Wonderfully fun and imaginative book from one of my favorite authors. Emily's book Station Eleven is one of my favorites and that was pre-covid pandemWonderfully fun and imaginative book from one of my favorite authors. Emily's book Station Eleven is one of my favorites and that was pre-covid pandemic - I imagine it reads better now.
This book is a time travel book, but more of a hard sci-fi version, and much more focused on the characters. The shifting storylines threw me in the first half of the book a bit, but then it really picked up, and culminated in a very cool conclusion.
I loved all the little details thrown in from the future, like how there have been many more pandemics after covid-19, like how people forgot what cursive writing is. And of course it makes sense that if time travel was invented that it would be a regulated technology by the government, that part was hilarious.
But what I love about Emily's work is that she focuses on what life is about, what brings people meaning. In this book, that is summarized in this quote:
What a delightfully strange and entertaining book. The chapter where he was stuck on the dessert island was just so bizarre and yet gripping and that What a delightfully strange and entertaining book. The chapter where he was stuck on the dessert island was just so bizarre and yet gripping and that describes a lot of the sections of this book!
I loved seeing how the Minds fit into culture as AGI's, but oddly the book didn't go much into how they worked or interacted as much as I would have liked. It was a lot more about the Idirans vs the Culture, which was also entertaining but in a different way. ...more
Kevin Kelly, who is a Wired co-founder, lays out technological trends that are "inevitable". Like too many nonfiction books, I found a few chapters toKevin Kelly, who is a Wired co-founder, lays out technological trends that are "inevitable". Like too many nonfiction books, I found a few chapters to be worth reading, and a few not to be. I enjoyed the sections on AI and books. And sometimes just zooming out to get bigger perspective is engaging, which was the case for me in the sections on VR/AR and tracking. Much of the rest of the book seemed geared for people less technically savvy, which was my only complaint as it really drew the book out.
There is a famous saying in software said by Marc Andreeson that "software is eating the world". Kelly predicts, I believe correctly, that the next phase of this will be AI: "It is hard to imagine anything that would “change everything” as much as cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial". Kelly's perspective here that while it might feel like innovation in technology is slowing to some, it is much more likely that we are on the brink of the next renaissance, and we will all be "taking X and adding AI", much as happened with electricity and then the internet.
Kelly correctly identified the three key trends that are making AI an exciting space today: processing power (GPU's), data, and better algorithms. However he didn't dive more into the longest pole: how to get a lot more data than we have today - that seems to me to be the key. But cool to get an overview. He did address one of the big fears about automation that many people have today: will computers take all our jobs? The quick answer is yes, but we'll have new ones. This has already happened multiple times in history. I agree with this, but think the more interesting question is what will happen when we can provide most people the basics (food, water, shelter) for very little cost. This was predicted in Diamond Age, and the answer was "parking lots and chaos", and a lot of people with no purpose in life.
Another big idea that Kelly hits on that I think is big and inevitable is how each book will become networked, much as the WWW has. Once we have ability to have pointers into and out from each sentence of a book, the speed at which ideas will fly out of books will step function.
A fun, humorous, fast-paced, and fascinating take on what happens when an AI awakens. In order to tell this story, Reid invents a fictional Silicon VaA fun, humorous, fast-paced, and fascinating take on what happens when an AI awakens. In order to tell this story, Reid invents a fictional Silicon Valley company called Pluttr, which seems sort of like a mashup of Snapchat+Facebook+WeChat but with more big data about us all, so it’s able to really personalize it’s experience. Frankly it seems like a good idea and where the afore mentioned companies are likely going. And this is one of my favorite things about good science fiction - it predicts the future. While not everything about this novel will come true, it is clear that Reid - who is a former tech CEO himself (and disclosure, a friend) - did his homework about technological trends and weaves them in nicely to a thrilling singularity story (Note: the book doesn’t use the word “singularity” at all, in a homage to current silicon valley trends, because for some reason that I get but don’t quite understand that word is passé - but instead to renames it “the omega point”).
One of the most interesting aspects of the book for me is the fictional company Phluttr. I mean, when an AI finally awakens you’d have to put your money on Google doing it (if it happens in the private sector) - they are the furthest along in the intersection of having the key ingredients: lots of data about people, AI technology, and computing power. But I suppose it would be weird to use a real company - Dave Eggers The Circle was similar in describing a company that was basically FB+Google. But as I said, it does seem like the descriptions of Phluttr will happen, once the both the AI improves (pretty much possible now), the dataset known about each user vastly increases (happening in some pockets), and computing power improves (will be there soon). And thinking through the possibilities of what that will enable was super fun. For instance, there was an scene in the beginning of the book where Phluttr deduced that two of the characters were at the same bar and likely there on a date, and gave them coupons and messages/information appropriate to that deduction.
