The Playful World : How Technology Is Transforming Our Imagination

Rating:
Summary: BECOME A CHILD AGAIN AND DISCOVER YOU
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: BECOME A CHILD AGAIN AND DISCOVER YOU
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: Nuts & Bolts View of Technological Transformation
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Out-of-date and Trivial
Review: I purchased and read this book with the hopes of learning about the cutting edge of technology and how it's affecting us culturally. This book may have weakly accomplished that lesson when it was first published, but its (necessary?) reference to techno-ephemera of the late 90's strikes a dull, anachronistic chord for a reader not three years after its date of publishing.

For an example, Pesce devotes _multiple_ chapters to discussing the Furby. He, himself, acknowledges the blisteringly fast pace of technology, so it is not suprising that his detailed account of the creation and marketing of this toy is tragically trite and (to use the word as unsnobbishly as possible) passe.

After enduring these first chapters I hoped the book might address more general aspects of technology, but instead it becomes a personal travelogue of Pesce's (not the least bit compelling) contributions to cyberspace. If he relayed these events with the perceptive knack of modern historians, his anecdotes might prove worthwhile, but instead they read like a desperate attempt of his "trying to find a place for himself" in the story of the development of modern technology.

This book brought me very few new perspectives and even fewer new facts. I strongly discourage anyone from investing time or money into this book if you're approaching it with the objectives I did.

Rating:
Summary: not for me
Review: I was hoping for some insight from this book that I could use in our Internet company. Possibly it was my error in purchasing it. The author shares his thoughts and gives history, but it did not provoke any thoughts for me nor provide much value. If you are into the toy industry or the discussion of theory, it might be a good buy. If you have looking for ideas or inspiration, I'd recommend you try elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: the wow effect
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: eye-opening
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Toys Lead to Simulations Lead to Web-Based Problem Solving!
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Toys that make you go "aha"
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: I couldn't put it down!
Review: 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.