#0106: Recent reading 01
Braingasm
Ok, so here’s something a bit different: what follows is a list of the books I’ve read (well, technically listened to as audiobooks) in the first half of this year, along with a short précis, for no other reason than it might be helpful if you’re looking for something to read.
SciFi
Salvation, Peter F Hamilton,
#kindle#audio#unfinished
Started this on a recent plane trip and it has promise. In typical Hamilton style, it’s far reaching in scope. The central idea appears to be the uncovering of an alien artefact on a distant world (a common trope). But there’s enough early on to keep me reading. One annoyance: the person reading the audiobook version gives a rather overdramatic voice treatment.
Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky
#kindle#audio
This is a refreshingly original take on world-building sci-fi, that includes a fascinating speculation on the nature of “created” intelligence, both machine and biological. There’s also a ton of excellent characters (particularly the AIs) that make for some amusing interactions. Well written, engaging, and thoroughly thought-provoking.
Children of Ruin, Adrian Tchaikovsky
#kindle#audio
The sequel to Children of Time really delivers on all of the things that made the first book such a compelling read. There’s a new set of “uplifted” (created) life that is octopus-based, along with the spider-based life-forms from the first book, plus another species of alien(s) that are quite puzzling and inscrutable. There is a familiarity to the plot structure from the first novel, but it is expanded upon in a fulfilling way, which I suspect sets the ground for a future third novel in the series.
Ancillary Justice, Anne Leckie
#kindle#audio
This book seems to really divide readers. My sense is that at least some of the issues people have with it is the odd way that certain characters in the book use the she pronoun for all interactions. This is an attempt to convey the irrelevance of gender by the controlling Radch empire, and the AIs that run their spaceships. It’s an interesting literary device that essentially disappears into the narrative after a while, a bit like the way your brain subsumes subtitles when watching a foreign movie. This is an intelligently layered story with a bundle of innovative ideas and a subtle twist that creeps up on you in a way that opens up opportunities for subsequent novels. I will definitely be giving the second book a read in the near future.
The Quantum Magician, Derek Künsken
#kindle#audio
I loved this book because it’s got a bit of everything going on, and at an epic scale. It is essentially a noir detective / heist story set against the backdrop of a variety of genetically modified human sub-species and a vast array of current technical possibilities extrapolated to their imaginative conclusions. Calling it “Ocean’s 11 in space” as one Amazon reviewer opined doesn’t quite do it justice in my mind, but add in some speculative physics and a few multiple-universe related twists and turns and you’ll get the idea.
Future of Tech, Machine Learning, AI, etc
The Big Nine, Amy Webb
#kindle#audio
The book ended up being quite different to what I expected in that I thought it was going to be a somewhat dry run through the “Big Nine’s” AI strategies, but it ended up being so much more than that. There’s some very insightful analysis of the potential harmful impact of biases inherent in the programming and programmers of the Big Nine’s systems. But the highlight is a very well drawn set of scenarios that describe optimistic, pragmatic, and catastrophic outcomes of the progression of machine intelligence through society. Within these scenarios, Webb draws interesting comparisons between the Chinese-based “BAT” (Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent) and the remaining US-based mega-techs (Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, and Apple) and how the fundamentally different relationship they have with their domestic governments will play a significant role in their ongoing development. This is a richly researched and well communicated piece of speculative futurism. Well worth a read.
Possible Minds: 25 ways of looking at AI, John Brockman
#kindle#audio
This is an anthology of essays on the potential for artificial intelligence, drawing inspiration from Norbert Wiener’s 1950 book The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society. The range of perspectives is stark: from extreme pessimism to extreme optimism, and everything in between, taken from an elite collection of the World’s leading thinkers on machine intelligence.
