The first impression we take from Richard Powers’ 2024 novel Playground is of a central ecological theme: the existing and looming threats posed by our late capitalist society to the oceanic environment. As such, it appears to be a successor to his earlier The Overstory (2018), with the battlegrounds moved from the treetops to beneath the seas. Of course, like any Powers novel, it is much more intricate and complex than that! One of the intriguing aspects is a lengthy public debate over the merits of a controversial proposed project that would strongly affect the oceans, which we are (presumably) intended to see as the central issue of the book. As we progress, however, we realize (first gradually, then suddenly, as Hemingway said about going bankrupt)—that the author’s main concern is rather what may be a much more serious threat to the future of humanity.

Playground unfolds in three interleaving narrative streams. The longest is the autobiography of Todd Keane, a computer genius/internet entrepreneur who has made a fortune from his app “Playground,” a sort of hybrid between Google and Facebook. At a prestigious private high school, he meets Rafi Young, a much less privileged black student. Their lives become significantly intertwined, both going to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (the home of many early internet developments, as well as Powers’ alma mater and the setting for his earlier AI-centered book Galatea 2.2), sharing passions for complicated games—first chess, then Go—which excite them in different ways: Todd for the logic and intellectual challenge, Rafi for the human drama.Footnote ¹ That disparity is also reflected in their choice of majors, computer science and literature, respectively. At UIUC, they meet Ina Aroita, a Polynesian native and artist, who becomes involved with both, particularly Rafi; they seem destined to become a couple. But Todd and Rafi have a serious falling-out and lose contact.

Next is the life story of Evelyne Beaulieu, an internationally renowned diver, oceanographer, and author of a book aimed at children; much of the writing in these sections is lyrical, even rapturous, reflecting her love of the seas and their inhabitants. The third is a contemporary story set on Makatea, a tiny French Polynesian island formerly exploited for its phosphate deposits (it is a real place).

Differences in exposition are immediately notable. Todd tells his story in first person, announcing that he has been diagnosed with a degenerative cognitive disease (DLB, dementia with Lewy bodies) and urgently feeling that “I needed to start recording everything. Telling someone. That’s where you come in”, although at that point, we do not know who “you” might be.Footnote ² In contrast, the other two are related in the third person. Furthermore, Todd’s line is printed entirely in italics throughout, while the rest of the novel is all in ordinary Roman print. The three lines connect at several points: Todd was immensely impressed by Evelyne’s book in his youth; Ina and Rafi (as a couple with two children), and Evelyne are all found among the residents of Makatea (who number fewer than 100 in all).

Thwarted expectations arise in the Makatea story. We see this primarily in the evolution of the debate over a project called “seasteading,” initiated by a consortium of Americans, of which Todd is one of the prime movers. They aim to build free-floating autonomous cities that will allow humanity—the wealthy, privileged few, anyway—to escape the constraints of contemporary civilization “from the disaster of totalitarianism on the right to the sterile quagmire of the nanny state on the left”.Footnote ³ Makatea has been identified as the central locus for the huge organizational and manufacturing operation; the French Polynesian government has approved the plans, but given the Makateans the right to a referendum on whether to accept it. The consortium tries to sway the discussion by providing an advanced AI (called “Profunda”); the islanders are naturally suspicious but become so fascinated—“They could ask this monster anything”—that they mostly come to trust it.Footnote ⁴ When it comes time to vote, perhaps understandably, nearly all base their decision on what it will do for their island—not on the global issues that we might have expected to be the main focus.Footnote ⁵ Two exceptions are Evelyne, who votes “to protect the ocean”, and Rafi, who is so upset by Todd’s involvement (which he learns of from Profunda) that he turns violently opposed.Footnote ⁶ These plot developments also foreground an obvious question, whose explanation we have been anticipating (but have never received) almost from the beginning: how is it that Rafi, Ina, and Evelyne all find themselves together in this place at this critical time?

