Ken Kutaragi is best known as the father of the PlayStation, having led the development of the PS1, PS2, and PS3 consoles. While he retired from Sony in 2007, he's keeping busy as an AI firm CEO who seems convinced that video games will soon be replaced by AI daydreams. The most incredible part is that he also seems to believe that's a good thing.
"AI will transform games into entertainment, and change human sensibilities," Kutaragi tells 4Gamer (via Power Up Gaming) at a recent university panel. "The global game market is currently worth over 30 trillion Yen, but it might reach around 3,000 trillion Yen. If that happens, it won't even be called a game anymore."
He cites the development of early 3D fighting games like Virtua Fighter and Battle Arena Toshinden as examples of how quickly video game technology once developed. Now, while game studios are astronomically larger than they were in the PS1 era, graphical development has slowed to a crawl. AI is where the real innovation is happening, he argues.
"Behind the scenes, research and development is advancing on the real-time generation of video and music using AI," Kutaragi continues. "It’s predicted that this technology will be capable of operating at the same speed as today’s game consoles sometime around 2028 to 2029. When that happens, all content will change. Communication and imagination will become content. Imagining things will become content itself."
It's worth noting that this quote has been machine translated out of Japanese via DeepL, so some of the nuance may be lost in translation. But given how enthusiastic Kutaragi is about AI, I'm sure he won't mind. After all, since departing Sony, he's led Cyber AI Entertainment, which appears to be a consulting company helping others build AI technology, and Ascent Robotics, a startup building AI-driven software and machines.
In other words, Kutaragi now has vested interest in promoting AI as inevitable. I'd believe he genuinely believes in the technology – but it's easy to put blinders on when you've staked your career on one potential technological future. And, honestly, the rest of Kutaragi's predictions are a lot harder to follow.
He notes that the iPhone UI has changed year-by-year in a way that makes it easier to use. "But current human-centered design is too much of a pandering to humans, and what happens is that users lose the opportunity to think for themselves and end up not understanding what's inside the hardware and software," he says.
While you could argue that AI makes the problem of outsourcing critical thinking and obfuscating real technology even worse, Kutaragi argues that things will "become AI-centered. Because AI has to surpass humans." Instead, we'll have to learn how to communicate with AI, just as we have to think about how we communicate with our friends and family.
For me? Well, as somebody who grew up using computers in an era when vestiges of text-based interfaces still loomed, the cotton-candy design of modern tech interfaces remains a constant bane for me. And it's tough to imagine a future less appealing than one where our entertainment is developed by an infinite content machine. By Kutaragi's estimation, I guess it'll only be a few years before we find out which side wins out.
