Category: Reviews of books and movies

Two big themes Jeff Booth is a successful Canadian entrepreneur. His book “The Price of Tomorrow” is a warning about two dangerous trends which he thinks are not receiving enough attention. The first is that technology and price deflation will cause lasting widespread unemployment. The second is that the global economy is underpinned by an unstable mountain of debt. These are obviously serious concerns, and at least on technological unemployment I think he is largely correct – particularly with regard to his proposed solution. Successful entrepreneur In 1999, Booth co-founded BuildDirect, a technology company designed to simplify the building industry....

Technological unemployment and economists The term “technological unemployment” was popularised in the 1930s by the celebrated economist John Maynard Keynes. Fifty years later, another renowned economist called Wassily Leontief warned that jobs for humans might follow the same path that jobs for horses did in the early 20th century. So the idea has a respectable economic heritage, but economists are still arguing about whether it will actually happen. The latest contribution comes from Daniel Susskind, a member of an unreasonably talented family of lawyers, economists and academics. His economic credentials are strong: previously an adviser at Number 10, he is...

A YouTube series, presented by Robert Downey Jr Robert Downey Jr is best known as Tony Stark, the character behind Iron Man in the Avengers movies. It is said that Downey Jr modelled his portrayal of Stark on Elon Musk, the creator of Tesla and SpaceX, and one of the most outspoken commentators about artificial intelligence. Musk famously said that by developing advanced AI we are “summoning the demon”, and that we must work hard and fast to ensure it remains safe. In fact he thinks we must develop the technology to link our minds intimately with AI systems, so...

The New Optimists Andrew McAfee wants to cheer you up. If you read his latest book with an open mind, he might well succeed. McAfee, an MIT economist, is joining the New Optimists (Bill Gates, Stephen Pinker, Hans Rosling and others) in trying to persuade us that the world is not going to the dogs. The central claim of “More From Less” is that capitalism and technological progress are allowing us “to tread more lightly on the earth instead of stripping it bare.” Unfortunately, he admits, this good news is hard for many people to believe because catastrophism has such...

Roger Bootle is not afraid to think and say unconventional things. He is that rare phenomenon: a professional economist who thinks that Brexit is a Good Idea. Indeed, he belongs to a group called Economists for Brexit, now renamed as Economists for Free Trade, which argues for a no-deal Brexit. Whatever you think of that, the economics consultancy that Bootle founded, Capital Economics, has been very successful financially, and in 2012 it was awarded the £250,000 Wolfson Economics Prize, the second most valuable economics prize in the world after the Nobel, for a proposal that EU member states who wanted...

The title of Yuval Harari’s latest best-seller is a misnomer: it asks many questions, but offers very few answers, and hardly any lessons. It is the least notable of his three major books, since most of its best ideas were introduced in the other two. But it is still worth reading. Harari delights in grandiloquent sweeping generalisations which irritate academics enormously, and part of the fun is precisely that you can so easily picture his colleagues seething with indignation that he is trampling on their turf. More important, some of his generalisations are acutely insightful. The insight at the heart...

“Enlightenment Now” is the latest blockbuster from Stephen Pinker, the author of “The Blank Slate” and “The Better Angels of Our Nature”. It has a surprising and disappointing blind spot in its treatment of AI risk, which is why it is reviewed here, but overall, it is a valuable and important book: it launches a highly effective attack on populism, which is possibly the most important and certainly the most dangerous political movement today. The resistance to populism needs bolstering, and Pinker is here to help. Populism Populists claim to defend the common man against an elite – usually a...

Week Three: Extreme Algocracy In the first third of Homo Deus, Harari claims that humanity has more-or-less conquered its traditional enemies of famine, plague and war, and has moved on to chasing immortality, happiness and divinity. He also urged us all to become vegetarian, if only to make us less contemptible in the eyes of a future superintelligence. In the second third of the book he offers a surprisingly cursory review of the two singularities – the economic and the technological. He seems to assume that most people already know about them, or at least won’t need much persuading to...

Week two: the two Singularities In the first third of his new book, Yuval Harari described how humanity escaped its perennial evils of famine, plague and war, and he claimed that we are now striving for immortality, happiness and divinity.  Now he enters the territory of the economic and the technological singularities.  Read on... Free will is an illusion Harari begins this section by attacking our strong intuitive belief that we are all unitary, self-directing persons, possessing free will. “To the best of our scientific understanding, determinism and randomness have divided the entire cake between them, leaving not even a crumb for ‘freedom’. … The...

Week One: ending famine, plague and war… Clear and direct Yuval Harari’s book “Sapiens” was a richly deserved success. Full of intriguing ideas which were often both original and convincing, its prose style is clear and direct – a pleasure to read.* His latest book, “Homo Deus” shares these characteristics, but personally, I found the first half dragged a little, and some of the arguments and assumptions left me unconvinced. I’m glad that I persevered, however: towards the end he produces a fascinating and important suggestion about the impact of AI on future humans. Because Harari’s writing is so crisp,...

Nick Bostrom is one of the cleverest people in the world.  He is a professor of philosophy at Oxford University, and was recently voted 15th most influential thinker in the world by the readers of Prospect magazine.  He has laboured mightily and brought forth a very important book, Superintelligence: paths, dangers, strategies.  I hesitate to tangle with this leviathan, but its publication is a landmark event in the debate which this blog is all about, so I must. I hope this book finds a huge audience.  It deserves to.  The subject is vitally important for our species, and no-one has...