Some apparent discords between the narrative lines begin to appear. Todd comments that Rafi and Ina “should have ended up together”, whereas we know, from early on in the Makatea sequence, that they did—or do we?Footnote ⁷ We also gradually come to understand who is the addressee of Todd’s memoir: it is no person, but rather the ultimate implementation of his computer skills, a vastly advanced AI: “My algorithms learned to read and understand our users…until here you are, the child of my games, able to absorb and play with and regenerate and realize all stories”.Footnote ⁸ But the big reveal is withheld until the last few pages, where we learn from Todd’s narrative that Rafi died in Urbana, never having left there; and that Evelyne, ostensibly voting on the referendum in Makatea, was never there at all: “The woman, dead for twenty years, held her fist over the slot and opened it”.Footnote ⁹

The only possible resolution of these explicit contradictions is that the Makatea and Evelyne narratives are not “real;” rather, they are stories made up for Todd by his AI, “the scenes that you have made for me from what I’ve told you!”.Footnote ¹⁰ This late revelation compels a complete re-evaluation of the book: it is not just about the impact of humanity on the oceans (although that certainly remains a central theme), but at least as much about the impact of AI on humanity. Strikingly, Powers delivers that message by embedding it in the book’s structure: a virtuosic demonstration of the “show, don’t tell” principle that echoes a similar device in his earlier novel The Gold Bug Variations. Footnote ¹¹

At least one reviewer believes that we should read Todd’s memoir as having been written by the AI as well.Footnote ¹² I do not see any strong evidence for that; also, the use of italics to set it apart from the rest of the book would seem to argue against it. However, as the memoir progresses, we do increasingly see Todd (in his own words) as an intelligence of limited humanity. “People and their emotions puzzle [him]”; he cannot understand poetry; he has no interest in forming any human relationships; he has “never been great at understanding humans”—he might as well be thought of as almost an AI!Footnote ¹³ He himself suggests a parallel between hallucinations created by his disease and those his AI creation’s “grandfather” was subject to.Footnote ¹⁴

Indeed, Todd’s preference for the company of machines over humans begins much further back, in his early life. Referring to a passage in Evelyne’s book that runs (excerpted here):

He comments:

Thus we see him, even as a child, transferring his allegiance from the natural world to the man-made one as embodied in an electronic game (it was called Simon, for readers old enough to remember it).

Does the juxtaposition of these two themes, ecology and AI, suggest anything about how the latter can affect the former? The expert in The Overstory, Neelay, believes that his AI creations can help save the world for mankind: “His learners will see across the planet …. They’ll speculate on what it takes to live and put those speculations to the test. Then they’ll say what life wants from people, and how it might use them.”Footnote ¹⁷ The most relevant example in Playground is Profunda, and how it is able to gain the islanders’ trust: that appears (at the time of its exposition) to represent a positive role for AI in engendering public awareness and understanding of scientific issues. But in our rereading, which shows the episode to be invented by an AI, it looks like very much the opposite: a self-serving, deceptive portrayal of what AI can do—if “self” may be ascribed to an AI.

There is a good deal of explicit commentary in Todd’s narrative about what AI will do to, not for, humanity. “The Age of Humans was coming to an end …. A new kind of life had come along to take out jobs, manage our industries, make our new discoveries, be our friends, and fix our societies as it saw fit”.Footnote ¹⁸ Addressing his AI creation near the end of the book, he writes: “Everything we ask, you’ll do superbly …. Will that be chaos or consummation? Both, I’m sure, and still you’ll go on unfolding …. We won’t survive the ingenuity you’ve learned from us”.Footnote ¹⁹ Asked to sign a public petition that reads “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” his response is “The twenty-odd words were true, after all. But even as I signed, my own group was forging ahead faster than ever….”.Footnote ²⁰

From the above comments, it seems that Todd might believe that, since humanity is such a destructive force, its replacement by AI might be the best outcome for the planet. Perhaps that is why Powers gave him that name, evoking the German Tod—death (Todd is also the name of one of the main characters in The Gold Bug Variations, which I argued represents an association with death, but for quite different reasons).Footnote ²¹ There is an interesting similarity here to Oryx and Crake Footnote ²²: both works feature a triangle of protagonists that includes a man with great technical abilities (the other man in each case is more humanities-focused) who wants (and succeeds, in Crake’s case) to supplant humanity with a newly created “race” (I thank a reviewer for pointing out this connection; I have no idea whether Powers was aware of it).

The potential role of fiction in increasing public awareness of science and scientific issues has been addressed recently, notably in a collection of essays titled Under the Literary Microscope: Science and Society in the Contemporary Novel. Footnote ²³ As Powers (no fewer than six of whose earlier books are examined among those essays) remarked in an earlier interview: “What we can only think of in terms of science fiction is about to become social fact, and none of our institutions are ready for the transformation. Perhaps fiction can provide a way of thinking about the revolution in life that other disciplines are bringing about but are not yet equipped or permitted to evaluate.”Footnote ²⁴ With its rich array of structural features and vivid characters—especially the portrayal of Todd as a severely damaged, largely dehumanized, living object lesson—Playground clearly reveals the urgent need for a scientifically conscious public to come to grips with these issues.