Here is the first of what I hope to be many reviews of books, shows and movies.

I’m not finished with it yet, but since it’s due back to the library and I can’t renew because of holds, I decided to write my review anyway.

This is a serious book about the problems posed by the nascent technologies Artificial Intelligence and Genetic Engineering, and the solutions required.

The author lacks nothing in credentials – Mustafa Suleyman is a co-founder of multiple successful Artificial Intelligence companies, including most notably the famous startup DeepMind acquired by Google in 2016. Google’s description suffices here:

The lab achieved early success by pioneering the field of deep reinforcement learning - a combination of deep learning and reinforcement learning - and using games to test its systems. One of its early breakthroughs was a program called DQN, which learned to play 49 different Atari games from scratch just by observing the raw pixels on the screen and being told to maximize the score.

In 2015, DeepMind unveiled AlphaGo, the first computer program to defeat a Go world champion. Go was a long-standing grand challenge in AI and AlphaGo’s landmark achievement was considered a decade ahead of its time.

I honestly did not expect the book to be quite so serious. At times I found it depressing. But I highly recommend it.

The overriding message of the book is that containment of these technologies is absolutely imperative to avoiding catastrophe. He describes containment as a loose term, and uses the analogy of a narrow and treacherous path between catastrophe (being too open and free with technological development) on one side and dystopia (a result of too much clamping down on technological development) on the other.

Throughout the book, he takes great care to justify his warnings and prescriptions with lengthy explanations and many examples of how catastrophe could come about.

The book provides compelling, sweeping narratives of humanity, quite worthy of a book on anthropology or philosophy, that put the current technological moment in context, as well as putting technology itself in context.

In an age when most of humanity seems trapped between nihilistic despair and blissful ignorance, either willful or otherwise, Suleyman’s warnings come across as a solid and principled vote for for hope, for facing our problems, and for taking collective action.

Against the hyper-capitalist, hyper-individualists, who seem to think that markets are the solution to everything and government the source of all problems, Suleyman believes in the power of government to address humanity’s problems. In an age when the barons of techno-feudalism often seem to deny their awesome power, or at least their own responsibility to wield that power with great care, Suleyman comes across as a stark exception.

The book is systematic, thorough, and sweeping in narrative, and its prose is exquisite. As a bonus for audiobook listeners, the narrator is Suleyman himself!

I’ll update this when I am able to get through the second half!