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The Playful World: How Technology Is Transforming Our Imagination Hardcover – October 1, 2000
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Are you ready for it? Your kids are.
In this spellbinding new book, Mark Pesce, one of the pioneers in the ongoing technological revolution, explores how a new kind of knowing and a new way of creating are transforming the culture of our time. It started, bizarrely enough, with Furbys, the first toys that had the "will" to grow and interact intelligently with their environment. As Pesce argues, Furbys, for all their cloying cuteness, were a vital sign of a new human endeavor--the ability to copy part of our own intelligence into the physical world.
But engineers of the playful world have already gone much further into considerably stranger virtual realms. Pesce takes us inside the world's cutting-edge research facilities where the distinction between bits and atoms is rapidly dissolving. We meet the creators of LEGO Mindstorms, a snap-together plastic device that intelligently controls motors and processes data from sensors. We watch technological geniuses like Marvin Minsky and Eric Drexler turn the theoretical breakthroughs of Nobel laureate Richard Feynman into "nanites"-- tiny ultra-high-speed computers that replicate intelligent life. We observe the launch of the amazing and much-anticipated Sony Playstation 2, a platform that will allow us to bring synthetic worlds into the home and create a gateway to the living planet.
Web-based toys are only the beginning--the first glimmer of a new reality that is transforming our entire culture with incredible speed and power. After all, thanks to the computer revolution and the Internet, all of us already command powers that just a generation ago would have been described as magical. Magic is about to take on a whole new dimension. In this dazzling book, Mark Pesce offers a mind-bending preview of the incredible future that awaits us all in The Playful World.
- Print length340 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBallantine Books
- Publication dateOctober 1, 2000
- Dimensions5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-100345439430
- ISBN-13978-0345439437
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Taking a look at the history of play (and taking care to knock down whatever remaining resistance we might have to considering play less worthwhile than other activities), the book shows it to be a form of learning--perhaps the most natural form. Toy technology is catching up with current research rapidly; more households have powerful computers playing "Crazy Taxi" with the kids than working on budgets with parents. The presumption that we are creating new ways of learning, knowing, and being that are rapidly overtaking our means to understand and control them could be frightening if explored by an author less familiar with the technology and its users. Instead of thinking "game over," Pesce believes we should get ready to "play again." --Rob Lightner
Review
–Wired
“CAPTIVATING . . . When we alter the way we see, hear, and touch the world, we alter ourselves. If you want a preview of the coming world and its humanity, read this intriguing new book.”
–Upside Magazine
[A] thought-provoking look at how these gifted researchers turn theories into realities far beyond anything we can imagine, things that would have seemed like magic only a generation ago.”
–The Dallas Morning News
“Impressive. . . . Eloquent . . . Pesce is a master at distilling complex ideas down to their most important elements and explaining them in layman’s terms.”
–Salon.com
From the Inside Flap
Are you ready for it? Your kids are.
In this spellbinding new book, Mark Pesce, one of the pioneers in the ongoing technological revolution, explores how a new kind of knowing and a new way of creating are transforming the culture of our time. It started, bizarrely enough, with Furbys, the first toys that had the "will" to grow and interact intelligently with their environment. As Pesce argues, Furbys, for all their cloying cuteness, were a vital sign of a new human
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
lifetime in a world undreamt of just a generation ago. As much as we
might have tried to speculate upon the shape of things to come, the
twenty-first century arrives just as unformed as a newborn.
When a child enters the world, it knows nearly nothing of the universe
beyond itself. With mouth, then eyes, and finally, hands, it reaches out
to discover the character of the surrounding world. Over the course of
time, that child will discover its Mother - the source of life - and,
sometime later, its Father. But in the first days after birth, the child
will be presented with rattles, mobiles, mirrors and noisy stuffed
animals that will become its constant companions. Our children, in
nearly every imaginable situation, are accompanied by toys.
