Unnecessary Obstacles: Play, the Grasshopper, and the One Thing You Cannot Delegate

Prologue

Four Feet

There is an easy way to do this. You could bend down, pick up the ball, walk four feet, and drop it in the hole. It would take five seconds and it would work every time.

Nobody does that. Nobody has ever been tempted to do that. If you did it, your friends would not say you had found a better method. They would say you had stopped playing golf.

I want you to hold on to that small strange fact, because this whole book hangs from it. Here is an activity where the efficient way is forbidden, where the forbidding is the entire point, and where a grown adult will get up before dawn and pay money for the privilege of doing it the hard way. We do not find this odd. We find it so ordinary that we have a short word for it. We call it play.

Now look at what is arriving. For the first time, an ordinary person has a delegate: an AI that takes a matter off your hands and brings it back done. I teach people to hand it the small matters and to keep only what is worthy of their attention. It reads the contract, files the claim, books the flight, reconciles the account. It is very good at the efficient way. The efficient way is the only way it knows.

So the pile gets shorter. Every month, something that used to stand between you and what you wanted is quietly cleared. That is the good news and I am not going to argue with it.

But notice what a delegate cannot do on that green. It can book the tee time. It can read the slope better than any caddie alive. It can tell you exactly how hard to hit the ball. And then it has to stop, because if it goes one step further and sinks the putt for you, there is no putt. There is a ball in a hole, which nobody wanted.

The machine that removes every necessary obstacle leaves you alone with the unnecessary ones. They turn out to be the ones you chose.

This book is about that remainder. It asks what play is, why it cannot be handed down, what the people who were always served did with their days, and what happens to a whole society when the necessary obstacles thin out and the chosen ones are what is left. I think the answer is hopeful. I also think it is stranger than either the optimists or the pessimists expect.

We start with an insect who was right all along.

Chapter 1

The Grasshopper

You know the fable. All summer the ant hauls grain and the grasshopper sings. Winter comes. The grasshopper knocks at the ant’s door, hungry, and the ant asks what he was doing all summer. Singing, he says. Then dance, says the ant, and shuts the door.

It is one of the oldest stories we tell children, and its job is to make them into ants. Work first. Store up. The one who plays will starve, and will deserve it.

In 1978 a Canadian philosopher named Bernard Suits wrote a short, odd, funny book that retells the fable from the other side. In his version the Grasshopper is the hero. He knows winter is coming. His friends beg him to work just enough to live. He refuses, on principle, and spends his last days explaining to them what a game is. The book is called The Grasshopper, and I think it is one of the most useful books ever written about a future its author never saw.

Suits was answering a dare. The most admired philosopher of the century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, had said that games cannot be defined. Look at them, he said: chess, tag, solitaire, football. Nothing is common to all of them. Suits thought this was lazy, and he produced a definition that has held up ever since. The short version fits on one line. Playing a game, he wrote, is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”

Take the words one at a time.

Voluntary. Nobody can make you play. They can make you go through the motions, as every child knows who has been ordered to have fun. But the moment it is forced, it is something else.

Attempt. You do not have to succeed. Missing the putt is still golf. In work, a failed attempt is a waste. In a game, the attempt is the thing itself.

Overcome obstacles. There has to be something in the way. A game with nothing in the way is not relaxing. It is nothing at all.

Unnecessary. Here is the heart of it. The obstacles are not handed to you by the world. Nobody needs the ball in the hole. If somebody did, we would send a man with a bucket. The obstacle is there because the players agreed to put it there, and for no other reason.

Suits gave a name to the frame of mind that makes this possible. He called it the lusory attitude, from the Latin word for play. It means accepting a rule for no reason except that the rule makes the activity possible. The runner stays on the track when she could cut across the infield. The card player does not look at the next card. Each of them could reach the goal faster by ignoring the rule, and each of them understands that the goal, reached that way, would be worth nothing.

In work, the rule is in your way. In play, the rule is what you came for.

That is the whole difference between an ant and a grasshopper, and it is not the difference the fable taught us. The ant overcomes obstacles because they are there. The grasshopper overcomes obstacles because he put them there. From the outside the two can look identical. A man chopping wood for the stove and a man chopping wood in a lumberjack contest are swinging the same axe. Only one of them would be disappointed if you showed up with a chainsaw.