The hundred page machine learning book, Andriy Burkov
#kindle#hardcover#unfinished
First up, this is one of the highest quality hardcover books that I have ever owned, right up there in quality with the best of Tufte. It’s both beautiful to look at and great to hold in your hand. Having spent so much time listening to audiobooks recently, this was a nostalgic change. And the quality continues into the content. It is incredibly dense, but there is an efficiency with which machine learning topics are explained that is extraordinary. There’s not an extraneous word anywhere. I’m not sure that this is a book for complete novices (like myself!) but after getting about 25% of the way in, it appears that a motivated engineer can get into the underpinnings of the major concepts of machine learning in a most efficient manner.
Grokking Deep Learning, Andrew Trask,
#kindle#unfinished
In contrast to the Hundred Page Machine Learning Book, this is a less polished affair, but no less satisfying. With an engaging and collegiate style, it starts right at the very beginning of machine learning tech and builds up a solid understanding using only Python and NumPy. For newcomers to this domain (like me!) I would be inclined to start with something like this before attempting the 100PML book.
Consciousness, etc
The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch
#kindle#audio
This is a profound work of intellect. Here’s what I wrote about it back in #0099:
I’ve been captivated recently by the writings of David Deutsch, particularly the rather imposing 2012 tome called The Beginning of Infinity. Rarely have I read a book — to be fair, I’m listening to the audiobook — and got to the end and thought “I have to re-read this book immediately.” But I did in this case. The book is difficult to easily characterise, but ultimately it’s about the nature of knowledge and the power of “good explanations” to help humanity unlock the secrets of the universe. He absolutely eviscerates large swathes of modern thinking such as post-modernism, empiricism, instrumentalism, and all manner of other philosophies that he suggests are based on “bad explanations“ (you’ll need to read the book to understand the difference between “good” and “bad” explanations). It’s a towering work of intellect, and a genuine must-read. There is also this short TED talk where he presents an overview of the basic ideas from the book. Just in case you want an intro before diving into the full thing.
Mind altering reading.
I am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter
#kindle#audio
There are some similarities between Strange Loop and Infinity in that they both try to provide a conceptual framework for thinking about the nature of consciousness. This one posits the idea that a special kind of abstract feedback loop called a Strange Loop is fundamental to understanding how consciousness emerges. Hofstadter (somewhat controversially, see Free Will and Waking Up below) argues that the concept of “I” is the most complex symbol in the brain, and the source of our sense of self and free will. This is far more speculative and subjective than Infinity, but no less thought provoking.
Free Will, Sam Harris
#kindle#audio
The first of two short(ish) works by Sam Harris, Free Will asks the simple question: Does free will exist? At first blush, this seems like a ludicrously self-evident question, but by the time I had finished listening, I was genuinely questioning my initial answer. I find this whole topic area fascinating because of how profoundly it challenges the default viewpoint on what makes our minds tick.
Waking Up, Sam Harris
#kindle#audio
Less controversial than Free Will, Waking Up takes a scientific lens to meditation and other traditional practices that are loosely grouped into the category of “spirituality”. This was the book that got me started on meditation as it was the first time I had seen it laid out in purely scientific and neurological terms. I’d go so far as to say that this one was life-changing.
Business, Management, etc
An elegant puzzle: patterns of engineering management, Will Larson
#kindle#hardcover
I have no doubt that this book will become a classic in the field of managing software teams alongside The Mythical Man Month, Peopleware or even Design Patterns. If you are responsible for smart people building software at scale, you really need to own this book. It works as both narrative and reference, and like The 100PML book, is an incredible artefact of book publishing. I expect I’ll be coming back to my copy again and again over the years.
Superforecasting, Philip Tetlock
#kindle#audio
I had never considered that people existed who could be significant outliers in their ability to make predictions in conditions of high uncertainty. But apparently, they do exist and they’re known as superforecasters. This book examines this interesting group of people and offers advice on how we might be able to improve our own forecasts using some of their intuitive techniques.
That’s my reading list for the first half of 2019. Let me know if you have any suggestions that are worth reading along similar lines, I’m always on the lookout for quality reading / listening material.
Regards,
M@
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