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likecymbeline 's review for:
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
by Douglas R. Hofstadter
It's hard to be succinct in reviewing this book, given how expansive it is. I got here by way of [b:The Magician King|10079321|The Magician King (The Magicians, #2)|Lev Grossman|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1316177353s/10079321.jpg|13362064]--this is one of the books Julia's read and FTB discusses, and that told me it was worth a look, apparently. I think it gets a reputation for being impossible to understand unless you're already a genius, but the thing is that it's actually really self-contained. You don't have to already know about computer systems, surrealist art, or 18th-century music, because this is meant to be a highly self-referential book. Everything that it's going to talk about it, well, talks about. You don't have to go in with specialised knowledge.
That said, there's a definite density to it and it's not the kind of book you relax into after work. There's mental labour, which is great if you want something you can really chew on, but not everyone does. And my focus definitely waned when things got math-y and Hofstadter wanted us to "play" with TNT theorems. However, these dropped off in the last quarter, and that was also where I thought the book got more interesting and started to better iterate its goals.
I couldn't stop thinking as I read about how 1979 was approximately a millennium ago in computer time. What computers can do has changed so much since this book came out, and AI systems are exponentially more complicated. We still have a lot of the same conversations about their limitations, though, and whether they can be creative without humans as a prime-mover. I'd be curious to know what this would've looked like written in 2016.
That said, there's a definite density to it and it's not the kind of book you relax into after work. There's mental labour, which is great if you want something you can really chew on, but not everyone does. And my focus definitely waned when things got math-y and Hofstadter wanted us to "play" with TNT theorems. However, these dropped off in the last quarter, and that was also where I thought the book got more interesting and started to better iterate its goals.
I couldn't stop thinking as I read about how 1979 was approximately a millennium ago in computer time. What computers can do has changed so much since this book came out, and AI systems are exponentially more complicated. We still have a lot of the same conversations about their limitations, though, and whether they can be creative without humans as a prime-mover. I'd be curious to know what this would've looked like written in 2016.