Suits did one more thing in that little book, and it is the reason I am writing this one. He asked what people would do in a world where every necessary obstacle had been removed, where anything you needed could be had by pressing a button. He called it Utopia, and he reasoned his way to a conclusion that annoyed nearly everyone. In such a world, he said, the only thing left worth doing would be playing games.

In 1978 that was a thought experiment. I am going to treat it as a forecast.

Carry this

A game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. The obstacle is not in the way of the point. It is the point.

This week

Name one thing you do where a faster way exists and you would be annoyed if someone used it for you.

Chapter 2

Older Than Culture

Forty years before Suits, a Dutch historian named Johan Huizinga made a bigger claim. He was a scholar of the Middle Ages, a careful man, and in 1938, with Europe sliding toward war, he published a book arguing that play is not a break from civilization. Play is where civilization came from.

He called the book Homo Ludens, Man the Player, and he opened it with an observation so plain it is hard to argue with. Play is older than culture. Culture needs human society, and animals did not wait for us. Watch two puppies. One bows, the other pounces, they roll, they nip without biting. They are following rules. They know it is not a real fight. No one taught them, and there is nothing they need from it that afternoon.

From there Huizinga built a list of what play looks like wherever you find it. I will give you the list in my own words, because we are going to need it.

Play is free. It is done for itself and can be stopped. Play steps outside ordinary life. Everyone involved knows this is “only” a game, and that knowledge does not make it any less absorbing. Play has its own place and its own time. It starts, it ends, and it happens inside a boundary. Play makes order. Inside the boundary the rules are absolute in a way that nothing in ordinary life is. And play pays nothing. You come out with no grain for the winter.

The boundary is the part people remember. Huizinga noticed that the card table, the tennis court, the stage, the temple and the courtroom are all the same kind of place: a marked-off spot where special rules hold and ordinary life is suspended. Later writers took a phrase from his list and made it famous. They called it the magic circle.

You have stepped into that circle thousands of times and never thought about it. The whistle blows and for ninety minutes it matters enormously which side of a painted line a ball is on. The whistle blows again and it does not matter at all. Nothing in the world changed except the agreement.

Then Huizinga went looking for the circle in the serious parts of life, and he kept finding it. A trial is a contest held in a special place, in special dress, under strict rules, with a winner. Poetry began as riddle contests and word games. Philosophy began as public argument for sport. War, for most of history, came wrapped in rules about heralds and truces and fair challenge that make no military sense at all. In the Latin he took his title from, the word for play, ludus, is also the word for school.

His conclusion was that the great forms of civilized life did not grow out of need. They grew out of play, and got serious later.

We like to think we play when the work is done. Huizinga’s claim is that we started working on the things we had first invented as play.

I bring him in for one reason. When people imagine a future with less necessary work in it, they picture a hole where the meaning used to be. They assume work is the solid thing and play is the decoration, so that if you take away the work, what remains is a long, empty weekend.

Huizinga says that picture has the building upside down. Play is the foundation. It came first, it built the institutions, and it has been sitting underneath them the whole time, covered over by necessity. Take away some of the necessity and you do not find a hole. You find the floor.

He had one more idea that will matter later. He said the real enemy of a game is not the cheat. The cheat still pretends to play, so the circle holds. The real enemy is the spoilsport, the one who shrugs and says it is only a game. He breaks the circle for everyone. Remember him. He comes back in Chapter 8, and he will have help.

Carry this

Play is not what is left over after work. It is the older thing, and much of what we call serious life was built on top of it.

This week

Find one magic circle you stepped into without noticing: a table, a field, a room where different rules held for a while.

Chapter 3

The Long Way Round

If what you wanted was the picture, you already had it. You paid for it to be cut into a thousand pieces so that you could spend a week putting it back.

Once you see this you see it everywhere. The answers to the crossword are printed in tomorrow’s paper. The fish goes back in the river. The knitter spends forty hours on a sweater that a store sells for less than the wool cost. The gardener grows tomatoes at several times the price of buying them. None of these people are confused. They are after something that the short way cannot deliver.

The cleanest proof is a coincidence of dates. The motorcar was patented in 1886. The marathon was invented for the Athens Olympics of 1896. So the first era in which nobody had to cover twenty-six miles on foot is also the era in which people started doing it on purpose, in crowds, for a ribbon. The machine did not kill running. It turned running from a chore into a game, because it made the obstacle unnecessary, and an obstacle has to be unnecessary before it can be played with.