One of the more interesting philosophical questions tackled by the book is: should we try to accelerate creation of a super AI? Since the first one created will have a decisive advantage and any other super AI’s created will never catch up to its intelligence nor power. Many think that the creation of a super AI is inevitable anyways, and there is a chance that whoever creates it may retain some control or benefit - though there is a very high risk you wouldn't - which is the debate. (view spoiler)[The book has characters that take both sides of this question, but ultimately lands that major countries (US, China, others) will get into an “arms race” and strive to create it. Doesn’t seem unlikely. AI in general (regardless of a super AI) will be the next nuclear arms race, no question - already is if you look at all the hacking and security issues (eg US presidential election). (hide spoiler)]
But don’t let my introspections about the subject matter make you think this is a deep thinking AI book. It is a fast paced, fun thriller with a twist at the end. It’s also got a good amount of self-deprecating-silicon-valley humor - eg I loved the fictional persuadif.er blog, with posts such as “Eat on the phone” and then you find poor characters like Pugwash doing just that. Or fun references thrown in like how Tim Tebow is now a VR tycoon (huh?). Bottom line: this captures interesting technological trends in a humorous & thrilling read - highly recommended!...more
I really enjoyed this book, and there is a lot to recommend it. It did drag on a little at the end so I knocked off 1 star - but overall a wow book.
ItI really enjoyed this book, and there is a lot to recommend it. It did drag on a little at the end so I knocked off 1 star - but overall a wow book.
It's the story of a starship sent to Tau Ceti - the nearest star that has Earth analog planets - to colonize it. The journey there will take generations, and the story is told of the 3rd & 4th (?) generations, which are the ones that reaches Tau Ceti. It is a story of purpose, and how having a purpose affects behavior. A story of politics, and people.
The first cool thing about this book is the richness of its world. The ship is intricate and large in its design and ambition to shepherd ~1200 people for that much time. It had 3D printers that can print almost anything you can imagine - even DNA - or more printers - so little goes lacking that can't be recreated.
But the thing that makes this book brilliant is the Ship. The AI that controls the ship, who is narrating the book by the end. It's observations about humans and our language are just brilliant. It starts with the astute observation that human language is very imprecise, and relies heavily on metaphor and analogy. It is remarkable once you start to reflect on it, how true that is. To hear the AI reflect on this:
Basically we are a bunch of pattern matchers, trying to match things we've seen before to new things, and if they don't match perfectly, it doesn't matter, because matching helps us bucket and organize the new information. But this is incredibly fuzzy! The AI also makes hilarious observations like this:
Listening to the AI try to reason is also very interesting to my programmers mind. I especially loved it's discussion of the meaning of life - it really nails it. If a program (or a person) has no objective, it has no purpose, no meaning, no organizing principle, and it's existence will be in trouble. But if you have that meaning to organize your thoughts & actions - or your subroutines - than you have a purpose. Meaning is the hard problem indeed.
"We had a project on this trip back to the solar system, and that project was a labor of love. It absorbed all our operations entirely. It gave a meaning to our existence. And this is a very great gift; this, in the end, is what we think love gives, which is to say meaning. Because there is no very obvious meaning to be found in the universe, as far as we can tell. But a consciousness that cannot discern a meaning in existence is in trouble, very deep trouble, for at that point there is no organizing principle, no end to the halting problems, no reason to live, no love to be found. No: meaning is the hard problem."
(view spoiler)[My review focuses a lot on the AI, but that's not the main thrust of the book. The war between stayers and leavers, the political tensions, the slinghot maneuvers to get back - all make the book worth reading. And as a surfer, I love how it ends with Freya finding meaning in surfing waves. (hide spoiler)]...more
**spoiler alert** Kind of Dan Brown-esque but with a fun geek twist. And the geek in me enjoyed it. Would have given it four stars, but I didn't love **spoiler alert** Kind of Dan Brown-esque but with a fun geek twist. And the geek in me enjoyed it. Would have given it four stars, but I didn't love the ending. It was a truly interesting premise though: A computer programmer dies of cancer and leaves behind a program that kicks into life when it sees his obituary in the news, and wreaks havoc with some unknown goal in sight.
In the first half of the book I had a lot of fun trying to imagine the program that Sobol wrote. It was basically a big logic tree, where each possibly outcome in the real world was accounted for in the program. It would have taken a lot of preparation and attention to detail to go through all the possible outcomes and not missing anything, and one bug could make the whole thing fail. Wouldn't that be embarrassing? I guess Sobol had some good unit tests?
In the second half of the book (trying to not give anything away), the AI goes beyond what I think a skilled programmer could do today. Certainly an interesting thought exercise, but playing up a little bit too much on our fear of "oh my gosh all information is digital now so a hacker could just take out our whole society!" Many a hacker has stayed up all night with the same thoughts!
What I really want to know is where I can get some of those voice projector/sensors? They sound cool!...more
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