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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.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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