I'm really not sure what to make of this book. It was recommended by my book club as something between tragedy and comedy. The characters are excruciatingly well written - if you (or your friends) shoplifted Impulse body-spray back in the 1990s, you'll be hit by a terrifying wave of nostalgia.

It reminds me of this excellent essay by Marie Le Conte about consent. What can a teenage girl consent to? What will fuck her up for years to come? What if she doesn't mind being a little fucked up?

The prose is amazing, the plotting perfectly paced, and the denouement satisfying - with lots of retrospectives "Oh! I get it now"s.

Despite the hectic and hilarious story, I still felt a little sordid reading it. There's a streak of sadness running through it, intertwined with some unbearably heartbreaking poetry.

It’s always raining and there’s nothing to do except dream and they don’t even give you much time to do that with all the coursework.

It is entertaining and fun - but you need a strong stomach and a casual disregard for the overall happiness of your protagonists.

One note - there are a few odd / broken styles in the ePub. Nothing too disruptive, but some passages have a slightly smaller font size for no discernable reason.

This is a disappointing and frustrating book - not least because it so nearly hits the mark.

The subtitle is "How Computer Programming Is Changing Writing" - but it never gets close to discussing that topic, let alone deeply examining it. Instead, it is a book mostly focussed on the history of what we mean by "literacy" and, by contrast, what it meant to be "illiterate".

As per the standard for academic monographs, it is more interested in endlessly discussing the semantics of a term than engaging with its impacts. The historic stuff is genuinely fascinating. But the endless diversions about what Academic A thinks and how Academic B rebuts is a little tedious. There are clear parallels between a pre-literate society relying on the village scribe and the modern family having that one cousin who "knows computers" - but it is only weakly explored.

There are moments when it seems like the author is really going to delve in to what coding literacy actually means:

The relationship between programming as a practice and computer science as a discipline is a central tension in the contemporary programming campaigns that invoke literacy,

But it rarely goes beyond surface level. Most people can write - but only few can write a novel. Many can engage is literary criticism - but few take it any further. How does that model fit on to coding? The book doesn't discuss, but there's an easy parallel there. Only a few people can write an app, but many can use it. Anyone can write a review of an app, but not many can do so from a position of literacy.

This was published in 2017, so written a decade or so before LLMs became seemingly ubiquitous. Nevertheless, there are some historic titbits which seem to fit nicely into today's world:

As early as 1961, Peter Elias claimed that training in programming languages would soon cease because “undergraduates will face the console with such a natural keyboard and such a natural language that there will be little left, if anything, to the teaching of programming. [At this point, we] should hope that it would have disappeared from the curricula of all but a moderate group of specialists.”

But, as the book does briefly discuss, the way the brain is changed by coding literacy forces people to think more in line with a computer. Even if you tell an LLM "build me an app to do xyz", you still need to think about what you're doing, why you're doing it, what edge-cases you need to consider, etc.

But then it is back to the interminable academic squabbling about whether Wittgenstein's definition of an inconsequential term is compatible with Chomsky's.

Perhaps the biggest weakness is that there is almost a complete absence of code! A few examples of BASIC would have done so much to demonstrate how a restricted language set changes how people write and therefore think.

There's a brief exploration about how the typewriter and typesetting changed language and literacy - but where's the examination about how the tyranny of ANSI layout curtailed the way programmers wrote? There's an amazing exploration to be done about why coders use => rather than → and how various other symbols got co-opted into their languages.

Instead, it is back to the history books again.

Here's another good example about how writing changed literacy:

Written texts provide fewer cues than oral delivery about how to “take” them; for example, ironically, sincerely, or jokingly. Readers must interpret texts, supplying the illocutionary force of the text themselves.

It seems obvious to me that this is directly comparable with something like a code review. It isn't immediately clear what a programmer means when they write something down - and even comments can be misleading. What sort of "oral traditions" are we building up?

The book then mostly abandons any pretence of talking about code. I think the author really wanted to write a history book but needed the (then) coolness of tying it to the various "get kids to code" campaigns.

Towards the end, it almost returns to the topic at hand.

We choose our words in terms of what is potentially reportable on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter

[…]

Although few people know how to program the devices on which code and computation ride into our lives, their manifestations influence us anyhow. In various ways, we have learned to see ourselves as “computed” by the devices and networks on which we depend.

