If I'm honest, I was disappointed by David Miles' definition of a cold. He tells us 'Within these covers, a cold is an illness caused by a virus that infects the upper respiratory tract and, in most cases, clears up within a matter of days or possibly weeks without requiring medical intervention. This definition is the reason I included the influenza viruses and the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 as cold viruses.' To me, this doesn't seem fair. As far as I'm concerned, the term 'common cold' refers to exactly what I'm suffering from as I write this: a subset of such viruses that definitely does not include either of those killers. I've read far too much about COVID and generally avoid books covering it like the plague (sorry). Miles argues that 'some infections with every type of cold virus lead to some sort of serious illness.' But the reason I was more interested in this book, was I wanted to read about the relatively harmless bu...

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...

Tom Griffiths introduces himself: I’m a cognitive scientist — a professor of psychology and computer science at Princeton University — so I think about minds and mathematics every day. But we are in an interesting moment where people who aren’t professional cognitive scientists are grappling with the same questions: Can machines think? Is it possible to describe minds using mathematics? What are the limits of different approaches to building a mind? Will we be able to create super-human artificial intelligence? These are questions that have come into focus in the last few years with the creation of chatbots that can hold conversations and solve challenging problems, but answering the questions we have about modern AI requires going further back into the past. In writing the book, I hoped to give readers the context for this moment and some of the language for talking about it, as well as highlighting the stories of discovery that brought us to this point and that suggest possible paths...

It's an easy assumption (which I made) that this book is fantasy as it involves a ghost hunter, but I'm calling it SF, as at the time of publication at the end of the nineteenth century, the Society for Psychical Research was treating such phenomena as a subject of scientific investigation, and there has been plenty of SF where the 'science' has been anything but correct. This is part of MIT Press's Radium Age series, which brings back titles from the period when science fiction was just starting to emerge. Often writing from this period was stodgy and no longer easy to read: arguably with little other entertainment available in the home, there was far less need for good writing than is the case now. But short stories of the period can often work better - think how well, for instance, the Sherlock Holmes stories hold up. Although the Herons (in reality mother and son team, the bizarrely named Kate O'Brien Ryall Pritchard and Hesketh Hesketh-Pritchard) aren'...

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...

Caleb Scharf received the 2022 Carl Sagan Medal while director of astrobiology at Columbia University and is currently the senior scientist for astrobiology at NASA’s Ames Research Center. He has written several previous books and is a frequent contributor to Scientific American and Nautilus magazine. He divides his time between Silicon Valley and New York City. His new book is  The Giant Leap : Why Space is the Next Frontier in the Evolution of Life. Why science? I still feel the sense of great wonder at the world that I did as a child. For me science isn’t about some harsh, clinical deconstruction of things, it’s a type of contemplative discipline that amplifies that wonder and helps create a better sense of connection to this vast, crazy, messy universe we’re part of. I also love toying with ideas and asking questions, and I’m in awe of all the ways we humans continue to invent to help answer those questions.  Why this book? I said to my agent that I wanted to write a book ...