Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How
In the 21st century - the planet is the little school house in the galaxy.
Citizenship is the battlefield of the 21st Century
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
This is a time when human-planetary-technological relationships are being redefined — and this is a time characterized by fake news, hyper-monopolistic corporations, xenophobic nationalism, algorithmic opacity, and surveillance capitalism, all of which make the problems unintelligible, and solutions unimaginable. At the moment when collective action is most needed, the legitimacy that undergirds its institutions is eroding.
To move forward, we must explore wholly new modes of governance; new paths to legitimacy — because public imagination and legitimacy are foundational tools for building healthy futures for people and planet.
Could a network of regulatory experimentation labs in cities build legitimacy and shape inclusive innovation toward a great transition?
...cities and communities are at the heart of creating better futures. At this scale we experience trust and mutual accountability; it is the scale at which the unintended impacts and externalities of technologies are felt; and it is the scale of collective creativity. It is also the scale that is drawing increasing attention from “big tech” companies. Their recent urban development proposals, including Amazon’s HQ2 and Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs in Toronto, are challenging public means of constructing and preserving public value.
... it is increasingly clear that government neither has the capacity nor should be the sole architect of public value. Governance for public value is and needs to be formed at the intersection of state, markets, educational institutions and civic activism — that is, in new hybrid entities — where the public good is deliberated with all its different and complementary models of making societal decisions. In short, cities and communities are where pathways to deliberative legitimate innovation in a disruptive technological era can and must be discovered.
Legitimacities: Notes on innovating our cities from the sidewalk up
For almost half a century, something vital has been missing from leftwing politics in western countries. Since the 70s, the left has changed how many people think about prejudice, personal identity and freedom. It has exposed capitalism’s cruelties. It has sometimes won elections, and sometimes governed effectively afterwards. But it has not been able to change fundamentally how wealth and work function in society – or even provide a compelling vision of how that might be done. The left, in short, has not had an economic policy.
Instead, the right has had one. Privatisation, deregulation, lower taxes for business and the rich, more power for employers and shareholders, less power for workers – these interlocking policies have intensified capitalism, and made it ever more ubiquitous. There have been immense efforts to make capitalism appear inevitable; to depict any alternative as impossible.
In this increasingly hostile environment, the left’s economic approach has been reactive – resisting these huge changes, often in vain – and often backward-looking, even nostalgic. For many decades, the same two critical analysts of capitalism, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes, have continued to dominate the left’s economic imagination. Marx died in 1883, Keynes in 1946. The last time their ideas had a significant influence on western governments or voters was 40 years ago, during the turbulent final days of postwar social democracy. Ever since, rightwingers and centrists have caricatured anyone arguing that capitalism should be reined in – let alone reshaped or replaced – as wanting to take the world “back to the 70s”. Altering our economic system has been presented as a fantasy – no more practical than time travel.
There is a dawning recognition that a new kind of economy is needed: fairer, more inclusive, less exploitative, less destructive of society and the planet. “We’re in a time when people are much more open to radical economic ideas,”
“If we want to live in democratic societies, then we need to … allow communities to shape their local economies,” write Joe Guinan and Martin O’Neill, both prolific advocates of the new economics, in a recent article for the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) – a thinktank previously associated with New Labour. “It is no longer good enough to see the economy as some kind of separate technocratic domain in which the central values of a democratic society somehow do not apply.”
The new left economics: how a network of thinkers is transforming capitalism
James Lovelock - who coined the concept of the “Gaia Hypothesis” is about to turn 100 years old. He is publishing a new book coming this August.
Novacene picks up from that note of hope, and showcases another big idea. Gaia might, after all, be saved — by the singularity. This artificial-intelligence takeover, which so alarms many doomsayers, will be our redemption. Lovelock argues that increasingly self-engineering cyborgs with massive intellectual prowess and a telepathically shared consciousness will recognize that they, like organisms, are prey to climate change. They will understand that the planetary thermostat, the control system, is Gaia herself; and, in tandem with her, they will save the sum of remaining living tissue and themselves. The planet will enter the Novacene epoch: Lovelock’s coinage for the successor to the informally named Anthropocene.
James Lovelock at 100: the Gaia saga continues
Tim Radford reassesses the independent scientist’s groundbreaking body of writing.
Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence
James Lovelock will always be associated with one big idea: Gaia. The Oxford English Dictionary defines this as “the global ecosystem, understood to function in the manner of a vast self-regulating organism, in the context of which all living things collectively define and maintain the conditions conducive for life on earth”. It cites the independent scientist as the first to use the term (ancient Greek for Earth) in this way, in 1972.
On 26 July, Lovelock will be 100; his long career has sparkled with ideas. His first solo letter to Nature — on a new formula for the wax pencils used to mark Petri dishes — was published in 1945. But, unusually for a scientist, books are his medium of choice. He has written or co-authored around a dozen; the latest, Novacene, is published this month.
As that book’s preface notes, Lovelock’s nomination to the Royal Society in 1974 listed his work on “respiratory infections, air sterilisation, blood-clotting, the freezing of living cells, artificial insemination, gas chromatography and so on”. The “and so on” briefly referred to climate science, and to the possibility of extraterrestrial life. The story of Gaia began with a question posed by NASA scientists while Lovelock was a consultant at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. That is, how could you tell if a planet such as Mars harboured life?
This is an excellent 1 hour discussion with Esko Kilpi on the nature and future of work. This is a Must View for anyone interested in AI and Blockchain (distributed ledger) technologies.
Using AI and Blockchain Technology to Increase the Value of Our Work
Esko Kilpi, founder of the research and strategy group Esko Kilpi Company, is bold enough to defy the consensus of all of our other Future of Work interviews and argue work is, in fact, not changing. “Work has always been the same thing and work is always going to be the same thing,” Kilpi says.
This is a great account of the state-of-the-Art in self-driving cars by Waymo. This is well worth the read to appreciate the design efforts being to enable this phase transition in transportation.
The arrival of self-driving cars doesn’t just mean we’ll one day lease Kia crossovers that can drive the family to Disneyland on their own. Autonomous vehicles are poised to disrupt transportation of people and goods alike into a post-ownership, post-Uber society. Small vehicles will deliver pizzas, groceries, and Ikea dressers. People will have sex in-transit. Cities will be planned differently, with real estate prices shaken, simply because a transit system has no limits, and a cab can appear at your door on a whim. Traffic fatalities will decrease by as much as 90%. Heck, buildings might even go mobile. With all this in mind, it’s almost an afterthought to consider that the automobile industry itself will change, as people may no longer buy cars at all.
The fate of self-driving cars hangs on a $7 trillion design problem
Waymo One is the world’s first self-driving taxi service. Just two rides in, and we’re already bored of the future.
It is precisely such outré robot behavior that Waymo’s designers and engineers have spent the past few years trying to humanize. And it’s a big job.
Waymo One is the company’s new, autonomous self-driving car service born almost 10 years ago out of Google’s highly experimental X lab. In 2014, Google unveiled its Firefly car, a cute, some might say dweebie, autonomous car without a wheel in Silicon Valley. Over time, they’ve grown up, spun off to be run by Alphabet instead of Google, and moved to the suburbs of Phoenix. Today, Waymo is a fleet of more than 600 modified Chrysler Pacificas, retrofitted with proprietary vision cameras, a giant Lidar (laser) scanner that harkens back to 1980s conversion vans, and ever-whirring secondary Lidar, which spin like zoetropes on the front and rear bumpers. It’s a dizzying array of technology that Waymo has worked tirelessly to render downright dull–a design strategy the company believes will be key to dominating the $7 trillion self-driving car industry.
Waymo, meanwhile, is the first to market with what’s dubbed “Level 4” self-driving technology. That means you can say, “pick me up here, and drop me off there,” and the car is smart enough to handle the rest. Because Waymo is the first through the breach during a time autonomous vehicle fatalities are still front-page news, public perception of self-driving cars will largely be shaped by this one company–at least to start. Which may help explain why Waymo is positioning autonomous vehicles not as exciting and futuristic, but as a nonthreatening public utility here to prevent 1.25 million deaths in auto accidents a year.
