“Can you smell the negative ions?” The novelist Richard Powers and I were sitting on the banks of a river in the Great Smoky Mountains, and I could scarcely hear him above the water crashing against the rocks. The sound was both violent and serene, like being trapped inside a white-noise machine. These collisions, he said, release negative air ions, electrically charged particles with beneficial health effects.
Sometimes he liked to wade into the river and sit among the rocks, letting the cold water pound his body. I took a deep breath, and the air did, indeed, smell fresher. Was I experiencing a surge in my serotonin levels, or am I just impressionable? Before I could decide, Powers was on to the next wonder.
“Do you know your trees?” he asked. Since the nineteen-eighties, Powers has built a reputation as a novelist of unusual intellectual curiosity and range—as interested in probing the frontiers of technological innovation as in expanding the possibilities of fiction. He’s written prize-winning, best-selling novels about computing, virtual reality, neuroscience, and nonhuman forms of consciousness, often focussing on the process of discovery and invention.
But it was his twelfth novel, “The Overstory,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2019 and sold more than two million copies, that turned him into an unlikely sensation. The book is a five-hundred-page multigenerational epic that follows nine characters whose only overlap is some form of relationship to trees—a chestnut tree that symbolizes a family’s resilience, a banyan that saves a parachuting pilot from danger, a California redwood that a band of activists risk their lives protecting. (Passages of the novel are even narrated from the perspective of a tree—an attempt, as Powers put it, to shake us out of our “human exceptionalism.
”) “The Overstory” is about the damage that humans do to the natural world, but it is also about the natural world’s innate resilience to the worst we can inflict. To many readers, Powers became “the tree guy.” Powers lives in eastern Tennessee, in a small town very close to one of the main gateways to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which he visits multiple times a week.
He walks the trails as though he’s checking in on old friends, remarking on flowers that are “brand new,” pointing to barren-looking patches that will be “all bloomed out” within a couple of weeks. Judging by how frequently he hosts friends or journalists in the Smokies, he seems to relish being “the tree guy.” As we hiked, he would occasionally pluck a leaf off a tree and encourage me to chew it, or point to a plant and tell me to take a whiff.
He joked about “doing the ‘Smells of the Smokies’ tour.” I admitted to Powers that I knew little about trees, though I had the impulse, shared by many who read “The Overstory,” to touch them and protect them. “This little spot is infused with semantic and syntactical meaning that you have to learn how to read,” he said, gesturing toward trees and bushes flanking the river.
I asked him to tell me the story of where we were sitting. “There are endless psycho-social-historical-botanical narratives that I can start to learn how to read in a spot like this, that just keep opening outward the more you’re able to see,” he said. “For instance, what happened to this tree?” I had no idea, besides the fact that it looked a little skinny.
He explained that it was a hemlock that had withered, marking the presence of the hemlock woolly adelgid, an invasive, aphid-like insect that had made its way to the United States from Asia in the first half of the twentieth century. Even a dead tree, though, like one he spotted lying in the river, could create its own ecosystem—a new set of “pleasures and perils,” he said. Then he pointed out a stand of healthy hemlocks along a ravine, high across the river, that the adelgid had not yet reached.
He was telling me a story driven not by characters or by plot but by the different time lines that converged on this river. “I don’t care if humans think that humans are the center of the universe,” he said. “I just want the rest of the universe to be there as well.
” Powers has a precise, gentle energy that’s sometimes broken by a goofy laugh. He speaks in full paragraphs, toggling between technical language and earnest astonishment. But attempting to take hold of all the stories within our sight line caused him to stumble in excitement.
It reminded me of a moment in “The Overstory” when the limited horizons of the human brain are mocked by the “chorus of living wood” all around: “If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning.” Link copied Because of all the rhododendron bushes nearby, Powers continued, “I know that something has recently disturbed this forest. And I know what it is: the logging in the nineteen-twenties and thirties—” I interrupted to make sure I had heard him right: “You just said ‘recently.
’ ” “Hundred years,” he said, laughing. “That was ‘recently,’ man!” This month, Powers will publish his fourteenth novel, “Playground,” a book that initially seems like a way for him to add “ocean guy” to his C.V.
It essentially comprises three story lines. The first is about Todd Keane, an all-conquering tech giant. The onset of dementia has compelled him to revisit his happiest memories, which involve Rafi Young, a close friend of his teens and twenties from whom he is now estranged.