Mountains tell the same story. When George Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Everest, he gave the three most quoted words in the history of sport: because it’s there. A helicopter has since touched down on that summit. It settled nothing for climbers, because getting a body to the top was never the goal. Getting yourself there, under the rules, was.

So here is a rule you can test against your own life. Whenever a machine makes a hard thing unnecessary, the hard thing does not disappear. It splits in two. One half becomes a service, delivered the efficient way, and we stop thinking about it. The other half becomes a game, done the long way round, by people who love it. Transportation and running. Shipping and sailing. Groceries and gardening. Photography and painting. The service half is always bigger in money. The game half is where people put their Saturdays.

A machine does not end the hard thing. It splits it into a service and a game.

What exactly does the long way deliver? I think it is three things, and none of them can be shipped.

The first is the test. A game tells you something true about yourself that you could not have learned any other way: whether you can hold your nerve over four feet of wet grass. The second is the story. A game has an outcome that was not known at the start, and living through an unknown outcome is one of the deep pleasures of being alive. The third is the company. People who have agreed to the same pointless rules are bound to each other in a way that people who merely trade with each other are not.

A psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent his career studying the first of these. He found that people report their best moments when a challenge is matched closely to their skill. Too hard and you are anxious. Too easy and you are bored. In the narrow channel between, you lose track of time. He called it flow. A good game is a device for keeping you in that channel, which is why games come with handicaps, weight classes, levels and leagues. They are tuning the obstacle to the player.

Notice what that means. In work we tune the obstacle down, as far as it will go. In play we tune it to fit. That is a different engineering problem, and it is the one that is about to matter.

Carry this

When a machine makes a hard thing unnecessary, the hard thing splits into a service and a game. The service is larger. The game is loved.

This week

Pick one thing your delegate now does for you. Ask whether anyone, anywhere, still does it by hand for the pleasure of it. Someone does.

Chapter 4

What the Served Did

People talk about a life with every chore handed off as if no one had ever tried it. But a small class of people in every age has lived exactly that life. They had cooks, stewards, clerks, grooms and agents. Their necessary obstacles were removed by other hands. We do not have to guess what human beings do in that condition. We have several thousand years of records.

They did not lie down. Idleness, real idleness, turns out to be rare and brief. What the served classes did, in every civilization that had one, was invent difficult things to do and then surround those things with rules.

They hunted, and not the efficient way. The English gentleman did not want a dead fox. A farmer with a trap could supply that. He wanted to follow one particular fox across open country on horseback behind a pack of hounds, by a code of conduct stricter than most laws. Oscar Wilde called it the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable, which is a joke and also a precise description of an unnecessary obstacle.

They fought, by rule. The medieval tournament began as a rough practice battle and became, over three centuries, a pageant with lists, heralds, scoring and blunted lances. They gambled, danced, fenced, raced horses and played cards, and for each of these they produced referees and rulebooks.

The rulebooks are the tell. Look at a single decade in Britain, when a prosperous class found itself with time and servants. In 1742 Edmond Hoyle published his treatise on the card game whist, and “according to Hoyle” entered the language. In 1743 a set of rules was written for boxing. In 1744 the gentlemen golfers of Leith wrote down thirteen rules of golf, and in the same year the laws of cricket were set on paper. The Jockey Club followed within a few years. Much of the world’s sport still runs on documents drafted by people who did not have to work.

The economist Thorstein Veblen looked at all this in 1899 and saw only showing off. The leisure class, he said, plays hard games to prove it can afford to waste time. He was partly right. But he missed what the players themselves would have told him. They were not suffering through the fox hunt for the sake of appearances. They would rather have been there than anywhere.

Give people servants and they do not stop climbing. They build themselves a hill.

I should be honest about the other half of the record. Not everyone who was served built a hill. Some drank. Some gambled away estates. Some sank into the long boredom that the novels of every aristocracy describe so well. Being freed from necessity is not automatically good for a person. It is a test of its own, and plenty of people with every advantage failed it.

