Playing With Reality - by Daniel Kronovet
Last month, I had the pleasure of reading Kelly Clancy’s excellent Playing with Reality, a wide-ranging history of technology and society, named an Economist book-of-the-year. Over 300-odd pages, Clancy, a physicist and neuroscientist, covers topics as wide-ranging as probability, game theory, evolutionary biology, and the invention of AI.
Throughout the book, Clancy maintains a steady through-line: the models we develop to understand our world inevitably reach back around to shape that very world, and not always for the better. By applying a critical eye to these histories, à la Yuval Noah Harari, we create the possibility of different futures.
This essay will provide chapter summaries of the book, as well as provide commentary linking the material to the broader themes of this blog.
The book’s first section focuses on the history of gaming’s fundamentals: the science of dopamine in the brain, and the early history of probability.