A second story line concerns a close-knit, dwindling community on Makatea, an island in French Polynesia, that must decide how to respond to an offer from wealthy American investors who want to launch a libertarian seasteading enclave nearby. The third follows Evelyne Beaulieu, a famous oceanographer, as she reflects on her life’s work and all the destruction she has witnessed: the collapse of fisheries and the disappearance of various species; the acidification of the seas; the dredging, in a single afternoon, of entire “coral cities that had taken ten thousand years to grow.” There’s also a Silicon Valley-inspired twist, involving Todd’s investments in social networking and artificial intelligence, that brings these narrative threads together.
Powers was a participant in the personal-computing revolution of the seventies and the rise of the Internet in the nineties, and he is deeply attuned to the potential cataclysms that technological innovation could invite. “I had this sense that we were living through this ethical moment again,” he said, of the inspiration for the new book. In May, Powers was in New York to meet with editors at his publisher, W.
W. Norton. We had an early dinner at a vegetarian restaurant in Koreatown, and we discussed his upbringing.
Powers was born in 1957, in Evanston, Illinois, the fourth of five children, and he has described his childhood as “almost idyllic.” The kids would gather around the organ for sing-alongs with their parents. His father was a school principal; his mother cared for the family.
When Powers was about eleven, the family moved to Thailand, where his father had taken a job at the International School Bangkok. His parents wanted the children to have a meaningful adventure abroad, so they were given a great amount of freedom. Powers recalled exploring the city, sleeping on beaches, and drinking a surprising amount of coffee, to which he attributed his current aversion to caffeine.
His classmates were the sons of American military leaders and political élites. He sang and played guitar, bass, clarinet, and saxophone in bands and orchestras that toured throughout Southeast Asia. The family returned to the United States in 1973.
“I had more culture shock coming back” to the U.S. than after moving to Thailand, he told me.
“We left with the Beatles, and we came back with James Taylor. There was a discontinuity there that we had to get caught up on.” He finished high school in DeKalb, Illinois, where he was a novelty to his classmates.
Some complimented him on his English, not knowing that he was from the United States. It was during this period that he began to see the world as a writer, understanding what it meant to be simultaneously inside and outside situations. He could mimic the speech and codes of those around him—“That’s the writer thing,” he said.
“You’re ventriloquizing everything.” He read “Gravity’s Rainbow” and was awestruck by Thomas Pynchon’s electric prose and roving intellect, as well as by his sheer force of will. “I had nothing to compare it to,” he said, “no explanation of how it worked or where it was going or what its endless, surreal vignettes meant or how the whole astonishing structure fit together.
” Powers was good at math and science, and in 1975 he enrolled at the University of Illinois, intending to pursue physics. But he was miserable during his first year and recalled going to the health clinic complaining of stomach pains and stress. Specialization was antithetical to how he understood the world.
Eventually, he decided to major in rhetoric, adding a concentration in math and physics. He was fascinated by the university’s internal computer network. On weekends and late at night, he hung out in the computer lab, teaching himself how to program.
“When I first understood what coding was, I thought, This is the answer,” he said. “We now have the ability to incarnate thought, to make thought have its own agency in the world, to create things that are like organisms but sprung totally out of brains. It was absolutely intoxicating.
” In “Playground,” Todd, whom Powers sees as his alter ego, gives voice to this feeling: “I now had the tools to create a way of playing in this life that human beings had always wanted.” Powers stayed at Illinois to pursue a master’s degree in English, with vague literary ambitions. But, in 1978, his father died of cancer.
Powers recalled sitting in a graduate seminar, analyzing a poem on euthanasia, and realizing that the conversation was about the work’s mechanics rather than about what the poet was trying to communicate about death or suffering. “Somewhere between the life and the study of art, there had been a massive disconnection,” he said. Powers decided to give up literature, and he moved to Boston, where he began working as a computer programmer.
He lived close enough to Fenway Park that he could open his windows and hear whether the Red Sox were winning. Programming work was abundant, lucrative, and relatively easy. He occasionally took on freelance jobs; for one, he wrote a program, for an exiled Spanish prince, that foresaw the future of options hedging.
