The Year Was 1978
And the aliens invaded
Before we begin, I want to tip my hat to two books that shaped this week’s essay.
The Game: A Digital Turning Point by Alessandro Baricco is a book that has profoundly shaped my worldview over the last decade.
Invasion of the Space Invaders by Martin Amis is a delightful, time-capsule of a book, written in 1982, by Amis, a critically acclaimed author, and includes an introduction by Steven Spielberg.
The Game offers a fascinating framework for understanding how early arcade games marked our first mass adoption of the human-keys-screen interface. And if you're lucky enough to find a copy of Martin Amis' Invasion of the Space Invaders, the photographs alone provide a striking portal into arcade culture at the dawn of the 1980s - all polyester, cigarette smoke, and the eerie glow of cathode-ray tubes.
The year was 1978, and the rumors were that Japan was running out of 100-yen coins. Not due to inflation, though there was plenty of that going around. Not due to economic crisis, though that too lurked on the horizon. No, the rumor was that Japan's coins were vanishing into the slots of a new kind of machine - one that spoke in beeps and blips, showed flickering alien invaders in stark black and white, and taught a generation a new way of being human.
Space Invaders had arrived. In arcades and bowling alleys across Japan, teenagers hunched before glowing screens, their fingers dancing across buttons, their eyes locked on descending rows of pixelated aliens. The game's premise was simple: shoot the invaders before they reach the bottom of the screen. But its impact was profound. For 100 yen, players could enter a new kind of relationship with a machine - one that would come to define the digital age.
The Japanese mint worked overtime to stamp out more coins, but it was rumored that they couldn't keep up with demand. By year's end, Space Invaders would consume more yen than the entire Japanese movie industry. But what the mint officials couldn't know, as they rushed to fill the coin shortage, was that they were witnessing more than just a gaming craze. They were watching the first mass adoption of what would become our default mode of existence: human, screen, interface.
Halfway across the Sea of Japan, another kind of invasion was taking place. After decades of rejecting artificial intelligence as "revisionist betrayal," China was preparing to embrace the very technologies it had once condemned. Just months earlier, Chinese scientists had denounced AI research as "reactionary idealism," a tool of Soviet ideological corruption. Now, in a dramatic reversal, Deng Xiaoping stood before the National Science Conference in Beijing, declaring "science and technology constitute a primary productive force."1
The timing was uncanny. As Japanese teenagers fed coins into machines that taught them a new way of interfacing with technology, China's leadership was learning its own lesson about human-machine relationships. Both transformations represented a fundamental shift in how humans would interact with machines - one coin at a time in Japanese arcades, one policy declaration at a time in Chinese conference halls.
The interface was deceptively simple. In Space Invaders, three elements: human, keys, screen. In China's new technological vision, three similar elements: scientist, laboratory, progress. Both required a new posture, a new way of thinking, a new relationship with the artificial. As one Chinese researcher who had previously attacked AI as "betraying Marxism-Leninism" now wrote urgently of the need to "facilitate cybernetics research."
That spring, in a Harvard Business School classroom, Dan Bricklin was imagining another kind of interface entirely. Watching his professor laboriously update financial models on a blackboard, he envisioned something revolutionary: an "interactive visible calculator" where numbers would flow and update automatically. Like Space Invaders' endless waves of descending aliens, Bricklin's numbers would march across the screen in perfect formation - but instead of destroying cities, they would help build businesses.2
This connection between Space Invaders and VisiCalc (as Bricklin's program would later be called) isn't as strange as it might seem. Both represented new ways of visualizing information on a screen, new patterns of human-machine interaction. While teenagers in Tokyo arcades were learning to track alien invaders, Bricklin was teaching machines to track financial projections. Both would transform how humans interfaced with computers - one through play, the other through work.
