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Gamification : “If we could only create the right games, we could make humanity fitter, greener, kinder, smarter. We could repopulate forests and even cure cancers simply by making it fun.” vs “Will Storr, in his book The Status Game, charted the rise of game-playing in different cultures, and found that games have historically functioned to organize societies into hierarchies of competence, with score acting as a conditioned reinforcer of status. In other words, all games descend from status games.”
People: Scientists have found that climate change will reduce the world’s income by 19% in the next 26 years. The UAE experiences its heaviest rains in 75 years of record-keeping. Against journaling. The little brain. GenZ and hallucinogens. Blackout shopping.
Tech: Environmental DNA (eDNA) and DNA metabarcoding. Dyson, vacuuming and AR.
Business: Costco sells 200m$ in gold per month. No more “office bestie” for GenZ. Links between strategy and innovation. The shape of futures.
Governance: Gov can’t buy data from third parties in the US. Bayer to cut all middle management to save $2bn? The social structures that enabled the Mongols to conquer Eurasia.
AI: AI Prompt Engineering is Dead. LLM x CRISPR - what can go wrong. Poetry as Turing test. Llama3 of course. Human-human interactions, boosted with AI. AI leaderboards.
Companies that exploit our gameplaying compulsion will have an edge over those who don’t, so every company that wishes to compete must gamify in ever more addictive ways, even though in the long term this harms everyone. As such, gamification is not just a fad; it’s the fate of a digital capitalist society. Anything that can be turned into a game sooner or later will be.