In his spare time, he read a lot. On weekends, he visited museums. One Saturday, he went to the Museum of Fine Arts, which was staging the first American retrospective of the German photographer August Sander.
He came across one of Sander’s most notable works, “Young Farmers,” taken in 1914. The image of three young men dressed in their finest clothes, on their way to a dance in a nearby village, immediately captivated Powers. The men look back at Sander, unaware of the First World War ahead of them.
Link copied Powers wanted to devote himself to thinking about this photograph. He returned to work on Monday and gave notice. He began writing what became his first novel, “Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.
” He’d discovered a solution to satisfy his restless mind. “If I’m a physicist, I can’t do all these other things,” he said. As a writer, he didn’t have to make a choice.
“I can be a dilettante forever,” he said. “Three Farmers”—which was at once a history of photography, an exegesis of Sander’s work, and a series of short, speculative stories about the young men—was published, to acclaim, in 1985, with critics likening Powers to Pynchon and Don DeLillo. While writing “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” he moved to the Netherlands.
The novel, which was published in 1988, interwove the story of a postwar Illinois family not unlike his own with the histories of Walt Disney, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, and the proliferation of nuclear-weapons testing. The range of these two works, and the clever, stylish way he evoked resonances between the past and the present, earned Powers a MacArthur Fellowship—often called the “genius” grant—in 1989. Two years later, he published “The Gold Bug Variations,” a novel that positioned a pair of love stories, decades apart, within a broader historical landscape of scientific discovery and musical composition.
Powers drew inspiration for the story’s shifting time lines from the double-helix structure of DNA. Popular novelists of the nineties often used technological change as a metaphor for uncertainty—the surveillance-state dystopia of Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash,” the dull, spirit-crushing corporatism of Douglas Coupland’s “Microserfs”—but Powers’s interests were more granular. In “Galatea 2.
2,” a novel about a writer embedded with a lab of researchers experimenting with A.I. and machine learning, and in “Plowing the Dark,” which follows an artist and her wonkish colleagues as they design a virtual-reality simulation, Powers focusses on the lives of scientists, programmers, and engineers, as well as on the obsessive-compulsive labor their insights require.
The writer Ann Patchett first met Powers when they appeared at an event together in the early two-thousands. “It was the best reading I’ve ever heard,” she told me. Although he’s an introvert, Powers projects a wise confidence onstage, as though he’s figured something out that the rest of us still need to learn.
She was so absorbed by his reading that she volunteered to give up her time so he could keep talking. “He really is one of those people that you think, Yeah, everyone in this room would follow this guy off a bridge,” she told me. The second time they met, she heard him tell a crowd at Vanderbilt University that he wished more people would write novels that dealt with science.
“I thought, O.K., I’ll do that,” she told me.
“And then I wrote ‘Run,’ totally because of him, and then ‘State of Wonder’ ”—novels that featured characters shaped by science or its pursuit. “I was just, like, If you think that’s a good idea, then I think that’s a good idea, too.” Powers wrote about technology with the earnest zeal of an early adopter.
“At every stage,” he said, of his journey into computing, “I wanted the latest and greatest. There was a revolution every twelve months.” But he was also interested in the social ramifications of this progress.
The protagonist of “Galatea 2.2” recalls browsing the World Wide Web for the first time, in the mid-nineties. He feels a constant “low-grade thrill at being alive in the moment when this unprecedented thing congealed.
” This gradually gives way to a realization that “people who used the Web turned strange,” likening it to a “vast, silent stock exchange trading in ever more anonymous and hostile pen pals. The Web was a neighborhood more efficiently lonely than the one it replaced. Its solitude was bigger and faster.
” Yet the character confesses that he cannot log off. A common criticism at the time was that Powers was writing “think pieces,” not novels—“More head than heart,” as the writer Jim Holt put it in a review, in 2014, referring to it as the “Powers Problem.” But Powers viewed himself as someone inspired by the great twentieth-century European novelists, such as Proust, Mann, and Musil, or American novelists like Pynchon or Gaddis, whose work reflects the large-scale changes in the world.
He tried to balance his astonishment at technological revolutions with a novelist’s vision of what might come to pass in their wake. He believed that many writers in the nineteen-nineties presumed that we had “beat nature,” he said. Struggles were focussed inward: “Can we get along with each other? Can we get along with ourselves?” The tendency of novels to root conflict largely in psychology, and to offer deep introspection as a way out, struck him as troubling, cutting us off from the nonhuman.