But look at who failed and who did not. The ones who came through were almost always the ones with a game: a sport, an instrument, a science pursued as a passion, a garden, a collection, a regiment, a cause. Much of early science was done by exactly these people, for exactly this reason. They did not need the answer. They wanted the chase.

So the old experiment gives a clear result, with a warning attached. Human beings relieved of necessary obstacles go looking for unnecessary ones. Those who find good ones flourish. Those who find none come apart. And the finding does not happen by itself. In every leisured class, the games were taught. A child of that world was put on a horse, handed a foil, sat at an instrument, and drilled in the rules long before he was asked whether he liked it.

That last point is the one to keep. Play is natural. Good games are an inheritance. The served classes knew that their children would have to be given something hard to love, and they organized childhood around it.

We are about to extend that condition, in part, to nearly everyone. In The Free Arts I asked what to teach a child who will be born a manager of delegates. This is the other half of that question. The inheritance has to be extended too.

Carry this

People who have always been served did not rest. They invented hard things and wrote rules for them. The ones with a game flourished, and the games were taught.

This week

Ask what hard thing you were given to love as a child, and who gave it to you. Then ask what you are handing on.

Chapter 5

The Machine That Won

There is a second experiment, more recent and more exact. We have already watched what happens to a human activity when a machine becomes better at it than any person will ever be. It has happened twice, in public, with the whole world looking on.

In May of 1997 a computer built by IBM, called Deep Blue, beat the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, in a six-game match. Chess had been the West’s favorite symbol of intelligence for centuries. The headlines wrote its obituary. If a machine could do it better, what was the point of a person doing it at all?

You know how that turned out, even if you have never thought about it. The program on your phone would now beat any champion who ever lived, and more people play chess today than at any time in its history. Children study it. Crowds watch it. The best human players are famous.

And here is the detail that matters most. Machines play each other too. There are championships for chess programs, and the games are the finest ever played by anyone or anything. Almost nobody watches. The audience wants to see a person, with a clock running and a pulse, try to find a good move and sometimes fail.

The machine did not leave. It changed jobs. It stopped being the opponent and became the coach, the sparring partner, the analyst in the booth who tells the audience how much trouble the champion is in. Every serious player trains with one. The delegate took over everything around the game, and the game itself stayed human, because that was the only place the game could be.

The second case is harder, and I include it because it is harder. In March of 2016 a program called AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, one of the greatest Go players of the age, four games to one. Three years later Lee retired from professional play. He told a Korean news agency that even if he became number one, “there is an entity that cannot be defeated.”

That is not a happy sentence, and I will not pretend it is. For a person who had built a life on being the best in the world at something, the arrival of a thing that could not be beaten took the floor out. He was honest about it.

But look closely at what was lost. Lee had been playing two games at once. One was Go: nineteen lines, black and white stones, an opponent across the board. The other was a game called Being the Best There Is, and its rules had never been written down. The machine did not touch the first game. Go is still played by millions, and its best players have learned moves from the machines that no human school had ever taught. The machine ended the second game, because the second game had a hidden rule that only humans were in it.

The machine cannot ruin a game you play for the playing. It can only ruin a game you were playing for the ranking.

This is the distinction I most want you to take from the chess and Go years, because every one of us is about to face it in our own trade. If what you loved was the work itself, the problem in front of you, the feel of solving it, then a machine that solves it faster takes nothing from you that you cannot keep as play. If what you loved was being the one who was needed, the one nobody could match, you are going to have a hard few years, and the honest thing is to say so.

Chess players got through it. They got through it by quietly changing what the title meant. The world champion is no longer the best chess player in the world. He is the best human chess player in the world, under human conditions, and everyone understands that the second phrase was always what they cared about.

Nobody ever thought the fastest runner alive was faster than a horse.

Carry this

When a machine beats us at a game, the game survives and the machine becomes the coach. What dies is the unwritten game of being unbeatable.

This week

In your own work, separate the two games: the thing you like doing, and the standing you get from being the one who can. Which would you keep if you could only keep one?

Chapter 6

The Thing You Cannot Send

I spend most of my time teaching people to delegate. So let me say as exactly as I can where delegation stops, because it stops at a sharp line and the line is not where people expect.

I often tell my students to try a simple request on their AI: order dinner. And I tell them how to grade it. The task is not done when the order is placed. It is done when the food is in your stomach. I wrote about this in The Eval Is in Your Stomach. The point is that work is graded out in the world, by a result, and the result does not care who produced it. A dinner your delegate arranged feeds you exactly as well as one you arranged yourself.