And so Waymo’s designers and engineers have worked to make the service “courteous and cautious,” in the words of Dan Chu, the head of product at Waymo. That narrative is reinforced across the full Waymo One experience. It’s everywhere from the car’s interface, which cautions and reassures you at every turn, to the way it drives, which brakes early and often to avoid the whiff of an accident. To assuage people’s fears of climbing into robo cars (and to prevent a truly catastrophic media event), Waymo One vehicles still have a human “driver” inside. It’s an employee who actually just sits awkwardly at the self-steering wheel with their hands on their lap, prepared to hit a red “stop” button that’s secured in the car’s center cup holder with what looks like beer koozie.
I believe that Design Science is a ‘master discipline’ an approach that is necessary to develop truly functional and more importantly ‘evolvable’ systems. This is a vital signal - for a creative, generative and evolvable future.
redesigned MacBook Pro keyboards with mechanisms that are, again, a fraction of a millimeter thinner, but that are easily defeated by dust and crumbs (the computer I am typing on right now—which is six months old—has a busted spacebar and 'r' key). These keyboards are not easily repairable, even by Apple, and many MacBook Pros have to be completely replaced due to a single key breaking.
History Will Not Be Kind to Jony Ive
Ive, Apple's Chief Design Officer, is leaving the company. He leaves a legacy that made its products hard to repair and impossible to upgrade.
Jony Ive, the man most often credited with Apple’s visual, industrial, and product design, is leaving the company. He leaves a legacy of pushing its products toward disposability and unrepairability, a choice that has reverberated across the consumer electronics industry.
With Ive as Chief Design Officer, Apple released the iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods, and various iterations of the iMac, Mac Pro, MacBook, and MacBook Pro. He was there for, and key to Apple's transformation from a computer company to the most valuable company in the world. Under his watch, Apple’s products became thinner, lighter, and sleeker. They also became steadily less modular, less consumer friendly, less upgradable, less repairable, and, at times, less functional than earlier models. These design decisions extended beyond Apple: Ive’s influence is obvious in products released by Samsung, HTC, Huawei, and others, which have similarly traded modularity for sleekness.
Ive is regularly held up as a genius. He has been knighted by the British crown, he was featured on the cover of the ultra-luxe Hodinkee magazine for people who buy watches that cost as much as cars, and his departure was announced in a six-part series by the Financial Times. Apple sells a $300 coffee table book dedicated to the genius of its (and his) design.
But history will not be kind to Ive, to Apple, or to their design choices. While the company popularized the smartphone and minimalistic, sleek, gadget design, it also did things like create brand new screws designed to keep consumers from repairing their iPhones.
Under Ive, Apple began gluing down batteries inside laptops and smartphones (rather than screwing them down) to shave off a fraction of a millimeter at the expense of repairability and sustainability.
This is another significant signal - all the more relevant as renewable energy emerges as the dominant geopolitical energy paradigm. Imagine if we used ‘zero-marginal cost’ renewable energy to desalinate ocean water and irrigate the Sahara with the best irrigation tech we can develop? Carbon capture, relieving pressure for populations, food and eco-diversity and more.
As with all solutions (pun intended) new fields of problems arise - requiring a paradigm change in our design approaches to whole systems.
desalination is coming into play in many places around the world. Several factors are converging to bring new plants on line. Population has boomed in many water-stressed places, including parts of China, India, South Africa, and the United States, especially in Arizona and California. In addition, drought—some of it driven by a changing climate—is occurring in many regions that not that long ago thought their supplies were ample.
the cost of desalinated water has been coming down as the technology evolves and the cost of other sources increases. In the last three decades, the cost of desalination has dropped by more than half.
DESALINATION IS BOOMING AS CITIES RUN OUT OF WATER
Each day 100 million gallons of seawater are pushed through semi-permeable membranes to create 50 million gallons of water that is piped to municipal users. Carlsbad, which became fully operational in 2015, creates about 10 percent of the fresh water the 3.1 million people in the region use, at about twice the cost of the other main source of water.
Expensive, yes, but vital for the fact that it is local and reliable. “Drought is a recurring condition here in California,” said Jeremy Crutchfield, water resources manager at the San Diego County Water Authority. “We just came out of a five-year drought in 2017. The plant has reduced our reliance on imported supplies, which is challenging at times here in California. So it’s a component for reliability.”
A second plant, similar to Carlsbad, is being built in Huntington, California with the same 50-million-gallon-a-day capability. Currently there are 11 desalination plants in California, and 10 more are proposed.