It has been this way for a very long time. We can trace the prehistoric
sharpened stick - undoubtedly the first tool - to the sticks children
still love to play with today. Over the 5500 years of recorded history,
forward from Sumer and Egypt, toys have a presence both charming and
enlightening, for we have learned that toys not only help to form the
imaginations of our children, but also reflect the cultural imagination
back upon us. The ancient Maya, who thrived across Mesoamerica thirteen
centuries ago, never developed the wheel for transportation - already in
use for some seven thousand years in Mesopotamia - yet employed it in
toys. The Mayan world-view - based in circles and cycles of sky and
earth, brought them the wheel as a toy, a pocket universe which
reflected the structure of the whole cosmos.
All of our toys, for all of known time, perform the same role of
reducing the complex universe of human culture into forms that children
can grasp. I am not saying that children are simple, unable to apprehend
the complex relationships which form cultures, rather, that toys help
the child to guide itself into culture, playgrounds where rehearsals for
reality can proceed without constraint or self-consciousness.
These points have been made before, but have gained unusual currency
over the last few years, as the character of our toys has begun to
change, reflecting a new imagining of ourselves and the world we live
in. Somewhere in the time between Project Apollo and the Mars Pathfinder
we learned how to make the world react to our presence within it,
sprinkling some of our intelligence into the universe-at-large in much
the same way a chef seasons a fine sauce. Our toys, touched by fairy
dust, have come alive, like Pinocchio; some - like the incredibly
popular Furby - simulate ever-more-realistic personalities.
Although the Furby seems to have come from nowhere to capture the hearts
of children worldwide, in reality, it incorporates everything we already
know about how the future will behave. The world reacts to us -
interacts with us - at a growing level of intelligence and flexibility.
A century ago people marveled at the power and control of the electric
light, which turned the night into day and ushered in a twenty-four hour
world. Today we and our children are amazed by a synthetic creature
possessing a dim image of our own consciousness and announcing the
advent of a playful world, where the gulf between wish and reality
collapses to produce a new kind of creativity.
Toys can serve as points of departure for another voyage of exploration,
a search for the world of our children's expectations. As much as a
spear or wheel or astronaut figurine ever shaped a child's view of the
world, these toys - because they now react to us - tell us that our
children will have a different view of the "interior" nature of the
world, seeing it as potentially vital, intelligent, and infinitely
transformable. The "dead" world of objects before intelligence and
interactivity will not exist for them, and, as they grow to adulthood,
they will likely demand that the world remain as pliable as they
remember from their youngest days. Fortunately, we are ready for that
challenge. Just as the creative world of children has become
manipulable, programmable and mutable, the entire fabric of the material
world seems poised on the edge of a similar transformation. That, at
essence, is the theme of this book, because where our children are
already going, we look to follow.
In the evolving relationship between imagination and reality, toys show
us how we teach the ways of this new world to our children. Their toys
tell them everything they need to know about where they are going,
providing them the opportunity to develop a mind-set which will make the
radical freedom offered in such a world an attractive possibility. Many
of us - "older" people - will find that freedom chaotic, discomforting -
if not downright disorienting, and it will be up to our children to
teach us how to find our way in a world we were not born into.
All around us, the world is coming alive, infused with information and
capability; this is the only reality for our children, and it speaks
louder than any lesson taught in any school, because the lesson is
repeated - reinforced - with every button's touch. But it is up to us to
rise to the challenge of a playful world, to finish the work of culture
and change the nature of reality. It might seem, even after all of this,
to be nothing more than a dream; but this is a book about dreams made
real. So, follow on, as we trace a path through a world that is rising
to meet us...