That is what makes work delegable. Its test lives outside the doer.

Now try the same move on a game. Send your delegate to run your marathon. Have it finish your crossword. Let it play your hand of cards while you check your messages. You can feel the nonsense before the sentence is over. It is not that the delegate would do it badly. It would do it perfectly. It is that the result, once it arrived, would be addressed to no one.

The test of a game lives inside the player. Suits’s definition already told us so. The goal of golf is not a ball in a hole. It is a ball put in a hole by you, with a club, counting every stroke. Take the “by you” out and the rest falls apart.

Work is finished when the thing is done. Play is finished when you have done it.

This gives us a clean way to sort a life. For anything you do, ask one question: if it were done perfectly without me, would I have what I wanted?

The dishes: yes. The tax return: yes. The commute: yes, gladly. These are work, however you feel about them, and they can go down to the delegate.

Your daughter’s recital: no. The walk with an old friend: no. The song you are learning on the guitar, badly: no. The vow, the toast, the eulogy, the apology. No. Being there is not a means to these. Being there is the thing. In Nothing Owed I argued that a gift cannot be given by a delegate, because the giving is the bond. It is the same structure. Gifts and games are both things where the doer cannot be swapped out without the thing vanishing.

A great deal of life sits in between, and this is where it gets interesting. Cooking can be work on Tuesday and play on Saturday. Writing can be a report or a poem. The same person, doing the same motions, is on one side of the line or the other depending on a single fact: whether they would be pleased or cheated if it were done for them.

That means the line is not drawn by the activity. It is drawn by you. And so for the first time, most people will have to draw it on purpose. When every task was necessary, you never had to ask which ones you loved. You did them all. A delegate forces the question, one task at a time: do you want this done, or do you want to do it?

Most people have never been asked, and the first time can be awkward. You hand over the email gladly. Then you hesitate over something small, like planning the family trip or choosing the wine, and you cannot say why.

I can. You have found a game. Somewhere in the pile of chores there was a thing you did for its own sake, and you never knew it until something offered to take it away.

There is one more thing a delegate can do, and it is generous. It can serve the game without entering it. It books the court, finds the fourth player, strings the racket, keeps the score, holds the calendar open. Everything around the circle is work. Hand it all over. Then step inside by yourself.

Carry this

Ask of anything: if it were done perfectly without me, would I have what I wanted? If yes, delegate it. If no, it is play, and it is yours.

This week

Hand your delegate ten chores. Watch for the one you hesitate over. That one is a game. Keep it.

Chapter 7

The Remover of Obstacles

Every tool ever made removes an obstacle. The plow removed one, the pump removed one, the spreadsheet removed one. What is different now is the breadth. A delegate is not a tool for one obstacle. It is a general remover of obstacles, pointed at whatever you name, and it works on the kind that used to need a mind.

I am not going to tell you it removes all of them. It does not, and the claim that it soon will has been made too many times by too many people. I am making a smaller claim that I think is safe. For most people, the pile of things that must be done by them personally gets shorter every year from here.

The economist John Maynard Keynes saw this coming from a long way off. In 1930, at the bottom of a depression, he wrote a short essay about his grandchildren. He predicted that the economic problem, the struggle to have enough, would in time be solved. And then he said something that startled his readers. He said that solving it would expose a harder problem. Humanity, he wrote, would for the first time face its real and permanent question: what to do with freedom from pressing cares. He was not sure we were ready. We had been trained for too long to strive, and hardly at all to enjoy. I took up his worry in The Habit of Earning.

Keynes named the problem. Suits, half a century later, gave the answer, and it is not the answer people want. People want to hear that when the chores are gone we will turn to art, to learning, to love and friendship. Suits pushed on each of these. If a machine can hand you any knowledge you ask for, then studying it the slow way is something you are choosing to do under a rule. If a machine can produce any object, then making one by hand is something you are choosing to do under a rule. They are still wonderful. But their structure has changed. They have become voluntary attempts to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

They have become games.

I do not think that word should insult anyone. It only sounds like an insult because we were raised by ants.

Necessity used to hand us our obstacles for free. From here on, more and more of them have to be chosen.