As we might say nowadays "Hey chat! Guess the Cheeto didn't unalive himself today!" - but that isn't really about coding. The people using those substitute words are ignorant of how algorithms really work and think that their clever doublespeak can bypass censorship.

We desperately need more people to be literate in what coding means. Sadly this book only every lightly touches on what coding literacy does to our language, our thoughts, and our society.

I'm giving it 2.5 stars because the history was genuinely interesting - but it completely fails to engage with the topic it promised.

This is such a useful book. It makes the case that there's no such thing as "human error" - instead most catastrophes are caused by system issues, misaligned incentives, and unrealistic processes.

You are not the custodian of an otherwise safe system that you need to protect from erratic human beings.

By its nature it is a little repetitive. I suspect it's the sort of book students and business leaders will be expected to dip into on an ad-hoc basis for their MBA studies.

It's also chock-full of anecdotes which demonstrate how quite serious failings are often erroneously reduced to "human failure". Some of those stories are rather distressing - featuring death, dismemberment, plane crashes, and the like - but they also feel a little like "just so" stories. They illustrate the points well, but felt to me a little voyeuristic.

I'd go so far as to say it is probably one of the best management books that I've read:

holding people accountable is fine;

• but you need to be able to show that people had the authority to live up to the responsibility that you are now asking of them;

• if you can’t do that, your calls for accountability have no merit, and you’d better start looking at yourself.

I'm a big fan of using bullet-points for books like this. It is far too easy for important insights to get buried in the middle of a paragraph of waffle.

And it isn't just for management types. Anyone involved in computers needs to read and understand this.

new technology allows a system to be driven closer to its margins, eroding the safety advantage that was gained.

Although it doesn't venture into politics and government, I think it also applies there. Consider this:

What people were doing was reasonable in the eyes of those on the inside the situation, given the pressures and priorities operating on them and others doing the same work every day.

Modern political discourse often implies that decision makers are incompetent buffoons who frequently make errors. I think the truth is rather closer to what the book suggests. Given all the information (which the commentariat rarely have) and the systemic incentives (which are often set by the electorate) - most decisions look reasonable from the inside. A more systems based view rather than hindsight analysis would be useful for everyone.

There are a few slightly naff clip-art illustrations which are probably better suited to a crappy PPT than a serious book.

It is also a pity the eBook is so malformed. The HTML is full of things like <p class="h1"> rather than using proper semantic headers, which means the built in style-sheet must be used, which means you can't easily change the default font colour (dark grey on eInk looks rubbish). I'd love to see some of the tools and techniques proposed in this book applied to the organisation which created this rather terrible formatting.

The author is extremely generous with his citations and points to hundreds of resources for readers to explore.

A worthwhile book for anyone who deals with even moderately complex systems - if you can put up with the error-riddled formatting.

To call this derivative is an understatement. But that's what this genre demands; rehash all your favourite media properties into something new. It's the literary equivalent of having your Transformers™ fight your He-Man© toys.

The plot, such as it is, features the Vogon Constructor Fleet destroying Earth due to a late beurecratic appeal, forcing people to play The Hunger Games, while a Twitch streamer narrates the action.

The protagonists in Andy Weir's books are boys who know enough science to save the day. The ones in Scalzi's books have enough pop-culture knowledge to save the day. Dinniman's has played enough loot-box gatcha RPGs to save the day.

It is mostly pretty good fun. The tropes are goofy, the gore is splattertastic and only rarely ventures into torture porn, the villains are suitably campy, and the wisecracking sidekick doesn't become too annoying.

But the prose…

Here's a classic scene from Red Dwarf which exemplifies the major problem I had with this book.

There's only so many times you can read "Then I severed a +3 damage with poison debuff while he raised a +1 shield and used his armour of holding to neutralise the attack". I find opening endless lootboxen a chore when I'm playing a game - reading 150 instances of "I got a bronze box with a cauldron of Mafeking, then a gold box with an enchanted ring, then…" just becomes tiresome.

I tried listening to the audiobook of the sequel and I just couldn't get past the endless recitation of lists about +5 to elbows and -6 to arseholes. Just unbearably tedious.

