Ron Charles's Reviews > Playground

It didn’t take a supercomputer to figure out we’d get another remarkable novel about artificial intelligence from Richard Powers.

In 1995, Powers published “Galatea 2.2,” his Pygmalion tale about training a neural network called Helen to take a graduate exam on Western literature. At one point in that haunting story, after Helen has finished “reading” fiction and poetry, she’s given a CD-ROM containing recent news, human rights reports, political exposés and police bulletins. Overwhelmed by the horrors of human behavior, Helen announces, “I don’t want to play anymore.”

Well, almost three decades later — a millennium in computer time — Helen’s got her mojo back. Powers’s new novel, “Playground,” leaps across the circuits that enable large language models and delivers a mind-blowing reflection on what it means to live on a dying planet reconceived by artificial intelligence. The book won’t be officially released until Sept. 24, but it’s already been named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and longlisted for the Booker Prize.

Although “Playground” is nowhere near as mammoth as the author’s Pulitzer-winning opus, “The Overstory,” it follows a similarly fragmented structure. But trust me, any disorientation will eventually melt into wonderment.

The main narrator, Todd Keane, was once “a soldier for the digital revolution” and is now its king. He’s a world-famous tech genius who created an app called Playground. Part Facebook, part Reddit, Playground has hooked billions of daily users by gamifying engagement in a self-contained economy that runs on Playbucks. Closely shadowing the influence of social media, Playground affords Powers the opportunity to satirize and mourn the platforms that have colonized our lives.

When we meet Todd, he’s been diagnosed with. . .

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...