Here is what I think most people have not yet felt, and will. Necessity was doing us a favor we never noticed. It told us what to do with the day. The field had to be plowed, the report had to be filed, and inside that “had to” there was a ready-made sense of mattering. You never had to ask whether the obstacle in front of you was worth overcoming. It was in front of you. That was enough.

A chosen obstacle comes with no such guarantee. You have to supply the caring yourself. That is harder than it sounds, and it is why a person can be handed a free afternoon and feel, by three o’clock, a low dread they cannot name.

The dread is not laziness and it is not ingratitude. It is the feeling of standing in Suits’s Utopia without a game.

So the split I described in Chapter 3 is about to run through the work of the mind. Writing will split into a service and a game. So will calculating, translating, coding, drawing, planning, researching. The service half will be delivered by delegates, quickly and well, and most of the time that is what you will want. The game half will be kept by people who love the thing itself, and they will keep it the long way round, with rules.

The mistake to avoid is fighting over which half is real. Both are. The person who has a delegate write the memo is not a fraud. The person who writes a sonnet by hand is not a fool. They are doing two different things that used to look like one.

Carry this

Necessity used to assign our obstacles and the meaning came with them. As the necessary ones thin out, the obstacles that matter are the ones we choose.

This week

The next time you have an hour with nothing required of you, notice what you feel in the first ten minutes. Do not fix it. Just notice.

Chapter 8

Trifler, Cheat, Spoilsport

Suits said there are three ways to wreck a game, and he gave each a name. It helps to have the names, because the machines make all three easier.

The trifler follows the rules but does not care about the goal. He moves his pieces legally and has no interest in winning. He is not really playing, and you cannot play against him.

The cheat cares about the goal but not the rules. He wants the win and will take the short way to it. And here is the catch Suits noticed: by taking the short way he does not win the game at all. He gets the trophy, or the money, or the rating. Those are outside the game. The game’s own prize, having done it, is not available by that route.

The spoilsport cares about neither. He is the one Huizinga warned us about, who looks at the players and asks why they bother.

Now add a delegate that can do nearly anything, instantly, in private.

Cheating becomes free. It used to take effort or accomplices to cheat at most games. Soon it will take one whispered request. Every contest held at a distance, every test taken through a screen, every piece of work submitted as one’s own, has this problem at once. I do not think the answer is better detection. Detection is an arms race, and the cheat only has to win once.

The answer is the oldest one: play in the same room. A person standing in front of you, with empty hands, under your eyes, is playing. I made the wider case in Face Value that when everything sent over a wire can be forged, trust goes back to the face. Play goes back with it. The games that matter will be the ones where you can see each other.

That handles the cheat. The spoilsport is the greater danger, because the machine seems to prove him right.

He has always been with us. He is the voice that says: why learn the piano when there are recordings? Why draw when there are cameras? He used to be easy to ignore, because for most things there was still some practical reason to learn them. Now he has an argument for everything. Why write, why calculate, why learn a language, why study anything at all? A machine can do it.

“A machine can do it” is a complete answer to the question of work. It is not an answer to the question of play. It is not even about the same subject.

The spoilsport’s mistake is that he thinks the picture on the box was the point of the jigsaw. He has confused the service with the game. And because he is so often right about the service, he sounds wise when he is being a fool about the game.

You will meet him in two places. You will meet him in other people, and it will be tiresome. And you will meet him in your own head, at the moment you sit down to do something hard and beautiful that no one requires of you. He will say it in a reasonable voice. Why bother?

The answer is the one a golfer would give to a man who offered to carry the ball to the hole. No, thank you. You have misunderstood what I am doing here.

A young person in particular needs that answer ready, because the question will be put to them about everything they try to learn. I would teach it to them the way we teach manners. There are things we do so that they get done, and things we do so that we have done them. Know which is which, and do not let anyone talk you out of the second kind.

Carry this

The cheat takes the short way and loses the only prize the game had. The spoilsport says a machine can do it. He is right about the service and wrong about the game.

This week

Catch the spoilsport once in your own head. Write down what he said and what he was trying to talk you out of.

Chapter 9

Work With the Rules Left In

So far I have kept work and play in separate boxes. They do not stay there, and the place where they mix is where a good many livelihoods will be made.