“He was misunderstood for a decade or two,” Kim Stanley Robinson, one of contemporary science fiction’s greatest writers, told me. Robinson has devoted his career to exploring the interplay between the natural world—and its possible impending collapse—and culture. He draws a distinction between his novels, which are speculative and future-oriented, and Powers’s, which come from a more grounded, realist tradition.
“Modern critics didn’t know what to do with him—‘Oh, he’s so cerebral.’ They weren’t able to define him, because he actually wrote about scientists, ideas, and work. It doesn’t always have to be about people’s soap operas and domestic, bourgeois, modern American life.
He’s just interested in larger, more systemic things, and his novels are about those things.” Powers’s reputation for braininess belied the fact that his books often featured small glimpses of his personal history. On the final pages of “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” Powers seems to step into this swirling, playful novel about the Hobson family and the tales that their father, who recently succumbed to cancer, once told them.
“I have had an idea for how I might begin to make some sense of the loss. The plans for a place to hide out in long enough to learn how to come back,” the narrator observes. “Call it Powers World.
” “Operation Wandering Soul” borrows from his childhood in Thailand, and “Galatea 2.2” from the circumstances of his return to Illinois after nearly six years in Europe. These connections were likely lost on reviewers and readers, since Powers was largely an enigma.
His books didn’t feature an author photo until “Galatea 2.2,” in 1995, and he didn’t go on tour until 1998, with the release of “Gain.” “I just thought, I don’t really know how to drive this thing yet,” he said.
“I think it would probably be better if I allowed myself to mature in isolation. Figure out what you’re doing before a lot of other people tell you what you’re doing, or what you should be doing.” A couple of years ago, Powers’s older sister, Peggy, passed away unexpectedly.
While recalling their childhood, he recovered a memory: for his tenth birthday, she had given him a book about coral reefs. From his bedroom in Chicago, “it felt as if earth was two impossibly different planets”—the concrete-and-steel one just outside his window and the oceanic abyss far beyond. He never learned why she gave him the book.
But the following year they were living in Bangkok, and he was snorkelling alongside all the creatures he’d previously only read about. The recollection inspired him to try writing a novel that would examine how much the oceans had been transformed in the fifty years since his sister had given him that present. “The largest part of the planet exhausted,” he writes, “before it was ever explored.
” After dinner, we walked through midtown. It was warm out, the time of year when New Yorkers begin looking toward summer, and Manhattan had a jagged, anarchic feeling to it. Powers told me that he was far more comfortable in the solitude of the mountains.
As we walked through Madison Square Park, he found it hard to ignore the city’s distractions and distresses. “I’m hearing a lot of particular sounds I wouldn’t have been attentive to otherwise,” he said. A man on a bench began screaming about Anthony Fauci.
“That’s hard for me,” Powers said quietly. (“How funny,” Patchett said, laughing, when I mentioned our dinner. “Rick in New York.
”) Link copied It was still early enough in the cycle of publication that few people had read “Playground,” and he kept asking me about my response to it—what parts I’d found compelling, whether the novel had made me cry. Many of his books had helped people come to terms with panicky uncertainty regarding the future. As we passed some people playing chess in Union Square, he reflected on a book that had recently helped him deal with that terror himself: “Homo Ludens,” published in 1938, by the Dutch theorist and historian Johan Huizinga.
“Homo Ludens” is essentially a celebration of play. When we are young, play teaches us about freedom and pleasure, boundaries and order, the difference between real life and fantasy, what works and what doesn’t. “Play is older than culture,” Huizinga writes, and it is fundamental to culture’s twists and turns.
Powers began to see the engine of evolution—“life’s way of testing, training, and extending itself”—as play. In “Playground,” the characters Todd and Rafi cement their friendship with the Chinese strategy game Go, whose history stretches back some four thousand years. Although they’re competitive with each other, it’s the game’s complexity, the numerous possibilities in every decision, that appeals to them most.
They can play a single game all night. A theme of “Playground” emerges: What if the point of life isn’t to win but to keep surviving, together? “We play to keep on playing,” Powers said triumphantly, raising a finger to the sky before disappearing into the evening crowd. Powers spent much of the nineties and early two-thousands in Urbana, at his alma mater, where he had returned in 1993 to teach creative writing and continue writing fiction.