Look, I've never written a novel and doubt I could do any better. This has obviously found its fanbase but, regrettably, I'm not one. It was a fun enough read, but I'm not sure I can be bothered with a dozen more sequels of recycled plots and repetitive squishing of cackling enemies.

I didn't care for this book. It attempts to interweave botanical and cultural history with an autobiography and ends up doing neither particularly well.

For every dose of poetry about the far-flung and exotic journey of the fruit, there's a dull recitation of facts from Wikipedia. Occasionally various origin myths of citrus varieties are presented - there's no attempt to engage with them, seek out the truth, or comment on what they might mean.

Instead, the author seems more interested in inserting herself into the narrative. It's all rather uneasy. She spends a lots of times talking about hard it is for immigrants and their children. But her dad was a doctor who chose to stay in his new country, she's a fairly prominent journalist, and they spend a lot of time jetting across the world.

I know we're all fighting a battle no one else can see, but this isn't the story of someone's struggle against insurmountable odds.

There's an excruciating passage where she tries to rail against the evils of colonialism and expects her family, who grew up under colonial rule, to support her:

She set down her cup with a steady hand. ‘The British did some good things and they did some bad things,’ she said. ‘But what they did is in the past lah.’ She shrugged and picked her cup back up. ‘In Malaysia we need to think about the future.’

The author is utterly dismissive of other people's lived experience. She and I probably both agree that colonialism was a blunt and savage crime against people. But she can't let go of the fact that some people seem rather nonchalant about it.

I once asked my aunt about her colonial education, and she called it a gift.

It sort of feels like a privileged kid seething that no-one understands how hard it is to be her. I found the solipsism rather distasteful, and the lack of rigour in the botanic history left a bitter taste in my mouth.

I'm pretty sure this book is a psyop designed to demoralise a generation of starry-eyed dreamers. It is obviously written by the same people who told us not to land on Europa. A malignant energy designed to limit the scope of human ambition and thwart our plans to colonise the universe.

The problem is, I can't find fault with any of their logic.

The Weinersmiths make a compelling case that space is much harder than any of the propagandists are willing to admit. Even if it were faster, safer, and cheaper - there's still very little point. Any of the technologies we could point at the skies would be infinitely more useful (and profitable) pointed back at our pale blue dot.

Along the way they take in biology (is it even possible to breed in space?), legality (OK, but what jurisdiction will it be under?), and moral philosophy (will we actually become more enlightened beings?)

And yet, space is cool. I know that "because it is there" isn't a logical argument; but it is a hell of an emotional pull. In amongst all their (justified) snarky cartoons are occasional pearls in the rubble:

As with the cathedrals of Earth, those of us who cast the first few bricks may not be around to see the spire placed on top, but we might nevertheless want to start building.

They excel at making the dull delightful. There are a lot of big and serious facts to get through, but they have a gift for communicating them simply and eloquently. I just wish they'd've come to a different conclusion.

Thanks to BookSirens for providing me with a review copy. This is an intriguing self-published novel with a backstory almost as interesting as the plot.

The story is a descent into paranoia as an author is convinced that an AI is plagiarising his work. As the madness takes over, he's forced to confront whether his creative processes are genuine or not.

It raises some excellent questions about whether AI can replicate art. It also posits some solutions for ensuring genuine human content. Without going in to spoilers, I think some of the methods the protagonist comes up with might be the only way to "prove" that a human has created a work.

The pace is excellent - with some well-placed plot twists. As with any self-published novel, it could do with a little tightening up. Some of the characters have oblique motivations which need a bit more exposition.

A note on AI use. There's a novel-within-a-novel which is genuinely generated by an AI (as the author freely acknowledges). I think this is an acceptable use of generative AI - the prose it produces is utterly risible and cliché ridden. It works as a nice contrast to the human generated text.

I suspect more and more authors will turn to AI fears just as they turned to pandemic allegories a few years ago. This is a decent attempt to capture a moment in time when authors stared into the abyss and found only themselves staring back.

Despite vowing not to read sequels of books I love, I'm constantly surprised that regression to the mean is an iron-clad law of the universe. I thoroughly enjoyed the first book in the series, so eagerly gobbled up the second. What a burlap fool I am.

What was charming and wry in The Satsuma Complex is now overdone and clichéd.

The violence, which was an undercurrent in the first book, is now too pronounced and too grim to be funny. Yet the constant tomfoolery with language undermines any built-up tension.

