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4.28 AVERAGE
4.28 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
dark
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
My ideal read. Philosophy and history in novel form.
dark
informative
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
challenging
informative
fast-paced
dark
informative
reflective
tense
fast-paced
After seeing a lot of hype around this online, I felt a little disappointed with how it ultimately played out. It plays strongly in the genre of postmodern historical fiction, and the first two chapters are pretty stunningly written, but I felt that the pairing of madness and genius didn’t necessarily escape the ‘great man’ trap of familiar historicising of science and technology. in many ways, this felt like a thematic retreading of something like Oppenheimer, about the tragedy of a great man’s works taking shape within a twisted, imperial framework of fascism and war. I think there are much clearer condemnations on the unethical, evil mission of progress, particularly in using the figure of von Neumann to show how the development of atomic/nuclear weaponry and computers were inextricably wedded together against a backdrop of quantum physics and the increasing struggle for totalising mathematical logic in a seemingly irrational framework of science. But at the same time, the book romanticises and humanises the ideas of science and AI, particularly by attaching them to these freakishly intelligent individuals, that particularly manifests in the last chapter, where we lose the same rigorous historical framework of the earlier chapters; Peter Thiel and DeepMind come and go with no mention of the insidious capitalist structures that have driven the ensuing tech oligarchy from the events of this chapter. There’s a vague orientalising of Go as a narrative device (compared to chess). It plays out almost like a battle scene in an action film, quite unlike the restrained horror of the twentieth century that we see in the first two chapters.
AI is not a new life form; far from it. It is a technology that accelerates the drive of our systems toward war, the accumulation of capital, the alienation of labour. I am not convinced by the projections of creativity and brilliance that it found in Go. Ultimately, that rests on a notion that human brilliance is found in one person besting another in combat, be it calculations of nuclear devastation or Go formations. But the events of recent years have shown that that kind of productivity and achievement is not what we should be safeguarding from AI or neural networks. It is the capacity for the irrational, the feeling, the empathetic and the, clumsily, human, that cannot be replicated in self-learning models.
AI is not a new life form; far from it. It is a technology that accelerates the drive of our systems toward war, the accumulation of capital, the alienation of labour. I am not convinced by the projections of creativity and brilliance that it found in Go. Ultimately, that rests on a notion that human brilliance is found in one person besting another in combat, be it calculations of nuclear devastation or Go formations. But the events of recent years have shown that that kind of productivity and achievement is not what we should be safeguarding from AI or neural networks. It is the capacity for the irrational, the feeling, the empathetic and the, clumsily, human, that cannot be replicated in self-learning models.
informative
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Interesting book, weird mix of fiction and non fiction. Enjoyed? Think I liked more than avg given my maths background. Actually liked the hard algphago pivot
challenging
i thoroughly enjoyed this. the theme, the writing style, the emotions that come with reading it, all of it
the way benjamín paints the madness of these great thinkers is truly spectacular, this was my first book from him, but after this i am eager to dive into any of his pieces
the way benjamín paints the madness of these great thinkers is truly spectacular, this was my first book from him, but after this i am eager to dive into any of his pieces
challenging
dark
informative
inspiring
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
informative
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Interesting, if terrifying, science. Terrible novel.