Researching novels allowed him to explore all kinds of curiosities—music, psychological disorders, corporate history, cancer cells, the history of racial segregation. In 2010, he was hired as a writer-in-residence in the creative-writing program at Stanford University, and in 2013 he was given an endowed professorship. Powers probably had a more open-minded and sophisticated view of Silicon Valley than many novelists his age.
But he recalled attending dinners in California alongside tech entrepreneurs who seemed to have it all but were still fixated on correcting what they saw as the “design flaw” of life: death. Meanwhile, life on earth was growing ever more precarious. “I would go up into the Santa Cruz Mountains whenever I could, to escape this vision of the future being created down in the Valley,” he said.
He didn’t know much about the woods. Everything was “a green blur” to him. One of the first trees he learned about was the bristlecone pine, within driving distance, which had “germinated before human beings invented writing,” he said.
He admired the natural world’s seeming indifference to our inventions and innovations. He collected hundreds of books on trees and began working on what would become “The Overstory.” In 2014, he left Stanford and returned to Illinois.
In 2015, he decided to visit the Smokies, after reading about the untouched, old-growth forests there. It was a revelatory experience: the light, the smells, and the sounds were unlike anywhere he’d been. For months, he thought about the region.
The next year, he moved to Tennessee. Powers lives in a modest house in the mountains; he settled on it the first day he went looking. (His wife, the translator Jane Kuntz, splits her time between the Smokies and Urbana, where the couple met.
They have no children, owing in part to his anxieties about bringing life into an imperilled world.) It feels a bit like an adult tree house: there’s a screened-in porch that runs along one edge of the house, with a telescope, some DVDs, and a bed where he sleeps when the weather permits. Inside, there are books in every room, though the bulk of his library remains in Urbana.
In a corner of the living room is a small hydroponic table for growing salad greens and herbs, which he set up during the pandemic. Throughout the house are old awards and also gifts from his book tours, including a set of bricks that an admirer decorated with paintings of Powers’s covers. When I visited him, he looked at a topographical map of the Smokies and traced the mountain ridges with his finger, marvelling at how much was left to explore.
“Being able to think on the time frames of trees reduces my anxiety,” he said. (He joked that his anxieties could be inflamed by more short-term sources, such as being profiled for magazines.) When I asked him where he wrote “Playground,” he looked around the house.
“Everywhere,” he replied. His process involves a combination of dictating, typing, and writing by hand—depending on the nature of the scene—and he estimated that he wrote about eighty per cent of the novel while lying in bed and staring at the ceiling, trying to get as close as possible to sensory deprivation. “I think of him as a little bit reclusive, a very private person,” Robinson told me.
“Even though I’ve known him a long time and we talk a lot, I don’t know much about him. That just strikes me as another aspect of him being him.” Powers told me that he’s never felt healthier or more content than while living in Tennessee.
He thinks of the past few years, following the thrilling yet taxing success of “The Overstory,” as akin to a postmortem experience. He never imagined that he would have professional success on this scale, let alone in his sixties. “I’m in the bonus round,” he said.
The way a novel about the ocean reveals itself to also be a novel about artificial intelligence will likely determine how readers feel about it. “Playground” is by no means a dystopian story, despite moments of concern over “the Age of Deep Machines.” One of the main characters, a believer in the “technological sublime,” places all his faith in the machines that have built his vast fortune.
Todd—whom Powers initially thought he would base on Elon Musk—“is who I would’ve been if I stuck with the death world,” Powers said. Despite his passion for computers, Powers resisted owning a cell phone until he began working at Stanford. He said that he recognized the perils of a hyperconnected future.
From a young age, he told me, “I knew that to some extent my views on what it meant to be a human being were not normal. While my brain was capable of a lot of things—manipulating, exploring, and taking things apart of great complexity—I wasn’t especially good at understanding what people meant when they said what they said. The codes of social interaction.
What signals are people giving off to each other, how do I read them?” He foresaw that the new social networks of the Web would redefine what identity, community, and solitude meant. “I could see how profoundly all these new technologies change what we meant by social intelligence and what we meant by social advantage. I had a pretty sophisticated sense of the sociopolitical ways in which privilege was going to be amplified by these devices.
