We Should Learn to Have More Fun (or Vice Versa)

For several years now, my North Star for thinking about innovation has been Steven Johnson’s great quote (in his delightful Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World): “You will find the future where people are having the most fun.” No, no, no, naysayers argue, inventing the future is serious business, and certainly fun is not the point of business.  Maybe they’re right, but I’m happier hoping for a future guided by a sense of fun than by one guided by P&Ls.

Playing games - and having fun - is important business. Credit: Bing Image Creator

Well, I think I may have found an equally insightful point of view about fun, espoused by game designer Raph Koster in his 2004 book A Theory of Fun for Game Design: “Fun is just another word for learning.”

Wow.

That’s not how most of us think about learning. Learning is hard, learning is going to school, learning is taking tests, learning is something you have to do when you’re not having fun. So “fun is just another word for learning” is quite a different perspective – and one I’m very much attracted to.

I regret that it took me twenty years to discover Mr. Koster’s insight. I read it in a more current book: Kelly Clancy’s Playing With Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World. Dr. Clancy is not a game designer; she is a neuroscientist and physicist, but she is all about play. Her book looks at games and game theory, especially how the latter has been misunderstood/misused.

We usually think of play as a waste of time, as something inherently unserious and unimportant, when, in fact, it is how our brains have evolved to learn. The problem is, we’ve turned learning into education, education into a requirement, teaching into a profession, and fun into something entirely separate. We’ve gotten it backwards.

“Play is a tool the brain uses to generate data on which to train itself, a way of building better models of the world to make better predictions,” she writes. “Games are more than an invention; they are an instinct.”  Indeed, she asserts: “Play is to intelligence as mutation is to evolution.”

Mr. Koster’s fuller quote about fun and learning is on target with this:

That’s what games are, in the end. Teachers. Fun is just another word for learning. Games teach you how aspects of reality work, how to understand yourself, how to understand the actions of others, and how to imagine.

We don’t look at our teachers as a source of fun (and many students barely look at them as a source of learning). We don’t look at schools as a place for games, except on the playground, and then only for the youngest students. We drive students to boredom, and, as Mr. Koster says, “boredom is the opposite of learning” (although, ironically, boredom may be important to creativity).  

Learning is actually fun, especially from a physiological standpoint. “Interestingly, learning itself is rewarding to the brain,” Dr. Clancy points out. “Researchers have found that the “Aha1” moment of insight in solving a puzzle triggers dopamine release in the same way sugar or money can.” We love learning; our brains are hardwired to reward us when we figure something new out. Play is a crucial way we get to that; as Dr. Clancy writes: “Play is all about the unknown and learning how to navigate it.”

Dr. Clancy is not the first to articulate this point of view. Almost 90 years ago Dutch historian Johan Huizinga wrote Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Dr. Clancy summaries his point: “Play, historian Johan Huizinga argues in his classic book Homo Ludens, is how humans innovate, from new tools to new social contracts….Huizinga sees games as foundational cultural technology: Civilization arises and unfolds in and as play.”

I am wowed by the assertion that play is how humans innovate. If that seems extreme to you, contrast the crazy, reckless, boisterous atmosphere of many start-ups with the atmosphere of most corporate innovation departments. Not much playing – not much fun! – going on in the latter, I suspect.

Dr. Clancy goes one very interesting step further: “Play has served as a crucible of culture and innovation; it’s at the heart of design itself…Design is what happens when we uncover rules latent in the world and use these to define the logic of a new, separate system.”

That’s not how most of us typically think about design, but how I hope more of us will.   

And if you want to bring up the trend towards the gamification of everything, don’t get Dr. Clancy started: “Gamification, in other words, replaces what people actually want with what corporations want,” and “Many jobs that can easily be gamified will more profitably be automated.” You need more than gamifying to make play.

All this focus on the importance of play and having fun reminds me of the classic essay A Mathematician’s Lament, by Paul Lockhart. In it, he argues that when people say they are just bad at math, what they really are saying is that they’ve been taught math badly. “Math is not about following directions,” he wrote. “It’s about making new directions.” I.e., playing. 

Imagine, he suggests, if music was taught by simply teaching students how to transcribe notes, or art by having students identify colors. The students never get to hear music or to see art, much less to create either on their own. They’d hate both and claim to be bad at them. That, he charges, is what has happened with teaching math.  We’ve drained all the fun out of it, taken all the discovery from it.

“What a sad endless cycle of innocent teachers inflicting damage upon innocent students,” Professor Lockhart laments in closing. “We could all be having so much more fun.”

We should.

We’re living in very serious times. If it’s not climate change, it’s microplastics. If it’s not the threat of nuclear war, it’s of biochemical attacks. If it’s not the danger of cyberattacks, it’s of AI. If it’s not the impact of social media, it’s the breakdown of civility. Pick your poison; honestly, it’s hard to keep up with the things we should be worrying about. Fun seems pretty far down our priority list.

Fun is just another word for learning?  Play is at the heart of design? Play is how humans innovate? These are radical concepts in our troubled times, but ones that we should take more seriously -- or, perhaps, more mischievously.

Biohybrid Bots Are Mushrooming

I hadn’t expected to write about a biology-related topic anytime soon after doing so last week, but, gosh darn it, then I saw a press release from Cornell about biohybrid robots – powered by mushrooms (aka fungi)! They had me at “biohybrid.”  