Think about the word handmade. A hundred and fifty years ago it described nearly everything and so it described nothing. Then machines learned to make chairs, and “handmade” began to mean something. Notice what it means. It is not a claim about quality. A factory chair may be stronger and straighter. Handmade is a claim about rules. It says: a person did this, with these tools, under these limits. It is a statement that the game was played.

People pay for that statement. They pay because an object made under rules carries the test, the story and the company I described in Chapter 3. You are not buying a place to sit. You are buying the fact that someone overcame an obstacle they did not have to.

Every trade the delegates enter will grow a branch like this. There will be the service, delivered the efficient way, and it will be most of the market. And there will be work with the rules left in: the letter written by the person who signed it, the portrait painted from life, the meal cooked by the cook whose name is on the door, the lesson taught by a teacher in the room. It will carry a label that amounts to the word handmade, and the label will be about conditions, not results.

I want to be careful here, because there is a cheap version of this idea and I do not hold it. The cheap version says that everyone can make a living from their hobby. They cannot. Play, by its nature, pays nothing to the player. What pays is everything a game needs around it.

Look at any game that people love and count the livelihoods standing at its edge. Someone teaches it. Someone hosts it. Someone keeps the rules and settles the disputes. Someone makes the equipment. Someone tends the field. Someone tells the story of it afterward. A few play it well enough that others will pay to watch. The players in the circle are the reason for all of it, and most of them are spending money, not earning it.

So when I tell young people where the work will be, I do not say: turn your play into your job. I say: go and stand at the edge of a circle that people love, and make yourself necessary to it.

Play pays nothing to the player. It pays the teacher, the host, the maker and the keeper of the rules.

There is a second way work and play mix, and it is closer to home. In Masterpiece I wrote about what happens to training when the small work is cleared away, because the small work was the only school most trades ever had. Look at that problem through this book and it changes shape. Practice has always been a game. Scales on a piano produce no music anyone wants. Drills produce no victory. A student doing a problem set is overcoming an obstacle whose answer is printed in the back of the book. All training is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles, undertaken because of who you will be afterward.

That is the way out of the trap. If the firm no longer needs the junior to do the small work, the junior can still do it, as practice, under rules, with a coach. It stops being labor that happens to teach and becomes a game that is known to teach. We already do this for surgeons and pilots. We will do it for everyone.

And there is a third way, the quietest. Some people will go on doing by hand what their delegate could do, during working hours, for pay, simply because they love it and their customers love that they do. A baker does not need to shape every loaf. A lawyer does not need to draft the hard clause herself. When they do it anyway, they have left one rule in. I would not call that inefficiency. I would call it the reason they went into the trade.

Carry this

“Made by hand” is a claim about rules, not about quality. The living is rarely in playing the game. It is at the edge of the circle, serving the people inside.

This week

Pick a game people love where you live. List every livelihood that stands at its edge. Ask which of them you could do.

Chapter 10

The House of Play

I live and work in Charleston, a city that feeds and houses visitors for a living. Many of the businesses I serve are in hospitality. It is easy to say that what they sell is food and rooms. I do not think that is right.

Nobody goes out to dinner for nutrition. The efficient way to be fed is at your own counter in ten minutes, and soon a delegate will see to it without being asked. A dinner out is the long way round. It has a marked-off place and a marked-off time. It has roles: host, server, guest. It has an order of play: drinks, then a first course, then the main, then something sweet. It has rules nobody posts and everybody knows. And when it is over, a small ceremony with a folded piece of paper ends it, and you step back out into ordinary life.

Go back to Huizinga’s list in Chapter 2 and lay it over that evening. It fits at every point. A restaurant is a magic circle. So is an inn, a wedding, a festival, a guided walk through an old street, a night of music in a small room. Hospitality is the trade of keeping circles for strangers.

That gives me a simple rule for where AI belongs in such a business, and it is the rule I work by. Everything outside the circle is work, and it should go to the delegate, all of it, as fast as possible. The phone that rings during service. The reservation book. The invoices, the ordering, the schedule, the reply to the review. None of that is what the guest came for, and every minute a person spends on it is a minute taken from the room.

Everything inside the circle is play, and no machine should set foot in it. The guest did not come to be handled efficiently. The guest came to be seen by a person who is glad they are there.

Use the delegate to clear everything outside the circle, so that the people inside it can be entirely there.