The language is gorgeous though. Bob Mortimer has an ability to conjure the most ridiculous similes and metaphors. It's impossible not to be entranced by his panache.

The ending is, frankly, a bit unearned and unsatisfying. It feels like a word-count limit was reached and the quickest solution was found.

This is the most overwritten book I've ever read. Unfortunately, Alan Moore knows exactly how much polysyllabic pressure it takes to transmogrify base coal into precious gems.

With lines like "his shaved suede skull made him look like a wilted thistle" and "There was a rumour of pink lipstick circling her mouth" you know you're in for a treat. Even better than the joyful prose of Bob Mortimer's Satsuma Complex.

I'm also pretty sure Moore is actually a wizard. I've just finished reading a book about Black Britain in Wartime - which features Ras Prince Monolulu, who also appears in this book. Along with M. P. Shiel - who I did my GCSE coursework on. And, no spoilers, but I'm fairly sure I'd met other characters too. The only logical conclusion is that Moore is stalking my brain.

It is an epic tale full of rogues and reprobates. The story is excellent even though the plot follows a fairly basic structure. Although set up to be a series, it is a satisfying stand-alone tale.

My only real criticism of it is the trope of the "failing light of English magic" - much like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Shades of Milk and Honey, Sorcerer to the Crown, Babel, and a hundred other books. Britain was a great (magical) power and it's up to our hero to Make Magic Great Again. Well, sort of. I suspect that's going to feature more heavily in the sequels.

A pleasure to read and I look forward to both Alan and I being bitterly disappointed in the Bowdlerised Apple TV miniseries.

Ooooh! This is a lovely treat of a book. Every time Lauren sends her husband into the loft, a different man comes down. Her past is rewritten and she has now been married to Dave/Gary/Bob/Whoever for a year, a month, a decade, a minute.

This isn't like how Groundhog Day became On The Calculation of Volume or Sliding Doors became The Names, instead this is a new and twisty concept rendered through the lens of a chick-lit comedy.

It's proper laugh-aloud funny, while playing with all the clichés of both sci-fi and romcoms.

The thing I liked most is that Lauren is an active and intelligent protagonist unlike, say, Carol Sturka from Pluribus. Sturka never engages with the premise of her odd situation, she doesn't try to discover the rules of the world she's living in and is content to let things happen to her. Lauren spends a good deal of time at least trying to get to grips with the (un)reality of her husband-dispensing portal. I found that made for a rather gratifying story and didn't leave me shouting at the pages "JUST TRY SOMETHING!"

It's also refreshing to follow the adventures of a (slight) antihero. Lauren mostly knows when she is being monstrous. She flings between feminism and self-directed misogyny - with a smattering of misandry. Her discrimination against those of us men who wear socks with individual toes is, of course, an unforgivable sin.

The pacing is excellent - with an perfectly timed plot twist just as things are settling down. The afterword talks briefly about the multiple possible endings that were considered. I'd love to know what ideas were rejected although, in retrospect, there's only one narratively satisfying conclusion.

I read a lot of science fiction - probably more than is healthy - and The Husbands is a welcome addition to my shelf. The practicalities of the plot-device are as unimportant as how Warp Drive works; science fiction is about exploring the possibilities of a fantastical situation. If you could instantly swap your spouse because they lost the TV remote again - would you? In a world of no consequences, what would you get away with? If you discovered a break in reality, what would you try in order to exploit or understand it?

The Husbands gets fairly dark. Never grim, exactly, but it gnaws away at the cosiness proffered by domestic bliss. Although Lauren can be a bit of a bitch, the story just about strays away from making her morally repugnant. An exemplary piece of storytelling.

My mate Lisa has written a book!

Along with her pal Matisse, she takes us through the practicalities of publishing communications which are accessible to all. This isn't just about the theory - it takes us across multiple legal jurisdictions, ethical frameworks, and business cases. Once it is done convincing you of the necessity of the work, it begins to explain how to actually create useful and accessible comms.

Some stuff you may have heard before. Everyone knows to add alt text, right? But this goes in for a slightly deeper dive, explaining how different publishing tools expose it, how to get the most out of it, and where it can all go wrong.