It’s been a long time coming for desalination—desal for short. For decades, we have been told it would one day turn oceans of salt water into fresh and quench the world’s thirst. But progress has been slow.
From self-driving cars to insect bots - the world of mobile sensors progresses. The image and the two short videos are worth the view. It is likely that commercial application is still far off.
The RoboBee flies solo—Cutting the power cord for the first untethered flight
The RoboBee—the insect-inspired microrobot developed by researchers at Harvard University—has become the lightest vehicle ever to achieve sustained flight without the assistance of a power cord. After decades of work, the researchers achieved untethered flight by making several important changes to the RoboBee, including the addition of a second pair of wings. That change, along with less visible changes to the actuators and transmission ratio, gave the RoboBee enough lift for the researchers to attach solar cells and an electronics panel.
In the Harvard Microrobotics Lab, on a late afternoon in August, decades of research culminated in a moment of stress as the tiny, groundbreaking Robobee made its first solo flight.
This is a vital signal - that we must all attend to - while it is not a weak signal many will doubt its truth.
Honesty is majority policy in lost wallet experiment
Public more likely to return wallet containing larger sum of money, global study finds
Here’s a moral dilemma: if you find a wallet stuffed with bank notes, do you pocket the cash or track down the owner to return it? We can each speak for ourselves, but now a team of economists have put the unsuspecting public to the test in a mass social experiment involving 17,000 “lost” wallets in 40 countries.
This is a great signal of the emerging research synesthesia - where data, and reality are analyzed through different modalities - that also enable not just the arts and sciences to collaborate - but to also illuminate implicit aesthetic frameworks acting as presuppositions and/or shaping what we perceive as facts.
The method does not yet allow for any kind of directed modifications—any changes in properties such as mechanical strength, elasticity, or chemical reactivity will be essentially random. "You still need to do the experiment," he says. When a new protein variant is produced, "there's no way to predict what it will do."
By turning molecular structures into sounds, researchers gain insight into protein structures and create new variations
Want to create a brand new type of protein that might have useful properties? No problem. Just hum a few bars.
In a surprising marriage of science and art, researchers at MIT have developed a system for converting the molecular structures of proteins, the basic building blocks of all living beings, into audible sound that resembles musical passages. Then, reversing the process, they can introduce some variations into the music and convert it back into new proteins never before seen in nature.
Although it's not quite as simple as humming a new protein into existence, the new system comes close. It provides a systematic way of translating a protein's sequence of amino acids into a musical sequence, using the physical properties of the molecules to determine the sounds. Although the sounds are transposed in order to bring them within the audible range for humans, the tones and their relationships are based on the actual vibrational frequencies of each amino acid molecule itself, computed using theories from quantum chemistry.
The system was developed by Markus Buehler, the McAfee Professor of Engineering and head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, along with postdoc Chi Hua Yu and two others. As described in the journal ACS Nano, the system translates the 20 types of amino acids, the building blocks that join together in chains to form all proteins, into a 20-tone scale. Any protein's long sequence of amino acids then becomes a sequence of notes.
An interesting signal on a number of dimensions - serious efforts to deal with the challenges to our pollinators - but also modeling how we are inevitably shifting to a human managed planet with a digital environment/atmosphere.
Big data and innovations for healthy bees
Big data, an interactive platform and six different technological innovations are the core of the recently started Horizon 2020 project B-GOOD (b-good-project.eu/) in its 4-year mission to pave the way toward healthy and sustainable beekeeping across the European Union.
In close cooperation with the EU Bee Partnership, the project aims to develop a EU-wide bee health and management data platform, which will enable sharing of knowledge between scientists, beekeepers and other actors in the area.
To ensure interoperability and the establishment of the platform as a centralised EU bee data hub and support beekeepers in maintaining honey bees healthy, the European Food Safety Authority—EFSA's Health Status Index (HSI) will be further extended and operationalized.
This will be done for example by selection of key health indicators, creation of user-friendly protocols, development of novel tools to monitor health parameters giving attention for the honeybee gene pool.
This is no new signal - simply the confirmation of the inevitable emergence of our domestication of DNA (and related bio-informatics). After all it is the ‘differences’ that make a difference - that is at the horizon - evolution. So the question (one that I asked in 2010) - will the first national gene sequencing census occur by 2015?