” In “Playground,” Todd builds his empire on these connections, even as he is profoundly lonely, and that leads him deeper into technology. “The Age of Humans was coming to an end,” Powers writes. “A new kind of life had come along to take our jobs, manage our industries, make our new discoveries, be our friends, and fix our societies as it saw fit.
And that age launched itself in a heartbeat, after the briefest childhood.” It’s not a spoiler to reveal that an A.I.
entity appears—and that it does not end up destroying life as we know it. In fact, the representation of A.I.
is almost sympathetic, suggesting the possibility that machines could learn grace and benevolence. I asked Robinson what he made of it. “I think that we keep on understanding A.
I. through science-fiction stories from the nineteen-fifties,” he said, “or ‘2001.’ We anthropomorphize these extremely rapid calculators and immediately give them characters and personality and agency, so then they become villains or heroes or whatnot.
There’s a constant category error being made that assigns agency and personality to algorithms that are much simpler than that. These are not mechanical people. Their brains are not like our brains, if you wanna call ’em brains at all.
Their thinking isn’t like our thinking.” After a day of hiking, Powers prepared us a chickpea stew alongside couscous and caramelized onions. As I looked out at the forest from his deck, he told me the rough ages of the surrounding trees.
He asked me to snip some salad from his living-room garden. While we ate, he pulled out his phone to show me an experiment he’d undertaken. He had fed his book to ChatGPT-4, the most advanced chatbot available to the public at that moment, and he asked it to identify ironic moments in the novel.
There had been very little written about “Playground,” not even an Amazon plot synopsis, so there was nothing for the A.I. to parrot.
But, in two seconds, it came up with a polished, pages-long interpretation, which Powers read aloud with a sense of total bemusement. It identified the irony, for example, of a character creating a giant sculpture from plastic waste salvaged from the ocean. “The sculpture, which takes on mythic and cultural significance, is made from the very materials that symbolize environmental degradation.
” When GPT-4 began analyzing the ironic presence of A.I. in the book, we both started laughing.
“ ‘Richard Powers, stop talking to me!’ ” he said. “ ‘Go and talk to some other humans about your book.’ ” Earlier that day, I had asked whether he remembered his first experience with these sophisticated chatbots.
“Oh, my God,” he recalled thinking. “It’s weird. It’s gonna happen in my lifetime.
” I told him I couldn’t quite discern his tone. Was that “Oh, my God” one of terror, awe, or delight? “Do I have to choose one of them? I mean, all of them. Don’t you feel all of them?” I couldn’t shake my own nineteen-fifties-science-fiction-derived anxieties.
In late May of 2023, a group of three hundred and fifty industry leaders, researchers, and engineers made news by signing a one-sentence statement: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.
” And then there was the comparatively minor professional anxiety: I am a writer and an academic, and the past couple of years have been filled with stories of novels or homework being offloaded to A.I., resulting in all kinds of existential worries about the future of our work.
After all, Powers had just read me an analysis of his book that, with some editorial massaging, might not sound out of place in this magazine. “I feel more terror than delight,” I told Powers. “ ‘This changes everything.
’ The phrase itself is emotionally agnostic,” he said. “But we are at this point with the human manipulation of time and space and deformation of the earth where to say, ‘This changes everything’ . .
. it almost morally asks a person to say, ‘Do not lose your head.’ What is actually happening? What might actually happen? What values do we want to survive these changes? What do we want to do? In the moment of absolute disruption, if we say, ‘Make it go away because it’s all bad,’ then it will be all bad.
” He went on, “It may require massive amounts of regulation. But the question is not ‘Is A.I.
good or bad?’ It’s ‘How do we want to use A.I.?’ ” It felt a little incongruous to admire the handiwork of GPT-4 at Powers’s kitchen table, in the mountains, with the insects outside the only sound other than our conversation.
We agreed that it had produced an admirably strong effort. Still, I said, I was glad it got some plot points wrong. “Gives us another eighteen months,” Powers said, laughing.
He added that just a few years ago he hadn’t thought machine learning would happen on this scale for at least another forty years. He was staring at his phone, smiling. After dinner, he took a blender that he’d received last Christmas down from a shelf.