Meanwhile, in a British laboratory, another breakthrough was redefining what was possible. On July 25th, Louise Brown was born - the first human conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF). While teenagers fed coins into arcade machines to simulate space battles, doctors and scientists were using technology to help create life itself. The press dubbed her the "test tube baby," but her birth represented something profound: technology's power to enhance, rather than replace, fundamental human experiences.3
Boundaries were being blurred everywhere. In Egypt, President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin sat before cameras at Camp David, reducing centuries of conflict to a series of negotiable points, as if peace could be achieved through the same kind of systematic logic that governed computer programs. The resulting accords were hailed as a triumph of human reason - but like Space Invaders' endless waves of aliens, the underlying conflicts refused to be so easily resolved.
In arcades across London, Martin Amis - the enfant terrible of British literature - was studying what he considered a new kind of social disorder. Though his book wouldn't appear until 1982, he was already taking notes on how Space Invaders had "invaded" lives, including his own. The game was "programmed" for addiction, he would later argue, designed to extract an endless stream of coins through "theoretically infinite" play. Players might think they were mastering the machine, but perhaps the machine was mastering them. The same anxiety shadowed China's sudden embrace of technology - who was really in control? The user or the interface?
In Tehran, a different kind of resistance was building. The Iranian Revolution would soon sweep away the Shah's dreams of technological modernization, replacing computer-planned cities with human passion, digital logic with divine law.4 It was a stark reminder that while some nations rushed to embrace the digital future, others saw in these new interfaces - these screens and circuits - a threat to traditional ways of being human.
But while political upheavals reshaped nations, technological transformation continued apace. By year's end, Space Invaders had earned Taito Corporation over $600 million in Japan alone. That same year, China's National Science Conference outlined 108 major research projects, including "Intelligent Simulation and Intelligent Control System." The future was arriving in waves, like those endless rows of pixelated aliens, each wave moving faster than the last.
The global economy was caught in its own kind of game - stagflation had policy makers working their own controls, trying to shoot down inflation while dodging recession. But unlike Space Invaders, where success meant a higher score, this game had no clear winning condition. The quarters being pumped into arcade machines were worth less each month, as if reality itself were glitching.
And yet, in those dimly lit arcades, something profound was happening. A generation was learning to think in bits and bytes, to interact through interfaces, to see the world as a series of patterns to be recognized and problems to be solved. They couldn't know it then, but their high scores were less important than the posture they were practicing - the same posture you might be in right now, reading these words on a screen.
When the Japanese mint finally caught up with the coin shortage, they had supposedly stamped billions of additional 100-yen pieces.5 Each one was a token of transformation, a down payment on a future where human and machine would dance together in ever more intimate ways. China's leaders, watching from across the sea, were placing their own bets on this future, though their coins were measured in five-year plans and research initiatives rather than arcade credits.
The aliens had landed, not with a bang but with a beep. And they hadn't come to destroy us - they'd come to teach us a new way of being human.
Two From Today
In "To Whom Does the World Belong?" Alexandra Hartley points out that there is nothing inevitable about intellectual property. If we wanted to remove AI from private ownership, we could. "Ungoverned by physics, unenforceable by hired guards and private armies, IP law is serenely unconstrained by nonhuman reality, a purely human and purely social creation; its rules and contours map nothing more or less than the shape of a collective human will" via The Browser
In In "How AI Works,"
reveals that the pattern-recognition at the heart of modern AI isn't so different from what those first Space Invaders players were learning - the ability to recognize and respond to patterns without understanding the underlying "taste" of the thing itself. Both remind us that 1978's arcade players weren't just feeding quarters into machines; they were practicing a new way of thinking that would eventually reshape how humans and machines work together. Zicherman offers a brilliantly simple explanation of how large language models work by comparing them to a hypothetical meal-planning app. Just as this imaginary app would learn to group similar dishes together based on how they're typically paired (without ever tasting the food), AI models learn language by mapping words based on their typical contexts. The beauty of his analogy reveals how AI, for all its complexity, operates on a surprisingly simple principle: "a word is categorized by the company it keeps" - much like how a caesar salad and a caprese salad can be understood as similar simply because they appear in similar meal contexts, not because the computer knows anything about their ingredients or taste. via Every