Customer Reviews

The Playful World: How Technology Is Transforming Our Imagination

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This book clearly deserves far more than five stars.

Your imagination will be stimulated by this book . . . perhaps even more than by any other book you will read this year.

The book begins innocently enough by explaining some of the newest technologies that are affecting toys and games. You begin with Furby, an interactive toy that "comes alive" and requires care. Furby can learn language, and responds to its owner.

Next comes Lego's Mindstorms kit for making robots. These toys have a computer in them that allow them use sensors to take purposeful actions. Soon, adults were writing software for this so you could program in more actions.

You move on from there to see how these toys are built around a model of how children learn, by trial and error. Simulations then become a powerful technology for helping create more capable learners, by accelerating that learning process. You are introduced to a new product, the Sony Play Station 2, which will offer simulations with learning capabilities in complex games.

Then, the author takes to off into the Web and points out that youngsters are sharing their experiences with Furby, robots, and simulation games so that they all learn faster.

You begin to see the possibilities of a whole different paradigm for learning, that will proceed much faster and advance both individual and human development in more fundamental ways. This could be the big payoff from information technology.

He then takes you over the rainbow into the future with the potential of next generation toys and technologies. Virtual reality will be at full potential with the next generation of Playstation in 2005. Electron microscopes will allow us to peer routinely and inexpensively at the atomic level. Nanotechnology will have developed to allow us to manipulate atoms and molecules to create molecular machines.

If you then create convergence of artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, and the Internet, you can have a society where the most advanced problems can be attacked simultaneously by hundreds of millions of people sharing their experiences and insights. That's where he lets your imagination take over.

Obviously, the potential for good and harm is magnified in such an area. The harm can come from overdeveloping technology without putting in sufficient limitations required to overcome its potential dangers.

I prefer to focus on the good. I hope you will, too. Although the author exhorts us to encourage our children in this area while upholding important human values, I think that we need to get involved with the new technology, too. Playing with your child is good for you both! It's also going to be even more fun for you, with these neat new capabilities. Your child can teach you how to use them!

Here's how the book leaves it: "If we fail to listen to our own children, how can we expect them to listen to us when we try to teach them of older, but still essential, human values?"

Whatever you conclude about where this technology convergence will lead us, I encourage you to become familiar with these toys and technologies. Simulations are a terrific way to advance learning for adults as well as children. The sooner you understand the potential, the sooner you and your peers can make faster progress.

Enjoy a more knowledgeable future!

Good account of today's interactive toys, where they come from, and where they're going in the near term. It's always dangerous to predict how technology will modify our ontological horizons and Pesce, to his credit, doesn't push to hard on predictions, or engage in too much utopian dreaming. He resolutely focuses on explaining in layman's terms how advances in Artificial Intelligence are finding their way into toys. He also looks at nanotechnology and considers its implications. A self-admitted techie, he ventures into the predictive mode only where he has some empirical evidence to support his case. For instance he cites a study conducted by Sherry Turkle at MIT among kids who owned "interactive" pets like Furby which found that these kids did not classify these pets as either or alive or not alive but rather as some third category of object.

There will be implications for our children deriving from this new category of object, Pesce states, but doesn't take it much further than that. For instance, one might ask will this new category of object somehow work to erase the line between machine and humanity, to blur the boundary between our bodies and technology, a boundary already blurred by the objectification of the body in consumer culture? Will the difficulties encountered in making and refining this third class of artificially intelligent object help us to form a more complete understanding of the capabilities and capacities of humanity? Is that something we want to do? Why? Why are the dystopian implications of such technology always more compelling of our attention than the utopian implications?

These are questions that are really not within the stated scope of the book. But, of course, these are the most interesting questions.

This is a book I wish I had written. When I picked up this book, I was amazed at how many subjects Mark covered that I was interested in too. Everything from Lego Mindstorms, Eric Drexler's Nanotechnology, Richard Feynman's talk on "More room at the bottom" that was the inspiration for Nanotechnology and many more. This book covers so much ground and describes many very interesting ideas and technologies. Pesce was the designer of VRML, Virtual Reality Modeling Language, which enables web pages to display 3D scenes and has been involved in the forefront of emerging technology for a while, so he is very qualified to give us the whirlwind tour of these "Mind Toys".

He takes off from where Seymour Papert's Mindstorms left us with technologies that create toys that help us to develop our mental models of the world. Toys that make us think.