Product details
- Publisher : Ballantine Books; 1st edition (October 1, 2000)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 340 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0345439430
- ISBN-13 : 978-0345439437
- Item Weight : 1.05 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #9,192,094 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,078 in Social Aspects of Technology
- #12,476 in Video & Computer Games
- #17,019 in Computer & Video Game Strategy Guides
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Mark Pesce co-invented the technology for 3D on the Web (VRML), has written eight books, was for seven years a judge on the ABC's The New Inventors, founded postgraduate programs at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television and the Australian Film Television and Radio School, holds an honorary appointment in the Digital Cultures Program at the University of Sydney, is a multiple-award-winning columnist for The Register, pens another column for IEEE Spectrum, and is professional futurist and public speaker. Pesce hosts both the award-winning 'The Next Billion Seconds' and 'This Week in Startups Australia’ podcasts.
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* Augmented web
* The web of things
* Custom manufacturing
* Gaming
Pesce knits his experiences together into an engaging narrative that would brings all of it together for the reader. If you want to get where things are going I recommend you have a read of Pesce's book.
Your imagination will be stimulated by this book . . . perhaps even more than by any other book you will read this year.
The book begins innocently enough by explaining some of the newest technologies that are affecting toys and games. You begin with Furby, an interactive toy that "comes alive" and requires care. Furby can learn language, and responds to its owner.
Next comes Lego's Mindstorms kit for making robots. These toys have a computer in them that allow them use sensors to take purposeful actions. Soon, adults were writing software for this so you could program in more actions.
You move on from there to see how these toys are built around a model of how children learn, by trial and error. Simulations then become a powerful technology for helping create more capable learners, by accelerating that learning process. You are introduced to a new product, the Sony Play Station 2, which will offer simulations with learning capabilities in complex games.
Then, the author takes to off into the Web and points out that youngsters are sharing their experiences with Furby, robots, and simulation games so that they all learn faster.
You begin to see the possibilities of a whole different paradigm for learning, that will proceed much faster and advance both individual and human development in more fundamental ways. This could be the big payoff from information technology.
He then takes you over the rainbow into the future with the potential of next generation toys and technologies. Virtual reality will be at full potential with the next generation of Playstation in 2005. Electron microscopes will allow us to peer routinely and inexpensively at the atomic level. Nanotechnology will have developed to allow us to manipulate atoms and molecules to create molecular machines.
If you then create convergence of artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, and the Internet, you can have a society where the most advanced problems can be attacked simultaneously by hundreds of millions of people sharing their experiences and insights. That's where he lets your imagination take over.
Obviously, the potential for good and harm is magnified in such an area. The harm can come from overdeveloping technology without putting in sufficient limitations required to overcome its potential dangers.
I prefer to focus on the good. I hope you will, too. Although the author exhorts us to encourage our children in this area while upholding important human values, I think that we need to get involved with the new technology, too. Playing with your child is good for you both! It's also going to be even more fun for you, with these neat new capabilities. Your child can teach you how to use them!
Here's how the book leaves it: "If we fail to listen to our own children, how can we expect them to listen to us when we try to teach them of older, but still essential, human values?"
Whatever you conclude about where this technology convergence will lead us, I encourage you to become familiar with these toys and technologies. Simulations are a terrific way to advance learning for adults as well as children. The sooner you understand the potential, the sooner you and your peers can make faster progress.
Enjoy a more knowledgeable future!
For an example, Pesce devotes _multiple_ chapters to discussing the Furby. He, himself, acknowledges the blisteringly fast pace of technology, so it is not suprising that his detailed account of the creation and marketing of this toy is tragically trite and (to use the word as unsnobbishly as possible) passe.
After enduring these first chapters I hoped the book might address more general aspects of technology, but instead it becomes a personal travelogue of Pesce's (not the least bit compelling) contributions to cyberspace. If he relayed these events with the perceptive knack of modern historians, his anecdotes might prove worthwhile, but instead they read like a desperate attempt of his "trying to find a place for himself" in the story of the development of modern technology.
This book brought me very few new perspectives and even fewer new facts. I strongly discourage anyone from investing time or money into this book if you're approaching it with the objectives I did.