Jack Clark's weekly Tech Tales: children play god in 2040s city-building game
jackclarkSF · x · 2026-11-03
Nat Bullard highlights that Jack Clark (Anthropic co-founder) has shipped his weekly Tech Tales sci-fi column for years. This week's story, "City Race," imagines a 2040s game where children compete to plan, build, and manage cities on a new planet, powered by slices of a Dyson Swarm with cognitive gating so no simulated mind becomes conscious.
Hundreds of thousands of simulated minds live and die in the cities—some thriving, others trapped in squalor. Children must spend a day living in every city they built, experiencing their own wonders and the towns their success doomed, learning "what it means to be gods" before adulthood. Inspired by Iain M. Banks, SimCity, and Hesse's The Glass Bead Game.
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