Already September 1st, and a tang of autumn in the morning air. I had a two-week holiday with no laptop or emails, and lots of reading. Then a two-week scramble to catch up with the accumulated email and work. So here is a summary of the books I got through.
A couple were directly about AI: I, Warbot: The dawn of artificially intelligent combat by Kenneth Payne and The Age of AI by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher. This is not at all my territory but it seemed a good idea to learn something about AI and conflict as we have a relevant project at the Bennett Institute. Both left me pretty terrified, particularly the former: “The warbot doesn’t want anything and it isn’t troubled by our moral dilemmas,” writes Payne. The delegation of decisions from the localized (is that person spotted by facial recognition a valid target?) to the global (is it time to launch a major attack) to AI seems inevitable; the book ends calling for serious reflection. Indeed. As for the other, I certainly know less about geopolitics than do the authors, but some of the claims on which the geopolitical analysis is constructed seem over the top. The book suggests AI is changning the human relationship with reason, challenging the possibility of a free society and free will, and that we will be letting AI decide for us when we have ambiguous contexts or goals. “The boundary between AI and humans is strikingly porous,” they write. The book concludes AI is significantly changing human consciousness and moving us “close to knowing reality beyond the confines of our own perception.” Hm. It’s doing all sorts of things but I’m not sure about this kind of claim. I like better my colleague Neil Lawrence’s reflections in The Atomic Human on humanity in the light of AI.
My favourite read about tech was Scott Shapiro’s Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The dark history of the information age in five extraordinary hacks. The book pulls off the impressive feat of being a cracking good read with compelling stories and a super-clear technical explanation of why the internet is so easy to hack. (Incidentally, the name Fancy Bear for the notorious Russian state hackers was devised by the co-funder of CrowdStrike, the company that became famous for triggering Microsoft’s global Blue Screen of death meltdown while I was away. And ironically, the book explains that Microsoft had already improved its safeguards so that developers accessing the kernel would be far less likely to trigger a Blue Screen event.) One thing I particularly liked about the book was its designation of ‘downcode’ and ‘upcode’, the former being the computer code of all the various types, the latter the societal laws, regulations and norms within which the internet operates. “Change the upcode and you will change the kind of downcode produced.” Highly recommended.
I also enjoyed Shane O’Mara’s Talking Heads: How Conversation Shapes Us, which the publisher kindly sent to me. A book about neuroscience, it argues that thinking requires memories, and memories are collectively constructed through conversation. Our individual memory systems contribute to a cultural memory repository. “A society without memory has no capacity to repair itself, it has no capacity to evolve, it has no capacity to adapt, it has no capacity to remember or learn.” There is a two-way process of individual thoughts shaping the collective and in turn being shaped by them. Conversations or narratives or other cognitive artefacts enable co-ordination and collective action. (This reminded me of my friend Celia Heyes’ concept of Cognitive Gadgets.) Thus nationalism is a cognitive concept and needs a psychological understanding. The book doesn’t discuss social media directly but clearly the way we have conversations about the world has changed as a result, and not in a good way.
On with the gloomy theme. I was looking forward to Abby Innes’s book Late Soviet Britain: Why materialist utopias fail not least because the title is so brilliant. It has three parts. The first argues that central planning and the neoclassical competitive economy are equivalent – as indeed formally they are, one where quantities adjust and one prices. Francis Spufford’s superb book Red Plenty dramatizes this equivalence. (This isn’t cited here – I think the author would enjoy it.) I was mildly annoyed by the book’s referring to the ‘materialism’ of both – the former Soviet bloc certainly measured material product but the western metric of domestic product is 80% non-material. But maybe there’s a technical meaning of materialism I don’t know.
The second part of the book describes the growing dysfunctions of neoliberal regimes in the west, whereby the concepts of neoclassical economics and market primacy were translated into political practice. For instance, New Public Management, the book argues, has failed just as central planning failed in practice, by incentivising individuals to deliver to target rather than the genuine aim (and just as machine learning systems fail due to their ‘alignment problem’, automated New Public Management if we’re not careful). The third, short, section is a brief history of Britain’s political evolution – why we did Brexit and why the Conservatives are in a mess.
The whole didn’t quite come together for me because I couldn’t follow the step from the formal theoretical equivalence of the two ‘ideal’ economic models to the argument that “actually existing neoliberalism” was as doomed to failure as central planning. Neither system in practice was very similar to the theoretical ideal. For instance, New Public Management was arguably a quantity-planning mechanism rather than a market mechanism. But the book’s central construct is a stimulating idea and I enjoyed reading it.
Finally in the non-fiction, Anne Applebaum’s short and compelling
, pointing out the emergence of autocracy as a global, internet-enabled business model. Time to pull the plug on the enabling industry of lawyers, accountants and bankers. What will it take to get other nation-state governments to stop supporting hostile autocrats by permitting their business interests to carry on unimpeded?
Along with all these I read a ton of fiction, from detective novels (Elly Griffiths, Donna Leon, C.J. Sansom) to Sarah Perry’s terrific Enlightenment, Atsuhiro Yoshida’s sweet Goodnight Tokyo (a taxi driver version of my favourite TV programme Midnight Diner*) all the way to the seriously serious Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu (a gift from a Romanian former student).
* A good illustration of why Netflix is a poor substitute for domestically-produced programmes, if you compare the 1st series with the Netflixed later ones.