"Between the ages of 11 and 16, I was absolutely convinced that I was going to be a marine biologist, as I spent my free time snorkeling and diving in the South China Sea on these reefs that were like another planet to me, like going to Mars," explains writer Richard Powers (Evanston, Illinois, 1957) smiling and nostalgic on the screen to La Lectura. That childhood move from Chicago to Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, also gave him a great musical education, an avid love for reading -"especially scientific essays and classics like the Iliad and the Odyssey"- and something more important that has marked his life. "I went from the suburbs of Chicago, a capitalist and completely exceptionalist human world, row after row of brick houses and manicured gardens, to a Buddhist culture that bases its ontology on reverence for the non-human world, nature, animals. That changed my life," he shares.
It also endowed him with a unique literary world, a realm he would enter after studying Physics. Science, in its broadest sense, is a crucial part of his novels, in which he explores the implications of genetic engineering, nuclear physics, astrobiology, the chemical industry, or artificial intelligence, fields always approached in terms of how they affect people and nature, as paths to much older and more intimate human passions.
This is the case of his new novel, Playground (AdN), written with the subtle erudition and electrifying beauty that are the author's hallmark, addressing the abuses of neocolonialism, the destruction of nature, and the dangers of technology and human exceptionalism through the story of Makatea, a small island in French Polynesia. "I was about 20 years old the first time I learned about the phosphate islands of the Pacific. The most famous is Nauru - an independent country since 1968 - but there are many other places literally destroyed for decades, whose territory was torn apart to extract this essential mineral for creating fertilizers. It seemed to me the perfect expression of colonialism, and I thought a good 19th-century novelist like Joseph Conrad could have written a great work about this, but I never got around to it," explains Powers.
Translation by Teresa Lanero. AdN. 480 pages. ¤22.95 Ebook: ¤10.49 You can buy it here.
However, this old idea resurfaced in his mind several decades later when he learned that venture capitalist Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and the first major investor in Facebook, planned to build cities in open seas, in international waters to escape the control of any national government. "It seemed to me the perfect American fantasy, the culmination of that delirious idea of many Silicon Valley magnates to create their own rules. So when I read that in 2017, I believe, he had signed an agreement with the French Polynesian government to explore the sea for this purpose, I connected both ideas," summarizes the writer.
Thus, in Playground, the stories of Rafi and Ina, island inhabitants who must vote along with the other 80-odd locals on the plan to send floating autonomous cities to open seas; of Todd Keane, a tech mogul afflicted with a degenerative and fatal disease working on an idea to redesign the boundaries of human immortality; and of Evelyne Beaulieu, a 92-year-old Canadian diver and oceanographer who wants to finish a book about the ocean that will revolutionize human understanding of marine life, converge.
"The exceptionalism that believes alienation is a license to treat the rest of the living planet as if it were just a resource is what is pushing us to the brink of the precipice."
This character encapsulates one of the novel's major struggles, the scathing critique of human exceptionalism, the belief that humans have a special status in nature, based on their unique capabilities, which prevails in Western culture. "This idea, whose origin lies in the biblical dogma 'be fruitful and multiply and subdue the Earth' and which capitalism has embraced, that we are the only thinking, feeling, and important beings, that alienation is the license to treat the rest of the living planet as if it were just a resource, is what is pushing us to the brink of the precipice," argues Powers.
"The illusion that we have escaped nature, that we can create our own rules and are not dependent on anything, has led us to the climate catastrophe, species extinction, the reduction of fish populations in the world's oceans by 90%, and to an unsustainable agricultural system," he insists.
And, as he denounces through the character of Keane, to consider even redefining the limits of immortality, an old human dream where technology takes on a sinister role. "There is a dangerous connection between the libertarian fantasy of Silicon Valley culture and the triumphalist fantasy of the creatures they are creating. That is, between the idea of connecting the desire to be politically autonomous with the desire seen in AI culture to be biologically autonomous," reasons Powers, who abhors the term "singularity," popularized by technologist Ray Kurzweil, who argues that if we gain enough control over time and space through machines, we can escape death.
"When I lived in Silicon Valley and taught at Stanford University - an experience he narrates in The Overstory (AdN, 2019) - I would have dinner with top executives from Google, Apple, Facebook, and all these companies that shaped the present. And they would tell me: 'stay alive a few more years because we are going to fix the design flaw of death'. They really believed it," the writer quips.
"Seeing a Nobel laureate like Geoffrey Hinton warn the world about the unchecked growth of AI should make us think. Especially when we have Elon Musk in the White House."
But in his view, technology is not the sole culprit of this "collective delirium." "The potential dangers of technology and the idea that it will always come at a price are at the root of our civilization. Let's remember that even for Socrates, writing was a problem, as he believed it would steal our memory and memories, that it would make us pay more attention to the words of the dead than to what the person in front of us is saying. Writing was the first step towards artificial intelligence," he points out.
On this subject, the writer speaks with the authority granted by having already written in 1995 Galatea 2.2, a rewriting of the Pygmalion myth where he questioned the acceleration of autonomous machine learning. "Thirty years ago, I thought I was telling a fable, but now it's real. We are bringing into the world creatures with no precedents. They are like biological organisms, they don't resemble anything that has ever existed." The problem, he believes, is thinking that these entities will rid us of all evils. "We are pushing the limits, as Geoffrey Hinton asserts. Seeing a Nobel Prize winner, the father of deep learning, warn the world that this unchecked growth of AI poses an existential crisis should make us think. Especially when we have Elon Musk in the White House promoting accelerationism and saying, 'let's make sure there are no safety barriers, that nothing stands in our way,'" he laments.
An important battle
Winner of the National Book Award in 2006 for The Echo Maker and the Pulitzer in 2019 for The Overstory, as well as being a two-time Booker Prize finalist, in 2021 with Bewilderment and last year with this Playground, Powers confesses to feeling fear. "It's terrifying to see how the themes of this book are transferred to the real world in what Trump represents. His fantasy is that of human autonomy and exceptionalism, but with immense power. If there ever was a moment for the novel to be political and criticize these ideas, it is now," he argues.
"Living in my country today is a nightmare. The only thing preventing it from being an absolute horror is disbelief. I wake up in the morning, read the news, and although my response should be total and absolute despair, it's all such a comedy and a parody that I can't believe what's happening," he points out with resigned humor. "The United States is doubling down, committing exactly to the fallacious thinking that we can escape responsibility for our actions that the book is criticizing."
Therefore, the third plot of Playground addresses a neocolonialism where the power of technology and geopolitics go hand in hand. "The ideology of Silicon Valley has taken from colonialism the idea that the world is a giant chessboard, but it encounters a problem that didn't exist in the 19th century, the existence of human rights and the independence of many places. Something it has overlooked by undermining those human rights in a way we could never have foreseen decades ago," he denounces with pessimism. "Trump is basically saying that we should return to a stable hierarchy where whites are above other ethnicities, men above women, Americans above the rest of the world, and where humans could exercise complete dominion over the rest of living creation," he laments.
Is there an alternative? For Powers, we must "shed a culture that seeks individual benefit and idolizes power and money as supreme symbols of success", he maintains. "The future of the human race is far from clear, it is extremely precarious, and we are losing immense amounts of value, meaning, and wealth every day. We must remember how complex, beautiful, rich, diverse, and interdependent the living world is, how much meaning there is beyond the human. We have to be on the right side of the battle. Our stories, both novels and collective social narratives, are changing. They are no longer triumphalist or concerned with our small private crises. That is the way forward," he concludes.