Many questions are still to be solved, however. For instance, only 1.5% of genes encode proteins, and the functions of most genes are unknown. In addition, most genes do not function independently, but seem to participate in complex pathways, networks and systems. The HGP also raised awareness that subtle genomic variations can be associated with human diseases, including but not limited to cancer and genetic diseases.
The genomes of all individuals are nearly identical, and it is the small differences among them (around 0.1% of the genome), such as a single letter change, that result in the differences between us.
The cost per genome sequenced has been reduced from $3 billion to less than $1,000 in the past 15 years, and is expected to be further reduced by 10 times within the next five years.
However, as we embrace these advances in genomic medicine, we must also consider emerging problems caused by inconsistent results among underrepresented populations. Genetic research and disease treatments have traditionally been misled by biased genome datasets that are skewed by the overrepresentation of individuals from well-studied groups
We are witnessing a revolution in genomics - and it's only just begun
Have you had your genome sequenced? If you asked this question five years ago, people would have thought you were crazy. Today, genome sequencing is already for sale in supermarkets. It costs under $600 and takes less than a week for an individual to have his or her genome sequenced, and can even be ordered online.
Fifteen years ago, the first ever genome sequencing project carried out on humans, called the Human Genome Project (HGP), was completed. It took more than 13 years to accomplish, cost more than $3 billion and drew on efforts from scientists and non-scientists around the world.
Since then, the entire landscape of genome sequencing has been revolutionised. It is hard to believe that we are now talking about sequencing the genomes of a million people. In fact, the rate of progress in genomics development resembles - if not surpasses - that of Moore’s Law in processor development. Tremendous advances have been made in the field of DNA sequencing - but this is just the beginning.
Well it’s not Soylent Green - but this is a vital signal for the future of food.
“It is a completely new kind of food, a new kind of protein, different to all the food on the market today in how it is produced as it does not need agriculture or aquaculture,”
Plan to sell 50m meals made from electricity, water and air
Solar Foods hopes wheat flour-like product will hit target in supermarkets within two years
Solar Foods is also working with the European Space Agency to supply astronauts on a mission to Mars after devising a method it says creates a protein-heavy product that looks and tastes like wheat flour at a cost of €5 (£4.50) per kilo.
The Helsinki-based company, assisted by research from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and the Lappeenranta University of Technology, will apply to the EU for a novel food licence later this year before starting commercial production in 2021.
The powder known as Solein can be given texture through 3D printing, or added to dishes and food products as an ingredient.
It is produced through a process similar to brewing beer. Living microbes are put in liquid and fed with carbon dioxide and hydrogen bubbles, which have been released from water through the application of electricity. The microbes create protein, which is then dried to make the powder.
The stranger than fiction meme continues to surprise me - this is awesome. There are some people worried about the potential impact on human health of 5G technology - sort of wanting to wear tin foil head covers. But life is enabled by electrons flowing in all manner of ways.
“Not to sound too crazy, but we have an electric planet,” said John Stolz, a microbiologist at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.
Each wire runs vertically up through the mud, measuring up to two inches in length. And each one is made up of thousands of cells stacked on top of each other like a tower of coins. The cells build a protein sleeve around themselves that conducts electricity.
And cable bacteria grow to astonishing densities. One square inch of sediment may contain as much as eight miles of cables.
Wired Bacteria Form Nature’s Power Grid: ‘We Have an Electric Planet’
Electroactive bacteria were running current through “wires” long before humans learned the trick.
Electroactive bacteria were unknown to science until a couple of decades ago. But now that scientists know what to look for, they’re finding this natural electricity across much of the world, even on the ocean floor. It alters entire ecosystems, and may help control the chemistry of the Earth.
In the mid-1980s, Dr. Stolz was helping to study a baffling microbe fished out of the Potomac River by his colleague Derek Lovley. The microbe, Geobacter metallireducens, had a bizarre metabolism. “It took me six months to figure out how to grow it in the lab,” said Dr. Lovley, now a microbiologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Like us, Geobacter feed on carbon compounds. As our cells break down these compounds to generate energy, they strip off free electrons and transfer them to oxygen atoms, producing water molecules. Geobacter couldn’t use oxygen, however, because it lived at the bottom of the Potomac, where the element was in short supply.