Usually books like this focus only on HTML. That's great - but there is a world outside the Web. So this goes through the steps to make PDFs accessible (a necessary evil!) and other tools which comms professionals may be regularly using.

It also doesn't just focus on the US hegemony. Instead there are statistics and case studies from dozens of different countries and cultures. It also looks through the youth lens - are TikTok's bouncing subtitles good for accessibility? For situational stuff like not having headphones, probably but for people with cognitive impairments probably not.

Each chapter ends with "Key Takeaways" and a decent summary of what you've learned. You probably won't read this cover to cover, but it is worth diving in to the chapters which meet your needs. Some of the stuff was intimately familiar to me - but I had no idea about how to make Podcasts accessible.

There's a bit of AI stuff splashed through, as is de rigueur, but it is realistic about its current limitations and how harmful it can be if misapplied.

The book ends with a chunky checklist. I suggest printing it out and stapling it to anyone in your organisation who says accessibility is a waste of time.

What's better than one Adrian Tchaikovsky novella? Three Adrian Tchaikovsky novellæ! Or is it "novellii"? Either way, a delightful triptych of stories on a common theme. On the surface, they're about travelling to a new destination (Space! The Future! For-Copyright-Reasons Not Narnia!)

Except, deep down, they're about loneliness. No matter how far or fast we run, no matter where or when we go, we can't outrun ourselves. When you enter the void, sometimes the void enters you.

There's also the constant theme about the hunter becoming the hunted. All three of the stories reminded me a bit of Piranesi by Susanna Clarke - in that I was never quite sure if the characters were simply delusional and waging war on an enemy of their own making.

It brims with a pathos which I find rare in modern science fiction. That's offset with the perfectly placed British humour within it. Yes, there's a touch of the Weir/Scalzi "Only I, a nerdy guy, can save the universe in a self-knowing way" - but those authors aren't brave enough to mention Reading town centre or have their hero hail from Stevenage. Whereas Tchaikovsky knows what's up with the Furries.

An excellent collection of tales.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the review copy. The book is available to buy now.

This has an excellent narrative structure, some beautiful prose, and I just didn't enjoy it.

The story is Sliding Doors meets Same Time Next Year mixed with a distressing amount of domestic violence.

A mother faces a difficult choice. Should she name her child after her abusive and violent husband? In one strand she does, in another she doesn't, and in the third she makes a compromise. We rejoin the story every few years to see how our protagonists are progressing.

It mostly works and pushes us to consider how much the path of our life is influenced by factors outside of our control.

I have a real difficulty with books about violence. All of the characters are unsympathetic - trapped by tyrant but also trapped by their own inaction. I also struggled with how pedestrian and limited it was. In a world where you can read anything, why would you choose to spy on your horrible neighbours? Like a tawdry soap-opera it offered nothing more than misery and heartbreak. Fine if you need that sort of substitute empathy, but it left me feeling grubby and unsatisfied.

To be fair, the characters in the book address this:

‘Why read them if they make you feel bad?’

‘Because I’m hoping one of them might feel like me,’

It isn't a bad book - although it does veer into cliché a little too often - and the structure is interesting enough. But I found its subject matter too distressing to be enjoyable,

Book Club Discussion

This isn't the sort of book I'd normally pick up - but it was chosen by the book club I attend. The majority of readers rated it higher than I did. Here are some of the things we discussed.

The central message sees to be that, no matter how hard you try, the tragedy which infects your life can never be escaped. I found that depressing and disempowering. The domestic dreariness was stifling and just left me irritated with the passivity of the characters.

The evil father is an arsehole - but a one-dimensional arsehole. I get that there's a risk to humanising an antagonist, but other than a brief mention of his back-story there's nothing about him. I didn't want a justification for his actions, but he felt like a cartoon villain.

Even when one character gains a moment of happiness, it is offset by another's misery. No matter which path is chosen, someone always ends up broken.

Are we "destined" to meet the same people, no matter what path we take?

My mate Dr Lucy Rogers has written a book! This is a charming and thought provoking exploration of everything that goes on above our heads. This isn't an impersonal and imperious manuscript, it's a deeply personal and joyful book filled with science, anecdotes, and the thrill of discovery.