As a generation of children grow up playing with Lego Mindstorms, Furbys, AIBO's etc.. they will develop their mental faculties that will come into play as they define the future.

I grew up with a BBC micro and started programming adventure games in BASIC, which opened up a whole new world to me. As a generation we played computer games while growing up. These were rich interactive environments that left us feeling unchallenged in a schooling system, which was still geared towards to old teaching techniques. These techniques seemed totally inadequate in coping with children who could solve complex mathematical problems at home whilst programming. So I am not sure how the schools of today handle children who are building robots and playing with toys that they can not only interact with, but ones which can learn and change as they are interacted with.

Do we need to change the way we approach education? Instead of complaining that children have MTV (Short) attention spans, we should be creating an education system that can cope with the speed at which these young minds are working at. I think we should be encouraging children to be thinking faster and day dreaming and using their imaginations, instead of trying to get them to fit an out dated model that will leave them totally unprepared for an ever more complex world.

I digress, but these are thoughts that come to mind while reading this book, as you whisked off on this tour of future mind toys.

If you can't tell, I love this book! Anyone interested in toys that can help them or their children think, should read this book.

Thought provoking and engaging -- my copy is now filled with underlines and highlights! This was one of the rare non-fiction books where I just couldn't put it down. I've recommended this to many friends and felt it was about time I put a review up here. The author also generously shares his research on his web site. Worth checking out.

"The Playful World" is a fascinating tome by author Mark Pesce, one of the foremost practical techno wizards of our time. The creator of VRML (virtual reality mark-up language) Pesce's visions are creating a new immersive society and info-mediaries for today and tomorrow. Pesce helps you learn how to pretend again-- how to make believe and use those skills to build new bridges to the future whether you're involved in tech or whether you just want to understand the next generation of anything -- people, places and things. Pesce tackles tough topics and adds an amusing presentation to help you understand such concepts as distributed intelligence, engineered structures and yes, toys.
Pesce maintains it started with the FURBY -- you remember those little gremlin like creatures form Tiger Electronics a few holiday seasons ago don't you? He says they are the beginning of being able to embody human intelligence into the machine world (at least the beginning of what we can see on our store shelves). IA -- intelligence augmented is probably more likely than AI artificial intelligence but as our devices get smarter and our phones know where are kids and colleagues are, it's comforting to think that you can learn to USE technology not have it replace YOU!. Pesce is optimistic that the new 'synthetic worlds will create a gateway to a living planet'. It's all just a few years ahead-- this book will serve as a bridge of knowledge to tomorrow and make you think about ordinary objects in extraordinary ways.

The Playful World is a fascinating look at the future of computers and nanotechnology, and of wonders which may very well come to pass in the next decade or so (If Moore's Law continues to hold true, by 2012 we'll have reached the atomic level, and there will be supercomputers the size of a grain of sand). Pesce has been involved in the forefront of some of these advances, so he knows his stuff, and his enthusiasm for the potentials of this field is evident throughout the book. If the book has a fault, it is that he downplays or ignores the dangers inherent in the use of this technology, e.g., what's to prevent someone from releasing "spy dust", or clouds of nano-cameras, into an area, or billions of nano-surgeons to lobotomize an entire population? This book may be nothing new for those already immersed in the computer field, but for anyone else, it is required reading.

Investors who felt a few jolts in their technology portfolios this year are advised to buckle their seat belts. Those reverberations were merely the thrum of our new engines kicking into gear. As the plane of mass technology lifts into the air, the ride promises to be wild, volatile and sometimes downright scary.

Yet Mark Pesce, the author of The Playful World, How Technology is Transforming Our Imagination, isn't tucking his head between his knees and murmuring his final prayers. He's too busy discovering how new media and technologies are combining to create experiences humans have never previously enjoyed.

Pesce doesn't provide the vision of a technology guru like Marshall McLuhan and his book doesn't supply the analytical tools of McLuhan's Understanding Media. He's more like an international correspondent, charging into the frontlines beside the many geniuses who are transforming the technological landscape of the planet.

He begins with a study of Furby, that pesky darling of thousands of privileged children. Despite its whining, Furby is the first toy to demonstrate adaptive behaviour and an ability to communicate with other Furbys via infrared transceivers. Pesce states that "Furby is an emotional creature, with basic needs and desires." More likely, children who play with Furby transfer their own emotions to the furry little guy. It's a distinction that weakens Pesce's credibility. Too bad, because most of what follows is fascinating stuff.

