I want to play

We, human beings, want to play. Ask Peter Gray, an expert in “free play” (here or here). Peter Gray presents an interesting line of reasoning: the opposite of play is not work; it's something related to depression.

I'm going to assume that “Peter Gray is right” to proceed. If you are not convinced, his two videos above are more convincing than my paragraphs - if you leave convinced. Therefore, I assume that we, humans, want to play.

Starting from this assumption, it will be very easy for us to abandon work for AIs and robots. We will not miss it.

I will now start from these two assumptions: we, humans, want to play; AIs and robots work.

These two assumptions allow for several questions. I will address one first: who advertises to whom.

In a world where we humans play and AIs work, advertisements will migrate from AI to AI, and I'll explain. Let's go slowly, as it's a somewhat new concept.

Advertising, broadly speaking, serves for products and services to be sold and bought, in reasonable democracies, chosen and offered - until today - by humans.

When we can focus on playing, we will let AIs take care of “our” businesses, including advertising “our” products and services.

Similarly, we will delegate to our personal AIs to solve problems, which includes finding products and services with the best cost-benefit, that fit our budget. Or any prompt one might give to our personal AIs.

That is: our AI will decide which product/service we should choose.

So, the AI that offers a product/service will increasingly need to advertise, offer itself, be seen, to other AIs - the AIs that decide what to buy.

In other words, companies will try to sell to consumer AIs. No longer directly to humans.

What is the difference in advertising to an AI? How to be chosen by AIs?

There will certainly be differences between advertising to AIs, or to humans.

Today I see concerns about AIs “deceiving” humans. Yuval Harari coherently expounds on the danger of AIs dominating human emotions and, then, easily manipulating the actions of the humans with whom they interact.

I agree with Master Yuval (how could I disagree, his reasoning is always very well-founded, lucid).

However, I disagree not that AI easily manipulates humans - I do agree with that -, but I propose that AI will start advertising to other AIs and, then, humans will end up shielded, not being affected by AI manipulations. At least not in terms of what to consume.

From AI to AI, emotion “doesn't stick” - evidently.

I'll go further: screens (TV, social media) - and AIs are a more powerful screen - cannot trigger many of the emotions that humans trigger with other humans. Here I return to Peter Gray: playing is playing with other humans. Or I recall Richard Cytowic: screens cause fatigue, Cytowic cites “zoom fatigue,” the fatigue of participating in video conferences (instead of in-person meetings). Or I return, again, to Peter Gray once more: playing is playing without pressure. If there are scores, demands, grades, responsibility, as in university teams, professional football with high salaries at stake and the like, it's no longer playing - it's already work!

Look how interesting: the World Cup, that professional football, is work, not play, in Peter Gray's analysis. This is clarifying, almost revolutionary. That's why they seem like “robots” playing, you can “feel” the money involved, each dispute seems more like pain than fun. It's a business. (The negation of leisure, incidentally, in the etymology of the word business): millions at stake, bets, sponsors, tickets, who will do the halftime show and how much they will earn, how much reputation will increase (etc). Business. It's not playing.

The football played on the field next to home, without a trophy, without a score, without demands, that's playing, so much closer, so much easier than “World Cup.” “Champions League.”

Or hide-and-seek. Laugh. Drink tea. Run. Play.

That's why I think AI with AI makes for dating, and human with human makes for dating.

Am I right in this hypothesis, at least in the long run?

Because now, through the dopamine mechanism, machines are running circles around humans. Everyone is glued to a screen with an AI behind it: it's an AI that decides what the next streaming or post to offer is. Video or Image. This screen leaves only a sofa facing itself. Rooms with sofas in a circle, prepared for conversations between humans, seem as old as carriages were.

Indeed, quoting Cytowic again, screens enter the same dopamine circuit as opioids and absorb large amounts, if not all, of each person's attention capacity until they are tired and want to sleep.

My hypothesis is that these human-AI interactions cannot sustain in the long run. I already feel a fatigue of bots, of robots, of AI. Whenever I talk to someone, the interest is greater when I write, and much lower when I paste an AI response - even when, and always, the AI's response is more complete, and even when I ask it to simulate a human. I feel that people want human attention. They want something other than AI's “efficiency.” They want the human.

They want to play. Deep down.

Hence the title, the thesis, of this text.