It's spectacularly accessible. Written in a relaxed and casual tone, it encourages domestic science. I don't mean bakery, I mean the sorts of observations you can do at home without access to a multi-million pound laboratory. The afterword of the book contains dozens of resources for people who want to get involved in science. Dr Rogers eloquently makes the case that you don't need to dedicate yourself full time - it's perfectly acceptable to engage with it on your own terms.

What I liked most about it was that she gets her hands dirty. It would have been easy to write a literature review from the comfort of a safe and dry office. Instead we get a travelogue of all the places she's been - each trek through the forest, every laboratory, and all the foreign festivals are brilliantly recounted. It's a proper adventure from America's tornado alley down to the Vatican Archives.

I find it remarkable how slow some modern science is. As she points out, "there have been only eight transits of Venus since the telescope was invented" - our knowledge rests on the shoulders of giants, but they can be slow, lumbering beasts.

If, like me, you only have a hazy memory of the science you learned at school, this book will top up your knowledge (and vocabulary). It will reignite your passion and curiosity about the world around you - and make you want to buy a round the world ticket to chase solar eclipses!

After reading The Wicked of the Earth, I wanted to understand some of the history behind the stories. Why were women⁰ accused of being witches? What really happened in those trials? What are the modern consequences of those events?

This is the story of the Scottish Witch Trials - with brief forays into England and abroad. It examines the central tension of whether witchcraft was real to the accusers, or just a convenient means to oppress troublesome women. The descriptions of the imprisonment, torture, and state-sanctioned murder is visceral and horrific.

It's also rather stark in its modern assessment of the historic context:

Nonetheless, it’s important to remember it was a proper legal trial, with evidence being put forward and the judge assessing it and carrying out legal tests. Some people think that witchcraft trials were carried out by angry peasants waving pitchforks. Perhaps this is a more acceptable way for a modern person to think about it. No one wants to think that a judicial system can get it so wrong. But it did, with catastrophic consequences for those accused.

The book is mostly good, it's a spin off from the Witches Of Scotland podcast and that's reflected in the writing. As with any parasocial¹ entertainment, it attempts to centre the authors and bring the audience along for the ride - so there's lots of descriptions of the libraries the authors visit, how things make them feel, how enamoured they are with their podcast guests. I found it a little distracting, but it's obviously right for their main audience.

Similarly, there's an attempt to bring the past to life by imagining a little monologue from various historic figures. I found that a little unconvincing; I dislike putting words in peoples' mouths. But with sparse primary documentation, that may be the best way to bring these characters to life. It's also well illustrated. Too many books eschew pictures - but this has a nice collection of woodcuts and portraits to contextualise what we're reading about.

One little nitpick, the book makes the claims:

Life was hard and life expectancy was around 35

and

Lilias was an old woman, at least 60 years old and possibly as old as 80. At a time when life expectancy was much lower than it is now, even the lower estimate was still a considerable age.

That's not quite right. Although the average life expectancy was low, that's the average at birth - with a large number of infant mortalities dragging down the average. When you look at the full data, you'll see people used to live long lives even in the distant past.

In a way, it reminds me of Invisible Women. A national tragedy hidden from view.

It builds to a rousing end. There are parts of the world where witchcraft is still taken seriously - with devastating consequences. The febrile atmosphere which led to unfounded accusations against women is still prevalent even in modern societies.

Much like the film "Lola RenntRun Lola Run" there's a briefcase full of cash, a cast of morally ambiguous characters, and a meandering philosophical discussion about the nature of economic salvation.

It slams together the naïve and the cynical into a bunch of uneasy conversations.

I loved the slow-burn of the first story - the way it gradually revealed more and more about the characters. But throughout I was left wondering "where is this going?" The answer, disappointingly, was nowhere.

That's the heart of my problem with the book - it was compelling and frustrating in equal measure. The author herself states it best:

The reader needs something to hold on to. A glimmer of hope

It was stylish, there's no doubt about that. The texture of each story was gorgeous. The plotting was inventive and the morality interesting. I also enjoyed the bluntness of the social politics of economics. I just felt the whole was much less than the sum of its parts.

I read this as part of a new book club I'm attending. Thankfully, everyone else seemed to agree that it was a bit of a let down.

When I finally invent time-travel, the first thing I'll do is go back in time and give everyone a copy of this book. Published in 2014, it clearly sets out the likely problems with true Artificial Intelligence (not the LLM crap we have now) and what measures need to be put in place before it is created.