For example, he provides an analysis of nanotechnology, the atomic-scale assembly of devices. As a student at MIT in the early 1980s, he met Eric Drexler, a pioneer of miniaturization's final frontier. Drexler is devising ways to construct new molecules atom by atom, snapping them together much like Lego blocks. His key tools are nanoassembers and nanocomputers. These novelties open whole new fields of technology like nanomedicine, in which physicians can contrive digestible computers that perform molecular surgeries before they are excreted.

Pesce's personal expertise is in virtual reality (VR) devices. He invented VRML (virtual reality modeling language) which he introduced at the First International Conference on the World Wide Web in Geneva. VRML brings VR modeling into the realm of the internet. With the proper internet plug-ins, anyone can log onto a VR web site and play VR games or conduct VR science experiments.

When internet VR is combined with haptic (tactile) feedback, look-and-feel technologies become truly visceral. Haptic interfaces like the Argonne Remote Manipulator will become as common as computer mice, Pesce says. Soon you may be able to log on to a virtual reality web site and feel the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean or the smooth face of Ayers Rock in the Australian outback. Better yet, log on to a site dedicated to nanotechnologies where you might feel the surface of atoms in a new medication tailored to relieve your Aunt Martha's arthritis.

Everything that rises must converge and Pesce suggests that the confluence of these inventions is likely to occur in Sony's new Playstation III, due for release in 2005. If it's linked to the internet, connected to a haptic interface and viewed through high-definition television, Playstation III's VR capabilities will challenge novice users to distinguish virtual reality from the real McCoy.

Thus equipped for the new age, people can conduct endless modeling scenarios for any variety of research. They can log on from their homes and order robots to execute commands on another continent. On the other hand, a real-life Dr. No may decide to program a set of nanocomputers to replicate themselves endlessly. In this case, Pesce predicts that within about 72 hours, all the atoms on Earth could be transformed into self-duplicating nanomachines. Like the ultimate Hollywood triumph, a thick, grey nanogoo could slime the world during the course of a holiday weekend. (Perhaps the world does end with a whimper after all.)

The difference between speculation and science can be difficult to gauge. Sometimes Pesce's book does little to distinguish one from the other. But he is certainly correct in declaring that mass media and technologies will continue to transform our imagination. They inhabit us as much as we inhabit them; maybe that's the fundamental meaning of virtual reality.

D.F. (Don) Bailey [...]
The Playful World: How Technology Is Transforming Our Imagination

Pesce was an early pioneer of the web and has been applying his ingeniuty and enterprise to academia and futurism for the past decade and a half. The Playful World was written about a decade ago, yet was very prescient of today's cutting-edge web and related technology trends:

* Augmented web
* The web of things
* Custom manufacturing
* Gaming

Pesce knits his experiences together into an engaging narrative that would brings all of it together for the reader. If you want to get where things are going I recommend you have a read of Pesce's book.

The author was space crazy as a child. He imagined a future among the stars. Children are accompanied by toys. This has been happening for seven thousand years. Toys now represent the science of materials and digital communication. Our relationship to information in the world is changing.

Edison invented the first talking toy. Nolan Bushnell, Atari, fathered pop interactivity. All interactive toys need sensors and affectors. The Furby was an enormously engaging toy. It seemed to have facial expressions and a capacity for about one thousand utterances in pidgin--Furbish.

In Artificial Intelligence studies Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, Marvin Minsky, and Terry Winograd were pioneers. AI encountered roadblocks as researchers grappled with characteristics such as intuition. Robots appear in the world of toys including Lego Mindstorm, 1998, half of which were purchased for use by adults.

Richard Feynman accurately predicted miniaturization in a paper published in 1959. The author cannot imagine doing his work without the world wide web. Ted Nelson invented hypertext. He didn't have access to a computer. He befriended Any van Dam. Nelson's text and van Dam's code came together in a simple application. Englebart of Stanford had a more mature hypertext product.

Each innovation helps humanity do more with less according to Buchminster Fuller. Connectivity can enhance citizenship, among other things.

The book is an attempt to make sense of many facts in regards to the possibilities of tech. The result is a long magazine article which gets exhausting because each page has the most and best, etc... There are other books that have the same information but are better written.