A mushroom powered robot. Credit: Cornell University

The release talks about a new paper -- Sensorimotor Control of Robots Mediated by Electrophysiological Measurements of Fungal Mycelia – from the Cornell’s Organic Robotics Lab, led by Professor Rob Shepherd. As the release describes the work:

By harnessing mycelia’s innate electrical signals, the researchers discovered a new way of controlling “biohybrid” robots that can potentially react to their environment better than their purely synthetic counterparts.

Or, in the researchers’ own words:

The paper highlights two key innovations: first, a vibration- and electromagnetic interference–shielded mycelium electrical interface that allows for stable, long-term electrophysiological bioelectric recordings during untethered, mobile operation; second, a control architecture for robots inspired by neural central pattern generators, incorporating rhythmic patterns of positive and negative spikes from the living mycelia.

Let’s simplify that: “This paper is the first of many that will use the fungal kingdom to provide environmental sensing and command signals to robots to improve their levels of autonomy,” Professor Shepherd said. “By growing mycelium into the electronics of a robot, we were able to allow the biohybrid machine to sense and respond to the environment.”

Lead author Anand Mishra, a research associate in the lab, explained: “If you think about a synthetic system – let’s say, any passive sensor – we just use it for one purpose. But living systems respond to touch, they respond to light, they respond to heat, they respond to even some unknowns, like signals. That’s why we think, OK, if you wanted to build future robots, how can they work in an unexpected environment? We can leverage these living systems, and any unknown input comes in, the robot will respond to that.”

The team build two robots: a soft one shaped like a spider, and a wheeled one. The researchers first used the natural spike in the mycelia to make them walk and roll, respectively, using the natural signals from the mycelia. Then researchers exposed them to ultraviolet light, which caused the mycelia to react and changed the robots’ gaits. Finally, the researchers were able to override the mycelia signals entirely.

“This kind of project is not just about controlling a robot,” Dr. Mishra said. “It is also about creating a true connection with the living system. Because once you hear the signal, you also understand what’s going on. Maybe that signal is coming from some kind of stresses. So you’re seeing the physical response, because those signals we can’t visualize, but the robot is making a visualization.”

Dr. Shepherd believes that instead of using light as the signal, they will use chemical signals. For example: “The potential for future robots could be to sense soil chemistry in row crops and decide when to add more fertilizer, for example, perhaps mitigating downstream effects of agriculture like harmful algal blooms.”

It turns out that biohybrid robots in general and fungal computing in particular are a thing. In last week’s article I quoted Professor Andrew Adamatzky, of the University of the West of England about his preference for fungal computing. He not only is the Professor in Unconventional Computing there, and is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal for Unconventional Computing, but also literally wrote the book about fungal computing.  He’s been working on fungal computing since 2018 (and before that on slime mold computing).

Professor Adamatzky notes that fungi have a wide array of sensory inputs: “They sense light, chemicals, gases, gravity, and electric fields,” which opens the door to a wide variety of inputs (and outputs). Accordingly, Ugnius Bajarunas, a member of Professor Adamatzy’s team, told an audience last year: “Our goal is real-time dialog between natural and artificial systems.”

With fungal computing, TechHQ predicts: “The future of computing could turn out to be one where we care for our devices in a way that’s closer to looking after a houseplant than it is to plugging in and switching on a laptop.”

But how would we reboot them?

There are some who feel that we’re making progress on biohybrid robotics faster than we’re thinking about the ethics of it. A paper earlier this summer -- Ethics and responsibility in biohybrid robotics research – urged that we quickly develop and ethical framework, and potentially regulation.

The authors state: “While the ethical dilemmas associated with biohybrid robotics resonate with challenges seen in fields like biomedicine, conventional robotics, or artificial intelligence, the unique amalgamation of living and nonliving components in biohybrid robots, also called biorobots, breeds its own set of ethical complexities that warrant a tailored investigation.”

Co-lead author Dr. Rafael Mestre, from the University of Southampton, said: "But unlike purely mechanical or digital technologies, bio-hybrid robots blend biological and synthetic components in unprecedented ways. This presents unique possible benefits but also potential dangers."  His co-lead author Aníbal M. Astobiza, an ethicist from the University of the Basque Country, elaborated:

Bio-hybrid robots create unique ethical dilemmas. The living tissue used in their fabrication, potential for sentience, distinct environmental impact, unusual moral status, and capacity for biological evolution or adaptation create unique ethical dilemmas that extend beyond those of wholly artificial or biological technologies.

Dr. Matt Ryan, a political scientist from the University of Southampton and a co-author on the paper, added: “Compared to related technologies such as embryonic stem cells or artificial intelligence, bio-hybrid robotics has developed relatively unattended by the media, the public and policymakers, but it is no less significant.”

Big Think recently focused on the topic, asking: Revolutionary biohybrid robots are coming. Are we prepared? The article points out: “Now, scientific advances have increasingly shown that biological beings aren’t just born; they can be built.” It notes: “Biohybrid robots take advantage of living systems’ millions of years of evolution to grant robots benefits such as self-healing, greater adaptability, and superior sensor resolution. But are we ready for a brave new world where blending the artificial and the biological blurs the line between life and non-life?”

Probably not. As Dr. Mestre and his colleagues concluded: “If debates around embryonic stem cells, human cloning, or artificial intelligence have taught us something, it is that humans rarely agree on the correct resolution of the moral dilemmas of emergent technologies.”

Biohybrid robotics and fungal computing are emerging fast.

Think you know what robots are? You don’t. Think you understand how computing works? Maybe silicon-based, but probably not “unconventional.” Think you’re ready for artificial intelligence? Fungi-powered AI might still surprise you.  

Exciting times indeed.