He was still experimenting with new recipes, and he loaded it with frozen bananas and made a kind of dairy-free ice cream. We drizzled our bowls with ginger syrup and crushed nuts, delighted by what this contraption had created. “Struggling with this question of the ultimate eradication of everything that you would think of ordinarily as personal meaning is not unrelated to struggling with this notion that ninety-nine point nine per cent of all species that ever evolved go extinct,” he said.
“The beauty of consciousness is that it can do that. The curse of consciousness is that it understands that.” When Powers was teaching at the University of Illinois, he had a student named Neelay Shah, who is now a principal software architect at Nvidia, the technology company that has become the dominant supplier of A.
I. hardware and software. Shah was familiar with Powers before they met: a high-school teacher had given him a copy of “Galatea 2.
2,” which explored the possibility of a computer equipped with a kind of A.I. software that could pass the Turing test—an edgy plotline for the mid-nineties.
In the novel, a writer feeds the computer book after book, to see whether it can successfully mimic the insights of a graduate student in literature. Shah told me that, when he read “Galatea 2.2,” he was skeptical of its implications.
Even once he became an engineer, working on early versions of A.I., he assumed that training a machine would require other sensory inputs, like visual cues, not just text.
But he was revisiting “Galatea 2.2” recently and realized that Powers had been right all along. “It’s almost exactly what they’re doing today,” he said.
Powers had given him an early copy of “Playground.” Shah was impressed by Powers’s desire to understand the engineer’s perspective. “It’s a really human portrait of why we might be doing these things, and what we could potentially get out of them,” Shah said.
On my last day in the Smokies, we made our way up into the mountains so that Powers could show me a spot he’d pointed out on the map in his living room. On our hikes, he often seemed like a volunteer member of the National Park Service, asking strangers whether they needed help with directions, sharing tips about less travelled trails, offering to take photos of couples celebrating their anniversary. We looked out at the hundreds of thousands of acres of trees between where we were standing and North Carolina, and he repeated a joke that his wife makes whenever they come across a particularly spectacular sight in the park: “Now that’s ‘National’!” There were a lot of salamanders along the trail.
We walked for a bit and then sat on a mossy fallen tree. Powers had brought a bag of snacks—crunchy, dried shiitake mushrooms, ginger cubes, pretzels, and cookies. We weren’t far from a road, and my concerns were generically urban, mostly involving the parking protocol.
It was hard not to feel like an intruder in a world that did not need us. “Terror results from not being able to escape the time frame where you can only see the earth as a story of loss,” he said. “Right now, everyone is seeing A.
I. only as a story of loss, because they know that every aspect of their life is gonna be changed by this. And they don’t want that instability.
But, in a story, in an artistic work about the moment that we live in, it can’t be emphasized enough that nothing we have done, no action that we’ve taken, no resource that we’ve extracted, no technology that we’ve created, nothing has altered in the least the life force’s ability to continue to respond to change at the same rate it has always been capable of responding.” Each time someone passed, we returned to the world of social pleasantries. An excited middle-aged couple—who looked as though they’d come to the forest straight from their desk jobs—regaled us with an account of all the different-colored salamanders they’d seen thus far.
My ankles itched. “What can I make happen?” Powers asked. “How do I have to save the world? The world is still, even now, constantly saving itself, and it’s hard for you to see because you’re out in the blink of an eye.
But, if you can see and understand it, your own existence as an organism is going to be much healthier, much saner. If you get to the end of ‘Playground’ and say, ‘The world is still here. The world will still exceed my comprehension and astonishment by orders of magnitude.
The world will open up to me if I attend to it,’ then let’s see what happens.” The bugs were getting more aggressive. We kept walking.
He pointed at a downed fir right next to me; I hadn’t even noticed it. It was just another brown blur. The fir was hundreds of years old, and now it was resting on its side, its roots in the air, dried out and barren.
And then he pointed up, where a birch tree was growing perpendicularly out from the fir’s fallen trunk. “Trees come and go,” he said, and we continued on our way. “We have to build a new world with the ingredients we’ve got.
” ♦ New Yorker Favorites They thought that they’d found the perfect apartment. They weren’t alone . The world’s oldest temple and the dawn of civilization .
What happened to the whale from “Free Willy.” It was one of the oldest buildings left downtown. Why not try to save it ? The religious right’s leading ghostwriter .
After high-school football stars were accused of rape, online vigilantes demanded that justice be served . A comic strip by Alison Bechdel: the seven-minute semi-sadistic workout . Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .
.