The businesses that get this backward will be easy to spot. They will put a screen where the host stood and keep a person in the back office typing numbers into a form. They will have automated the one part that was the product and kept human hands on the part that never was.

This is not only about restaurants. Any business can ask the same question: where is our circle? There is almost always one. It is the fitting room, the showroom floor, the first meeting, the closing table, the classroom, the chair in the barbershop. It is the place where the customer is not trying to get something over with. Find it, guard it, and send everything else down.

I made a bet on this myself. In January I opened a room in Charleston where people can come and learn about AI in person. The efficient way to teach is through a screen. But learning with other people in a room is a different activity from receiving information. It has a start and an end, a teacher at the front, the small courage of asking a question out loud. It is a circle, and I wanted to keep one.

I have told my own delegate to bring me only the matters worthy of my attention. It sounds like a rule about efficiency. I have come to think it is a rule about play. What is worthy of your attention is, very nearly, whatever would be ruined by being done without you.

If you run a house of play, and I mean any place people come to step out of ordinary life for an hour, your future is not threatened by any of this. People are about to have fewer necessary things to do and a great need for somewhere good to go.

Carry this

Hospitality is the trade of keeping circles for strangers. Send everything outside the circle to the delegate. Keep every person you have inside it.

This week

If you own or work in a business, draw its circle on paper. Put each task inside or outside the line. Look hard at where your people actually spend their hours.

Chapter 11

Six Predictions

A principle is only worth having if it tells you what to expect. Here is what this one tells me. I have tried to state each prediction plainly enough that you can check it against the world over the next ten years.

1. The split reaches the mind.

   Writing, coding, calculating, translating and drawing will each divide into a service and a game, the way transport divided into driving and running. You will see clubs, leagues and festivals for doing by hand what a delegate does in seconds, and the people in them will not be protesting anything. They will be enjoying themselves.

2. “Unaided” becomes a word on a label.

   We already say acoustic, amateur, organic, handmade. A new word of that family will settle in for work done by a person without a delegate. It will describe the conditions, not the quality, and nobody will think it means the other kind is cheating. Contests, schools and some employers will specify which they are asking for.

3. Play goes back into rooms.

   Because being present is the one cheap proof that you played, the games that matter will move to places where people can see each other. Local clubs, halls, courts, studios and tables will fill. A town will be judged partly by how many good circles it keeps.

4. The keeper of the circle becomes a common profession.

   Coaches, hosts, referees, league organizers, teachers of hard and lovely things, makers of good equipment, designers of games. These are old jobs and there will be many more of them, because they are the work that play requires and cannot do for itself.

5. Schools teach a game on purpose.

   Within a generation, a serious school will promise that every child leaves with at least one difficult thing they love doing for its own sake: an instrument, a sport, a craft, a branch of mathematics. It will stop being called extracurricular. It will be understood as the part of school that the delegate cannot do for the child.

6. The new line runs between those with a game and those without.

   We are used to sorting people by what they earn or whether they are employed. A third question will become just as telling: what do you do that nobody needs you to do? People with an answer will handle the coming years well at almost any income. People without one will struggle at almost any income.

I hold the last of these most firmly and like it least. It means the gift of free time will land unevenly, the way every gift does. And it means the kindest thing you can do for a young person is see to it that they have a game before they need one.

Epilogue

Four Feet, Again

A great deal was done for you this week. Your delegate filed something, paid something, argued politely with an airline, and moved an appointment you had forgotten you made. You did not see most of it. That is as it should be. I would not give any of it back.

This is different. Here are four feet of grass that nobody on earth needs you to cross. No one is waiting for the result. The ball could be in the hole already. And you are more awake than you have been all week, because the thing in front of you is hard, and you chose it, and it is yours.

The ant in the old fable was right about winter. We needed the ants, and for most of history nearly all of us had to be one. But the grasshopper was right about something too, and now that so much of the hauling can be handed down, his half of the argument is coming due. He knew that a life is not only the obstacles you are given. It is also the ones you would choose if nothing made you.

So here is what I would ask of you. Hand down everything that can be finished without you. Do it gladly and do not look back. And then find the thing that cannot, the one you would be cheated to have done for you, and guard it the way you would guard a child.

You draw the putter back.

Nobody can do this for you. That is the best thing about it.