Playground: A Novel

Todd’s narration of his memories begins to accelerate as he recalls how Playground gained popularity, expanding and progressing. With each technological breakthrough in AI, Todd wrote to Rafi. In response, he received only cryptic allusions to games. Todd’s company collected all sorts of data and built all sorts of machines and systems, but he always wanted more. He was making more money than he knew how to spend and realized that users shared a wealth of personal data with him unprompted, so he trained his AI machines on this data. His systems enabled him to sell advertisements, advance political causes, and gain deeper insight into the human psyche. His mother died, and he barely stopped working to attend her funeral. As Playground grew exponentially, Todd struggled to maintain control of his creation and its influence on the world. He had no politics beyond escaping any government regulation that restricted his companies. He met like-minded technologists, who introduced him to the idea of cities at sea, which he thought about as a “[p]layground on the high sea” (312). A month after an AI program defeated the world’s best Go player, Todd received an email from Rafi.