Futurists often lament the current state of artificial intelligence and the harm it might do to us, our society, and our planet. So, I was thrilled to read Bridle’s thoughts on reengineering the future of AI.
The artificial intelligence of today is what it is because it was created by corporations with corporate goals in mind. But what if those goals were subverted?
What if we could reconstruct AI as an oracle tasked with listening to everything that speaks? What if we could use AI not to discover new oil fields or to spy on our enemies but to hear the voices of plants or look to the stars?
Like no other book I read this year, Ways of Being challengedand changed my way of thinking.
Artist, technologist, and philosopher James Bridle’s Ways of Being is a brilliant, searching exploration of different kinds of intelligence―plant, animal, human, artificial―and how they transform our understanding of humans’ place in the cosmos.
What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans or shared with other beings― beings of flesh, wood, stone, and silicon? The last few years have seen rapid advances in “artificial” intelligence. But rather than a friend or companion, AI increasingly appears to be something stranger than we ever imagined, an alien invention that threatens to decenter and supplant us.
The Ministry for the Futurestarts with a bang. Then, as in so many of Robinson’s books, the setting and theme take center stage.
The setting in this ambitious novel is the world at large. The theme is the demise of that world as a human habitat, brought on by the greed of its human inhabitants. Robinson offers a powerful polemic on the evils of capitalism. But at the same time, he puts forth a multiplicity of well-considered ideas, many even now being earnestly discussed or realized in dealing with ecological emergencies worldwide.
This book reads more like nonfiction. I’ll be watching to see how many of the efforts launched by Robinson’s fictional characters become a reality within the next decade. I can only hope that many are.
“The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem
"If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox)
The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite…
Penned by that rare scientist with a gift for exposition, Otherlands is a tour de force.
Building on a framework of hard data from paleontological study sites around the globe, Halliday paints a picture of each period in Earth’s history since the Ediacarian, more than 500 million years ago.
What forces formed today’s continents, mountain ranges, and oceans? What and who thrived there along the way? What smells, sights, and sounds greeted them each day? Why did some species survive and flourish, while others vanished?
In superb prose, Halliday answers so many questions, yet still leaves us with a sense of wonder. Perhaps most importantly, he shows us our place in Earth’s ever-evolving ecosystem.
I don’t think I’ll ever hike another trail without wondering what lies beneath!
“Immersive . . . bracingly ambitious . . . rewinds the story of life on Earth—from the mammoth steppe of the last Ice Age to the dawn of multicellular creatures over 500 million years ago.”—The Economist
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE • “One of those rare books that’s both deeply informative and daringly imaginative.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Prospect (UK)
The past is past, but it does leave clues, and Thomas Halliday has used cutting-edge science to decipher them more completely than ever before. In…
In the year 2054, a boy named Kai is born in America’s desert Southwest. His only companion is his Mother—a super-soldier robot. Rho-Z is Kai’s home, protector, provider, and teacher. But she has the potential to be so much more.
The Mother Code tells the harrowing story of how Kai and his Mother came to be. It is the story of how they grow to better understand both themselves and the world that made them. But when survivors from that former world decide that the Mothers must be destroyed, Kai faces a choice:
Will he break the bond he shares with Rho-Z, or fight to save the only parent he has ever known?
