Before I got into popular science books I was a big fan of the really impressive business book - something like, for instance, Maverick , Ricardo Semler's astonishing account of transforming a family business. Now mostly a reader of popular science, I find most business books facile and full of padding - so it was refreshing to read this business-popular science crossover on the nature of our 'tribal' cultural instincts - primarily relating to peers, heroes and ancestors in the broadest sense and how these influence our interactions. Although in some ways I'd dispute Michael Morris's approach in putting tribalism central - I personally am more inclined to see the way we tell each other stories as central to what he describes, with tribalism just as symptom of that - it is still an engaging hypothesis. Morris gives us plenty of examples from around the world of the benefits that these instincts have brought over the millennia. Perhaps particularly interesting at a ti...

There have been plenty of books on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and how it will impact our lives from the dire warnings of Cathy O'Neil's  Weapons of Math Destruction to Melanie Mitchell's in-depth exploration of the technology  Artificial Intelligence , but in Working with AI , Thomas Davenport and Steven Miller give us a new viewpoint that is interesting, if a little worrying. If we compare writing about AI with the Star Wars movies, it's as if almost every AI book I've read so far, like the films, has been written from the viewpoint of the rebels. But this is a book that solidly takes the viewpoint of the empire. Unfortunately, although it covers a fair number of AI applications, it's also written more like a business book that a popular science/technology book, and as such it's pretty dull. Anyone familiar with the business book genre will recognise that deadly moment when you get to a box that's a case study. It's going to be boring....

When I was young, space travel was very exciting because science fiction was becoming reality. First there were people in space and then the landings on the Moon. However, there was one big difference between what I read in SF and what was happening on the news. Fictional space travel was largely a matter of private enterprise, whether it was down to the work of an individual mad scientist or a large corporation. But the reality left leaving Earth in the hands of two superpower nations. Of course, there were exceptions in the fiction, but even in something like Star Trek, where the central focus was a ship owned by supranational authorities, there were still plenty of privately owned ships in space. Now, though, reality is catching up with the fiction. Companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin are bringing a whole new entrepreneurial flair to the design and build of rockets, outpacing the slow and steady approach of NASA. In The Space Business , Andrew May takes us on a tour of this new...

I was quite impressed when I read the book Wikinomics back in 2007. The authors seemed to understand the importance of networking in a way that companies which (for example) sent out emails from a 'noreply' email address didn't. However, there's always a danger of misreading the runes when trying to predict what will happen in the future - so it seemed interesting to go back 13 years later and see how Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams' picture of the economy of the future panned out. Coming back to the book, it does rely on a handful of examples and repeats distinctly vague concepts a lot (in this respect it emphasises its role as a business title). And it's true that some aspects - for example the importance of the likes of YouTube and the as-yet-unlabelled social media ring true. However, the authors did fall for an old trap of enthusiastic techie types - the assumption that everyone is going to become a producer as well as a consumer any time soon. We ...

A quick flag on this one : it's a management/business book, and the four star rating is with that in mind. Brain Based Enterprises does contain a surprising amount of science, considering this, which is why it's here, but don't expect it to be like a four star pure science book. This is an eclectic attack on the status quo of our ideas about business. Peter Cook suggest that much of current business simply isn't oriented to the realities of a modern, technological world, and that we need to handle things very differently in a knowledge-based economy. The book is divided into three sections. For me, the most interesting was the first 'brainy people' part, as my own business doesn't have teams and such - but for those who do there are also 'brainy teams' and 'brainy enterprises' sections. Cook stirs together a heady mix of science - from psychology to economics - music (a passion of his and a significant part of the way he works) and bu...

After reading J. B. Williams' The Electronics Revolution I couldn't resist also having a go at The Electric Century . The mysterious J. B. provides a similar mix of historical data and narrative, in this case for aspects of electricity, from generation to household products using it. Covering a total of 21 topics, plus intro and conclusion, Williams reminds us just how far the use of electricity has spread into our lives. As well as the obvious, we get, for example, the use in cars - not so much electric cars, but a requirement from day one in even the most basic petrol vehicle. I say petrol, but Williams would say gasoline, as there is a really strange approach taken here. Although it covers both the US and the UK (and to an extent Europe), this is a very British book, giving far more detail on what happened in the UK than you would otherwise expect. Yet it's not only got American spelling it uses US words (so, for example, we hear of people in the UK using 'fauc...

This quirkily-titled exploration of the rise and fall of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) scores three stars as a general popular science title - if, like me, you sit at the intersection of being interested in computing, gaming and business it's a solid four stars. Once I had got over a few sniggers at the idea that game studies/platform studies could be an academic discipline, about which you can write a serious academic work with Harvard referencing and everything, I found this a genuinely fascinating book. I was never a SNES user - I made the transition from an earlier console (Mattel's Intellivision) to a Commodore 64, Amiga and then PCs for gaming - but it was impossible to be unaware of it during its heyday from the late 80s. It seems that the SNES is generally looked back on with awe by those who were fans at the time, but Dominic Arsenault brings a more balanced view, pointing out the technical and business limitations of the product - all driven by...

The science fiction author Neal Stephenson comments on the cover of this book that it is 'highly enjoyable'. I suspect this is because in the opening of the book, Ed Finn repeatedly refers to Stephenson's impressive novel Snow Crash . If Stephenson actually found reading What Algorithms Want to be fun, he needs to get out more. I would, instead, describe it is extremely hard work to read - but it is hard work that is rewarded with some impressive insights. What Algorithms Want is both clever and able to cut away the glamour (in the old sense of the word) of the internet and the cyber world to reveal what's really going on beneath - as long as you can cope with the way that the book is written. A Finn points out, most of us rely on algorithms, from Google’s search to Facebook’s timeline, not consciously considering that these aren’t just tools to help us, but processes that have their own (or their makers) intentions embodied in them. What’s more, there's real...

There's a certain kind of maths title that delights. It's not the kind of pure maths you'd find in an Ian Stewart book , where maths is an intricate, latticework puzzle like a net of spun sugar that need have no connection to the real world. No, this is maths as impure and dirty as it gets. It sneaks up behind us and takes us by surprise, because this is the maths at the interface with psychology - maths that often challenges our beliefs and understanding of the world. It can be both deeply satisfying and quite interesting in a QI fashion, all at the same time. I suppose the classic of this field is Freakonomics , though I would also recommend The Tiger that Isn't and (in a modest way), my own Dice World . What William Poundstone does with great aplomb here is to unpick our dubious relationship with randomness. In the first half of the book he points out how we are particularly poor envisaging randomness, and how, as a result, if you understand how people get it...