It opens with The Unfinished Fable of the Sparrows:

Which, frankly, should be the end of the discussion. Oh Scronkfinkle, why didn't they listen to you?

This book attempts to set out they why and the how of protecting humanity from the (inevitable?) arrival of machines which we would describe as "superintelligent". That is, capable of human-level reasoning and understanding, but unlimited in terms of speed, working memory, and accuracy.

For example, automated trading algorithms caused a "Flash Crash" of the stock market in 2010. Unchecked machines very nearly destabilised the financial work. As Bostrom writes:

[…] while automation contributed to the incident, it also contributed to its resolution. The pre-preprogrammed stop order logic, which suspended trading when prices moved too far out of whack, was set to execute automatically because it had been correctly anticipated that the triggering events could happen on a timescale too swift for humans to respond. The need for pre-installed and automatically executing safety functionality—as opposed to reliance on runtime human supervision—again foreshadows a theme that will be important in our discussion of machine superintelligence.

So where are those safety functions now? Are any of the AI providers building in guardrails to prevent atrocities? We know that some LLMs are restricted from sharing details about devastating weapons of mass destruction - but there seems little else put in place.

The book is mostly accessible but veers wildly between casual language, deep philosophical tracts, pointed snark, and the occasional dive into maths and physics. For anyone with even a passing interest in the progression of any technology, it is a worthwhile read.

Many of the predictions are spot on:

As of 2012, the Zen series of go-playing programs has reached rank 6 dan in fast games (the level of a very strong amateur player), using Monte Carlo tree search and machine learning techniques. Go-playing programs have been improving at a rate of about 1 dan/year in recent years. If this rate of improvement continues, they might beat the human world champion in about a decade.

In fact, AlphaGo achieved mastery at the end of 2016.

In the slightly longer term, the cost of acquiring additional hardware may be driven up as a growing portion of the world’s installed capacity is being used to run digital minds […] as investors bid up the price for existing computing infrastructure to match the return they expect from their investment

As I wrote about in "AI is a NAND Maximiser" this too has come to pass.

While LLMs weren't yet invented when this was written, there's an excellent prediction about how an AI could become a pernicious psychological adversary:

Caution and restraint would be required, however, for us not to ask too many such questions—and not to allow ourselves to partake of too many details of the answers given to the questions we do ask—lest we give the untrustworthy oracle opportunities to work on our psychology (by means of plausible-seeming but subtly manipulative messages). It might not take many bits of communication for an AI with the social manipulation superpower to bend us to its will.

Indeed, I think it is clear that this is already happening. While I don't ascribe malice (or any other motivation) to the AIs, it is clear that their makers have a bias towards obsequiousness.

Other predictions are perhaps a little wide of the mark:

if somebody were to succeed in creating an AI that could understand natural language as well as a human adult, they would in all likelihood also either already have succeeded in creating an AI that could do everything else that human intelligence can do, or they would be but a very short step from such a general capability.

We're a few years in to the LLM revolution and, while we can quibble about what "understand" means, it's clear that natural language can now mostly be interpreted by computers. But that doesn't seem to have made the leap to general intelligence, nor the acceleration of art and science.

Others are hopeful but possibly a bit naïve:

A future superintelligence occupies an epistemically superior vantage point: its beliefs are (probably, on most topics) more likely than ours to be true. We should therefore defer to the superintelligence’s opinion whenever feasible.

Yes, there probably are modern concepts which have more in common with "phlogiston" than reality. But if a scientist were to time-travel back to the early 1700s, how easy would it be for them to disprove the theory? Perhaps AI ought to exist in the "trust but verify" space?

It is slightly over-footnoted, with no distinction between citation and diverting passage. There's also a tendency to go off in fanciful directions - the stuff on genetically enhancing humans goes on a bit too long for my tastes. Similarly, the philosophy of maximising happiness by emulating brains and virtually doping them seemed unconvincing.

That said, some of the thought experiments are both fun and profound - the seminal "Paperclip Maximiser" was introduced in this book.

There are some downsides. An over-reliance on specific individuals like Eliezer Yudkowsky crowds out some of the other important thinkers.

