TeaIt felt like the year had come when AI really arrived. It’s on our phones and laptops; It is infiltrating digital and corporate infrastructure; It is changing the way we learn, work and create; And the global economy rests on the stratospheric valuations of corporate giants vying to control it.
But the uncontrolled rush to go faster and further could be humanity’s undoing, according to this surprisingly readable and highly praised If anyone makes it, everyone dies (Bodley Head), by computer scientists Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, which argues against creating superintelligent AI capable of cognitively surpassing homo sapiens In all departments. “Even an AI that cares about understanding the universe could destroy humans as a side effect,” they write, “because humans are not the most effective way to generate truth…of all possible ways to organize matter.” Christmas reading isn’t exactly exciting, but, as machines literally calculate our demise, you’ll eventually understand all the technical jargon about tokens, weights, and maximum priorities.
Historian Sadia Qureshi believes human extinction is not a new idea Disappeared: An Unnatural History of Extinction (Alan Lane), shortlisted for this year’s Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize. Colonial expansion and oppression of indigenous peoples clearly depended on Darwinian principles that the fate of some species is to compete with others. She explains that the concept of extinction is linked to politics and social justice, whether the extermination of the Beothuk people in Newfoundland in the 19th century or the current plan to “de-extinct” woolly mammoths so they can once again roam the land. She rightly asks whose land is it?
The idea of landscape, as well as that of people with authority, has been explored extensively and significantly by Robert Macfarlane. Are any rivers alive? (Hamish Hamilton). By telling the stories of three endangered rivers in different parts of the world, he presents a concept that is both ancient and radical: rivers deserve recognition as co-living beings, as well as legal protection. The book, shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing, was “written with rivers flowing through its pages”, he declared, using pronouns that removed any doubt about his passion for the cause.
This awe of the natural world is shared by biologist Neil Shubin, who has led expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctica and tells the reader end of the earth (Oneworld), also shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize. “Ice has come and gone for billions of years… it has shaped our world and paved the way for the origin of our species,” says Shubin. But as climate change accelerates and treaties come under pressure, those geographic extremes are becoming increasingly unsafe. It’s polar exploration, but without the frostbite.
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Just beneath the North Pole, deep inside the Norwegian permafrost, lies the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which aims to help humanity regenerate after the apocalypse. It includes a consignment from the first seed bank, started in the 1920s by Russian plant scientist Nikolai Vavilov, who dreamed of ending famine. In Forbidden Garden of Leningrad (Sept.), a strong contender for this year’s Orwell Prize, historian Simon Parkin uncovers the poignant story of Vavilov and his colleagues who fought to protect their collection during the siege of the city in 1941. Vavilov fell out of scientific and political favor, and was thrown into prison, with dire consequences.
If all this sounds too depressing for gift giving, super agers (Simon & Schuster) may be what you’re looking for. Cardiologist and medical professor Eric Topol, who recently reviewed the digital future of the NHS, is studying “Welderly” to offer evidence-based tips on longevity – which clearly challenge the difficulties of ageing. Their promise is that breakthroughs like weight-loss drugs and AI will further change the game on chronic diseases. This is the one going under mum’s tree, in hopes that 80 really is the new 50.
Like Oliver Sacks, two brilliant offerings come from neurologists using patient stories to tell us something about themselves. In era of diagnosis (Hodder), Susan O’Sullivan boldly questions medicine’s well-intentioned enthusiasm for attaching labels to aspects of the human condition – think ADHD, anxiety. Given the public discussion about the 2.8 million people who are economically inactive due to chronic illness, this is sensitive political territory, but it deserves a hearing. and in our mind, our self (Canongate), winner of the Royal Society Prize, Masood Hussain sensitively explores how our sense of identity can be eroded when illness strikes. The story of the woman who thought she was having an affair with a man who was actually her husband shows that “the way people behave can be fundamentally changed (by brain disorders), sometimes shockingly”.
Now, types of geography: proto (William Collins) Science writer Laura Spinney’s fluid account of how Proto-Indo-European, a painstakingly reconstructed ancient language, became the precursor to many languages. Its descendants gave us Dante’s Inferno, the Rig Veda (Hinduism’s oldest scripture) and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. “Almost every second person on Earth speaks an Indo-European language,” Spinney writes, launching a global scientific journey that uses evidence from linguistics, archeology and genetics to piece together its history.
Of course, no Christmas book list is complete without a biography of a doorstopper – and, in cricket (Profile), Matthew Cobb gives us the definitive backstory of one of the greatest men of 20th century science. Born into a middle-class family in Northampton, Francis Crick was an extraordinary young physicist who, with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, discovered the double helix structure of DNA and won the Nobel Prize in 1953. Cobb reflects the intellectual restlessness of a man who pursues problems (and women) rather than discipline, and who mingles with artists and beats poets. Crick, who died in California in 2004, spent his later career trying to unravel the mysteries of consciousness.
Speaking of big data, anyone left intellectually dissatisfied with the recent Oppenheimer-mania will enjoy destroyer of worlds (Alan Lane), in which physicist Frank Close ventures beyond the Manhattan Project to tell the gripping story of the atomic age. Beginning with the discovery of a stain on a photographic plate in the 19th century, Close creates a history that moves through Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and a very clever interpretation of physics, ending seven decades later with the Tsar Bomba, a Soviet weapon detonated in 1961.
It was second in explosive power only to the meteorite impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. A large enough hydrogen bomb, Close writes, “would signal the end of history. Its mushroom cloud hurtling toward outer space would be humanity’s last sighting.”
Can we please tell superintelligent AI no?
Anjana Ahuja is a science writer and columnist for the Financial Times.
