Playing Domains: Codes, Cities, and Cultures in the Viral World of Machine Learning

The history of artificial intelligence (AI) is also a history of play. In 1988, acclaimed computer scientist Raj Reddy proposed six ‘grand challenges’ intended to jolt the AI community into life. The most famous was the goal of building a ‘world champion chess machine’. Yet AI’s connection to play goes much deeper. For 20 years competitions, often referred to as challenges, have been organized to drive the development, and more recent commercialization, of AI and machine learning (ML). In this article I draw on recent scholarship on ‘AI as a sport’ to argue that as everyday urban environments – people, streets, situations – are compressed into training datasets, they have begun to function as game worlds for practitioners, attracted by the viral nature of machine learning. This practice of ‘playing domains’ – where practitioners treat AI as an arena for gladiatorial-style battles – is becoming a central feature of contemporary machine learning culture driven by this virality.