Ben Orlin makes the interesting observation that the majority of people give up on understanding maths at some point, from fractions or algebra all the way through to tensors. At that stage they either give up entirely or operate the maths mechanically without understanding what they are doing. In this light-hearted take, Orlin does a great job of taking on mathematical processes a step at a time, in part making parallels with the structure of language. Many popular maths books shy away from the actual mathematical representations, going instead for verbal approximations. Orlin doesn't do this, but makes use of those linguistic similes and different ways of looking at the processes involved to help understanding. He also includes self-admittedly awful (but entertaining) drawings and stories from his experience as a long-time maths teacher. To make those parallels, Orlin refers to numbers as nouns, operations as verbs (though he points out that there are some flaws in this simile) a

Pedro Domingos (@pmddomingos) is a renowned AI researcher, tech industry insider, and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Hs most recent book is 2040: A Silicon Valley Satire . Why AI?  AI is the defining technology of our time. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, is not kidding when he says that AI could be bigger than fire or the wheel. Using and governing AI is going to be a central part of our lives, jobs, politics and culture from now on. Why this book? Every one of us needs to understand AI and the issues surrounding it. Not at the level of an expert, but enough to figure out what we can do with it, what we want from it, and how to get there. And after writing a non-fiction book and talking to people from all walks of life about it, I've come to the conclusion that the best way to communicate what AI really is is by writing a story that illustrates it. Also, so much in the tech world today, from the AI hype and fear to the pol

This is a UFO book with a difference. Unlike so many others, it wasn’t written by a ufologist or sceptic with a particular axe to grind, but by a professional historian whose personal interest in the subject only goes back a few years. While I’ve read numerous books and articles about ufology over the last 30-plus years, this is the first time I’ve encountered such an in-depth account by an ‘outsider’. This in itself makes the book noteworthy – as does Eghigian’s studiously impartial approach, presenting developments in chronological order with virtually no analysis or commentary of his own. That’s quite a novelty in this field – but also, as I’ll explain at the end, something of a weakness. The first two-thirds of the book deals with what I think of as the ‘standard history’ of ufology, covering the same basic highlights that you might find in any account of the subject’s evolution and scope prior to the 1970s. From the first major ‘phantom airship’ scares of the late 19th century, th

I've come late to this updated 'classic' popular psychology book from 2021, updating the 2008 original. If I'd read it when the first version came out, I would probably have been really positive about it. Much of what's in here sounds very sensible and effective. And all sorts of people followed the concept of 'nudging', from hotels telling us that most people reuse towels to reduce laundry costs to governments setting up 'nudge units' like the UK's Behavioural Insights Team. But the reality has proved rather different from the assertions made here. One problem is sorting out what a nudge is . According to Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, a nudge should 'alter people's behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.' Nudges should be both easy and cheap, making them 'libertarian paternalism'. There is no doubt that some nudges work, some do something but not w

This sequel to Paul McAuley's excellent Something Coming Through holds a lot of promise. Like its predecessor it is set in a near future where we are travelling to multiple worlds through gateways after first contact with two alien species. On these frontier planets, humans uncover alien artefacts from now disappeared races - some result in great medical and scientific breakthroughs... others modify the brains of those who activate them, mostly in a negative fashion. Another similarity with the first book is the alternation of two initially very different timelines which come together as you get through the story, in this case linked particularly by an individual who appears initially in very different ways. One thread, which I enjoyed more, features Lisa, a former tomb raider seeking alien artefacts who has become a loner living with her enhanced dog before her ex-husband drags her into a complex situation. The other features a rather Dune-like noble house, where a young man'

This is in many ways an excellent SF satire - Pedro Domingos never forgets that part of his job as a fiction writer is to keep the reader engaged with the plot, and it's a fascinating one. There is one fly in the ointment in the form of a step into heavy-handed humour that takes away its believability - satire should push the boundaries but not become totally ludicrous. But because the rest of it is so good, I can forgive it. The setting is the 2040 US presidential election, where one of the candidates is an AI-powered robot. The AI is the important bit - the robot is just there to give it a more human presence. This is a timely idea in its own right, but it gives Domingos an opportunity not just to include some of the limits and possibilities of generative AI, but also to take a poke at the nature of Silicon Valley startups, and of IT mega-companies and their worryingly powerful (and potentially deranged) leaders. Domingos knows his stuff on AI as a professor of computer science w

This is long-time Mars enthusiast Robert Zubrin's paean to the red planet. It's fascinating in two ways. One is the detail of what it would be like to try to get to and live on Mars that Zubrin gives us... the other is as a psychological study of a particularly American mindset. Underlying a lot of the practicalities side of the book is that fundamental limit of the space traveller, the rocket equation. Zubrin makes heave use of it to show just how much material (human or otherwise) SpaceX's Starship vehicle could get to Mars (or away from it). There is no doubt that there's a really important point here - how much commercial space vehicles, particularly those of SpaceX, have transformed the economics of spaceflight and the potential for sufficient numbers of people and volume of stuff to get to Mars and make settling vaguely feasible. He also draws an interesting contrast between resources and raw materials, pointing out that only the latter are theoretically limited i

Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Professor in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, where she directs the Centre for Technomoral Futures in the Edinburgh Futures Institute. She is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute and former AI Ethicist at Google. She is the author of  Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (Oxford, 2016) Her latest book is The AI Mirror How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking . Why philosophy? I’m a philosopher because there’s no other area of research that investigates what our knowledge rests on, what justifies our beliefs, values, and choices, what legitimizes the power of the institutions and laws that govern us, what we owe to one another, and how we ought to live in order to flourish together. I have a hard time imagining more important questions to ask right now. Why this book? I’ve been writing about the ethics of artificial

Every now and then we get a graphic novel designed to put across some aspect of science and technology while simultaneously entertaining the reader - and for the most part they try hard and then fail painfully. The most succesful I've seen so far is Robin Cousin's The Phantom Scientist - but I'm afraid Dream Machine doesn't come close. The storyline features a small AI startup with an impressive generative AI, a startup with which a big, bad corporation is trying to get an exclusive contract. We see the head of the startup wrestling with whether or not to take the contract as he finds out more and more details about what generative AI is doing to people (most of which he surely knew anyway) and of the devious plan of the big corporation to gather vast amounts of data and eventually to be able to control whole countries. Move on folks, nothing dubious to see here. The good news is that we do find out lots about generative AI along the way. And the underlying message th

Two of the best ever fantasy writers - Alan Garner and Gene Wolfe - both wrote books that over the years got more sophisticated and harder to take in, yet these books really rewarded the reader who put in the effort to a great degree. Adam Roberts has become their equivalent in the science fiction world. Although much of Lake of Darkness is an easy enough read, the concepts it is built on are mind-boggling and the last part left my mind buzzing, if not entirely sure what I had just experienced. This could be seen as one of Roberts' few ventures into space opera - it certainly has the large scale trappings of this sub-genre. But the setting here is very different. Fairly early on, one of the characters (who it is does not become clear until later) addresses the reader directly, poking fun at the way that science fiction stereotypically sees space-based societies almost inevitably as militaristic, with ships modelled on warships. This is a very different type of future, with a socie