Amid AI Panic, David Graeber's Essay on Play, Consciousness and Lying Resurfaces
round · x · 2026-09-20
In light of current AI panic, this reshare points to David Graeber's 2014 Baffler essay "What's the Point If We Can't Have Fun?" It opens with an inchworm that appears to play for no reason, surveys the evolutionary-biology debate over whether all animals play, and explores the provocative hypothesis that humans may have evolved consciousness in order to lie — a useful lens for today's arguments about machine minds.
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