One of the suggestions made has already fallen:

One valuable asset would be a donor network comprising individuals devoted to rational philanthropy, informed about existential risk, and discerning about the means of mitigation. It is especially desirable that the early-day funders be astute and altruistic, because they may have opportunities to shape the field’s culture before the usual venal interests take up position and entrench.

The "Effective Altruism" movement is now hopelessly compromised and seemingly in tatters. Similarly, the cult of rationalism has taken an unfortunate turn to the bizarre and dangerous.

Nevertheless, it's hard to argue with the philosophy. Whether or not "superintelligence" is ever achieved, we should have systems in place now to protect us. It's the same as any other technology - the time to set up nuclear non-proliferation agreements and the systems to monitor them was before we invented them.

Short stories offer you the chance to dip briefly into a world and then skip out so there's not much time for development; just straight in to the plot and off we go. But this is all exposition and very little action. Rather than let the plots develop naturally, there are just vast passages of infodumping. I'm sad to say this is a rather dreary and insipid collection of stories.

Some of the stories start out with an interesting premise but then just fizzle out. There's a reasonably good idea in "The Materiality of Emotions" which describes people buying little trinkets which induce emotions in them. Again, emotions as drugs is well-worn stuff, but this builds up momentum nicely before suddenly ending.

The highlight is "Spectrum" which has some delightful world-building but, like the others, it's rather derivative of older stories. A woman's space ship crashes on a strange planet and she tries to befriend the local hominids. You've almost certainly read it before.

Overall I found it underwhelming.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

And there is a lot of politics.

One of the weakest areas is the political analysis behind the stories. For example, a Soviet Lunar rover is described as being "daubed with the sickle and hammer" - but there's no derogatory mention of the stars, stipes, and eagles on American craft. Similarly we hear about "the Soviet plans to invade Mars proceeded unabated" - there's no deriding description of the American plans to colonise various planets. The efforts of the European Space Agency described as "[m]ore than fifty industrial contractors from fifteen nations were involved in construction. Safe to say, it was a logistical nightmare." - while ignoring the various back-room deals that led to the American space programme being distributed around their country and their resultant logistical problems.

It isn't relentlessly pro-American (there's lots of descriptions of their failures) but it feels a bit one-sided.

There are some gorgeous photos spread throughout the book. Sadly, the ebook relegates most of them to the end rather than interspersing them with the text. At least one of the images is incorrect although, thankfully, the attribution hyperlinks to the correct photo on NASA's site.

I'm being a bit down on the book. It is a decent enough look at all the problems faced by space agencies as they tried to send machines into the void. For those of us in the computer industry, it is depressing to continually read about how we're often the weakest link:

On 2 September, a computer command was sent to Phobos 1 to turn on the gamma ray spectrometer. A single hyphen had been left out of the code, transforming it into an order for Phobos 1 to shut down. There was no way to turn it back on.

Yikes! The book is full of titbits like that - minor errors which led to major catastrophes.

It's a good starting point for anyone with an interest in space exploration and how technical and political challenges can be overcome.

Apparently I reviewed the previous version of this book four years ago but have no real memory of it. Did you ever have a dream which was vividly realistic yet somehow slightly askew from reality? Obviously there is no antimemetics division, nor could anyone write a book about it. If they did, their mind would instantly be liquefied and their mere existence would be purged.

So, why is there a new version of the book out and is it worth reading again?

As the copyright page says:

Earlier versions of this material were previously published in serial form on the scp wiki under Creative Commons 3.0, and subsequently self-published by the author in ebook and paperback format. The work has been substantively revised and updated since.

As the FAQ makes clear, getting a "proper" publisher to put money into a CC project is unlikely. So many of the original elements have been rewritten and reworked. The writing, plotting, and characters have all been substantially improved. The ending, in particular, has become something quite special.

The story itself is still recursively memetic and a metacommentary on itself. The bug-eyed-monsters are mindbending and the good guys are all morally compromised. The concepts are gorgeously impossible and the pacing is exciting.

There's simply nothing like it.

The eBook is mostly well formatted. Excellent use of monospace fonts for reports, there are accessible redactions where suitable, and the images all have alt text. Weirdly, one "monster" is named వ - a character which failed to render correctly on my eBook. That gave it a rather sinister appearance! The ghosting of eInk made it look like there were faint words behind the various redactions which was delightfully spooky. An excellent book and a satisfying update.

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