PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Some might wonder whether the author could have let his imagination run a little more freely by daring to take on von Neumann’s perspective, by diving into just a couple of his closest relationships, instead of following a predominantly male ensemble of fifteen ... Others might argue that the author’s focus on the danger that AI will supplant us in the future ignores the problems of implicit bias, copyright violation and accountability that we already have – a move that could play into the hands of technologists keen to avoid the more inconvenient matter of regulation in the here and now by playing up talk of approaching existential risk. Such an instrumental view of fiction seems churlish when faced with a novel that both entertains and provokes.
Scott J Shapiro
RaveThe Wall Street JournalFancy Bear Goes Phishing offers level-headed suggestions to reduce cybercrime, decrease cyber-espionage and mitigate the risks of cyberwar, arguing that we need to move beyond an obsession with technical fixes and focus instead on the outdated and vulnerable upcode that shapes the shoddy downcode we live with now.
Sally Adee
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMs. Adee writes as a reporter, but also an enthusiast ... Some of the research she describes is certainly remarkable, and her enthusiasm for bioelectricity’s enormous potential makes We Are Electric a lively read. Still, Ms. Adee is careful to acknowledge that it’s \'very, very early days.\' Readers may want to insulate themselves a little from some of her higher-voltage claims.
Nicklas Brendborg
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalLevel-headed ... his advice... is delivered with good humor and realism. Short chapters built from short, declarative sentences combine with familiar material to give Jellyfish Age Backwards the feel of an introductory survey rather than a novel argument. Perhaps its piecewise construction is only a reflection of the disjointed state of the subject.
Tom Mustill
MixedThe Wall Street JournalIt’s certainly plausible that the kinds of algorithms that have extracted the expertise of human translators from the world’s literature could map the semantic space of the sperm whale’s grunts and clicks, and respond in kind. But it hasn’t happened yet, which condemns Mr. Mustill to the realms of enthusiastic speculation. How to Speak Whale arrives too late to capitalize on his kayaking encounter and too early for any whale to have actually been spoken.
Patrick House
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalHere, as elsewhere, the striking phrase tips over beyond sweeping generalization to land askew ... When Eliot Weinberger chose 19 different translations of Wang Wei’s poem he also added his own trenchant commentary. Mr. House prefers to riff off the “various and sometimes contradictory theories\' he presents without offering much in the way of critique, making it so\'etimes hard to tell whether the author really buys the ideas he’s selling ... Mr. House seems both definitive and radically unsure ... The compressions and elisions of Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness are sometimes exhilarating and at other times exasperating, but this stylish, witty and insightful introduction to a frustrating discipline whets the appetite for more.
James Bridle
MixedThe Wall Street JournalWith habitual insouciance, the writer blurs the distinction between individual and species ... The author’s enthusiasm for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’s predictive scale model of San Francisco Bay is infectious, but the very act of scaling the entire bay down to the size of a football field implies some complexity is lost—despite any claim to the contrary. And they leave to one side the reasons why the Bay Model was demoted to a tourist attraction, the calculations passing instead to a supercomputer based in Vicksburg, Miss ... The author scorns captains of digital industry such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Shane Legg, who warn that AI presents humanity’s \'biggest existential threat.\' But the book’s answer to adversarial AI appears to be the hope that the intelligences we construct will join the envisioned planetary web of more-than-human solidarity. Given the difficulty of forging lasting solidarity among humans alone, it’s difficult to see how this proposal could be achieved before AI surpasses human intelligence—a prospect most experts predict within a century or so. Readers who agree with the author that the climate crisis is \'the central question of our age,\' and who share their concern at the inequality, injustice and environmental destruction of the Anthropocene, will find Ways of Being inspiring. But it’s hard to see how it will persuade those with their hands on the levers of power to set course for the \'infinitely entangled\' world, \'singing, full-throated, the song of its own becoming\' that the artist would prefer.
Olga Ravn, Tr. Martin Aitkin
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)A story of rising tensions ... The voices of humans and humanoids are almost indistinguishable as they describe the disturbing dreams, imaginary smells, skin complaints and wild thoughts that seem to be provoked by these mysterious things, which hum, or ooze resin, or lay eggs ... Ravn’s technology is an uncanny mixture of \'biomaterial\' and machine, and her characters, locations and statements are all numbered. The novel’s sense of dislocation is only enhanced by the fact that some statements are missing; the ones that remain appear not quite in order ... There may still be division in Ravn’s twenty-second century, but humans and humanoids alike answer to a distant, faceless corporation. If that’s a fate worth avoiding, there is still plenty of work for us all to do.
Paul Davies
MixedThe Wall Street JournalMr. Davies struggles not only with the difficulties of explaining demanding concepts to a nontechnical audience but also with the constraints of his book’s chosen format ... These challenges become only more acute when Mr. Davies explores how cosmology is determined by the physics of the very small ... A reader meeting the idea of charge conjugation, parity and time-reversal symmetry for the first time might be tempted merely to shrug ... Mr. Davies a keen insight into the realities of research ... He also offers perspective on the changing fashions of scientific opinion on subjects such as Einstein’s cosmological constant or the likelihood of extraterrestrial life ... sometimes the author’s straightforward prose can tip over into bathos.
Gabriela Ybarra, Trans. by Natasha Wimmer
PositiveThe Guardian... a bold examination of silence and mortality ... The short, declarative sentences of Natasha Wimmer’s translation reflect the direct, minimalist prose of the Spanish original, a style Ybarra chose partly to allow her some distance.