Instead, Geobacter transfers its electrons to iron oxide, or rust, Dr. Lovley and his colleagues discovered. The process helps turn rust into another iron compound, called magnetite.
Over the years, he and his colleagues have come across Geobacter in many places far beyond the Potomac. They’ve even encountered the bacteria in oil drilled from deep underground. “It’s basically found everywhere,” Dr. Lovley said.
Electroactive microbes are so abundant, in fact, that researchers now suspect that they have a profound impact on the planet. The bioelectric currents may convert minerals from one form to another, for instance, fostering the growth of a diversity of other species. Some researchers have speculated that electroactive microbes may help regulate the chemistry of both the oceans and the atmosphere.
A very interesting signal - not just of a feature of Firefox - but of a new privacy security paradigm - recasting ‘fake news’ as a screen for privacy from tracking.
Firefox Will Give You a Fake Browsing History to Fool Advertisers
Using the 'Track THIS' tool opens up 100 tabs at a time that will make you seem like a hypebeast, a filthy rich person, a doomsday prepper, or an influencer.
Security through obscurity is out, security through tomfoolery is in.
That’s the basic philosophy sold by Track THIS, “a new kind of incognito” browsing project, which opens up 100 tabs crafted to fit a specific character—a hypebeast, a filthy rich person, a doomsday prepper, or an influencer. The idea is that your browsing history will be depersonalized and poisoned, so advertisers won’t know how to target ads to you. It was developed as a collaboration between mschf (pronounced "mischief") internet studios and Mozilla's Firefox as a way of promoting Firefox Quantum, the newest Firefox browser.
“These trackers and these websites really commoditize you, and they don’t really make you feel like a person,” Daniel Greenberg, director of strategy and distribution for mschf, said in a phone call. “So we wanted to do something visceral that makes the user feel like they’re in control again.”
Imagine a ‘national game’ one based on a nation’s economy, culture, resources and more - that citizens could play to enact their favorite theories of what makes a ‘good’ world. Imagine this being a massive multiplayer online game - that educated us all about the connections and consequences of policies?
Ryan and Deci say that this boils down to competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Mastering something, feeling free to follow your interests and values, and having ways to bond with others give you the sense you are living well—no matter your cultural heritage. People everywhere—Europe, Asia, South America—need these things like they need vitamin C
Cognitive science has detailed the rich experience of playing video games. A 2017 paper analyzed 116 scientific studies of video game effects, and the conclusions were impressive. Yes, video games can become a fixation, but gamers tap into brain areas associated with improved attention spans, visuospatial skills, and motor systems more effectively than non-gamers. Further studies have argued that playing video games can help overcome depression and improve memory.
Playing Video Games Makes Us Fully Human
No other media meets our emotional and social needs like electronic games.
The popularity of video games is staggering. Last year, the top 25 public game companies—China’s Tencent, Sony, and Microsoft ranking highest—had annual earnings of more than $100 billion for the first time. The United States video game industry earned more than global box office movie ticket sales, U.S. video streaming subscriptions, and the U.S. music industry. By 2021, according to Statista, a market research firm, 2.7 billion people will be playing video games, up from 1.8 billion five years ago. A Pew survey reveals the age group that plays most often is 18 to 29.3In the 30 to 49 age group, nearly 50 percent of men and 40 percent of women play. A study in Europe shows people 45 and up are more likely to play video games than children aged 6 to 14.
Pete Etchells, a professor of psychology and communications in England, and author of a new book, Lost in a Good Game, thinks video games tap into the reaches of emotional and moral faculties that traditional arts and entertainment can’t reach. The player can drive action, exert agency, and explore imagined worlds freely. Video games, Etchells says, “embody the principles of existentialism.” A story can be cathartic but only a game can make you feel guilty for what you’ve done or were compelled to do. A 2010 paper in Review of General Psychology states, “Compared with other media such as books, films, and radio, electronic games appear to have an unusually expansive appeal and serve a surprising number of emotional, social, and intellectual needs.” For Etchells, an avid gamer, video games are a “creative medium” that can “offer us unparalleled opportunities for exploring what it means to be human.”
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