Transmitted 20260209 · · · 369 days before impact
If you’ve ever used Photoshop or another image editing program, you know the paint bucket tool. Here is its primordial form:
The operation executed by this tool is “flood fill”: color stretches out from the cursor, transforming everything until it reaches an unbroken line of pixels. The first few times I used it, back in the early 1990s, it was thrilling.
Think not of an image, but an economy — a world. And think not of a color, but a process: AI automation. The paint bucket just tipped over onto computing programming — click —
There it goes
—and the very live question is: how far will this flood fill extend?
Into all digital work? Possibly? Probably? And what about other kinds of work, those not yoked to screens and inboxes? One argument goes: the flood is coming for EVERYTHING, as supersmart computers yield supergood robots yield universal automation.
But this isn’t correct. There is an unbroken line of pixels out there; a firewall; a magic circle.
“Magic circle” is a term drawn from the study of games. It comes from Johan Huizinga; I learned it from Frank Lantz. The idea (in my formulation) is that games unfold in a special space, physical and/or intellectual, marked off ahead of time, in which action is constrained.
Playing chess, your goal is to knock over your opponent’s king, yet you don’t just reach across and swat it aside. You can do this; nothing restrains your hand. But the point of the game is to play the game. You and your opponent both agreed to that ahead of time.
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