Skip to main content

The Atomic Human - Neil Lawrence ****

This is a real curate’s egg of a book. Let’s start with the title - it feels totally wrong for what the book’s about. ‘The Atomic Human’ conjures up some second rate superhero. What Neil Lawrence is getting at is the way atoms were originally conceived as what you get when you pare back more and more until what’s left is uncuttable. The idea is that this reflects the way that artificial intelligence has cut into what’s special about being human - but there is still that core left. I think a much better analogy would have been the god of the gaps - the idea that science has taken over lots of what was once attributed to deities, leaving just a collection of gaps.

At the heart of the book is an excellent point: how we as humans have great processing power in our brains but very limited bandwidth with which to communicate. By comparison, AIs have a huge amount of bandwidth to absorb vast amounts of data from the internet but can’t manage our use of understanding and context. This distinction is a crucial one and I’ve never seen it put better.

There are plenty of other nuggets of fascination. For example, from Lawrence’s time working at Amazon it’s interesting to hear how in the time it takes a customer’s web page to load, the system has to work out in the background where the customer is, what the stock is and where it’s located, from this calculating when to stop offering same day or next day delivery. Another random intriguing part is the rift that effectively killed off the predecessor of AI, cybernetics - Lawrence says its demise was caused by a lie that was a ‘fabrication designed to drive a wedge between Wiener (Mr Cybernetics) and McCulloch (cyberneticist turned AI engineer)’. Frustratingly, though, we are not told who told the lie or why they did so.

What gets in the way of this being a great book are its length and (lack of) structure. The content simply doesn’t justify such an endlessly long feeling book. But I could have coped with that if it wasn’t for the way it’s put together. To say it meanders is a huge understatement. It’s quite ironic that at one point Lawrence comments that at Facebook an ex-colleague discovered that ‘instead of a patchwork quilt you needed to weave a tapestry’. This is no tapestry.There’s a sort of greatness to the plethora of scattergun references repeatedly pulling back to central themes of AI vs human intelligence and the twin foci that Lawrence repeatedly visits of the end of the Second World War and his personal experience, particularly when working at Amazon. It is to a popular science book what a James Joyce novel is to a readable one. Some love Joyce… others don’t. I’m afraid I found it hugely irritating - the book cries out for some imposition of order.

One other small moan - you would think from reading this that Cambridge Analytics had been eminently successful in their ability to use post likes to predict psychometric measures. Yet David Sumpter’s Outnumbered tells us that it was a useless predictor of almost all measures, only likely to have succeeded to a degree with one. I have no reason to doubt Sumpter on this.

I am still giving the book four stars because when you get to those nuggets the content is important and interesting. We could have done with a bit more on the practical aspects of controlling AI - I take Lawrence’s point that the essential is preventing AI from being used to make life-changing decisions unchecked by humans (which probably includes not allowing it to drive cars), but it doesn't really suggest how we get practically from here to there. Even so, it’s an interesting book if you can cope with that near stream-of-consciousness storytelling.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...
Post a Comment
Read more