Book Review: Abundance (2025). Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson.

I have long been an admirer of Ezra Klein, his writing and his New York Times podcast The Ezra Klein Show. In my opinion, he is one of the most influential public intellectuals in American life today, because of his deep and wide knowledge of politics and public policy, his unflagging curiosity about life and the way the world works, and his excellence as an interviewer of other important thinkers, whether he agrees with their opinions or not.

What demonstrates to me his importance as a thought leader is the number of times his writings and podcasts have introduced important and original new ideas that have overcome initial pushback and skepticism to eventually be widely recognized as true and important insights, at least by the liberal-minded part of the population.

In Why We’re Polarized (2020), Klein did a deep dive into the data about social divisions in American society, finding both new and surprising explanations for our political and social polarization, and identifying forces and effects (particularly in our media environments) that are further destabilizing our democratic political systems.

Then in early 2024, he shocked the Democratic Party and many of its supporters with his column in the New York Times advocating that Joe Biden should not run for re-election, based on Biden’s age and age-related inability to run a dynamic, effective campaign despite a good record of success in office. This bold and perilous opinion on Klein’s part was met with intense hostility and opposition from within the party apparatus, only to be eventually accepted and embraced by the party and the electorate after Biden’s disastrous debate performance.

In his latest book, Abundance, a collaboration with co-author Derek Thompson, a staff writer at The Atlantic and also a podcast host, Klein and Thompson build a conceptual framework for understanding why the Democratic Party and the left in general have lost the support of much of the population they have been trying so hard to help.

The principal problem they identify is the extent to which Democratic-led state and local governments have failed to provide the abundance they’ve promised, particularly in blue states like those on the West Coast. They provide a litany of examples of good promises unfulfilled, like the multi-decade high speed rail project in California, and the homelessness crisis and lack of affordable housing in major urban areas long governed by Democrats.

The primary reason they identify for this ongoing failure, despite the best of intentions, is the inability to build public infrastructure quickly and at a reasonable cost, such as  rapid mass transit, highways, more urban housing, clean energy projects and the like.

Klein and Thompson make the argument that Democrats and progressives should develop an exciting and positive vision of an abundant future, where our national wealth and high technology is used to build the kinds of cities, social amenities and clean environment people want to live in.

But the authors also suggest that Democratic leaders need to come to terms with the underlying reasons for their failures, such as NIMBYism, and the well-meaning over-regulation of public construction projects, which give the more affluent individuals and groups in communities the ability to endlessly delay and drive up the cost of projects they would rather not have in their own back yards.

In this argument, they are echoing an analysis I read recently in another new book, Why Nothing Works (2025) by Marc J. Dunkelman, which provides a longer-term historical account of how progressivism has always harbored two countervailing objectives that tend to create problems when out of balance. One of progressivism’s objectives has been to encourage strong government that can do good things for the people effectively, and prevent local obstructionism and corruption, but at the same time, it has also sought to protect the rights of individuals and communities against too-strong governments and corporations. These two objectives are in constant contention with each other within progressive thought.   

In Abundance, Klein and Thompson develop a similar argument, suggesting that Democrats over the past few decades have put in place so many administrative obstacles to getting things done, for the purpose of protecting the environment and the interests of their many minority and special interest constituencies, that the kind of grand achievements we used to be able to do as a society, like building the interstate highway system or sending men to the moon, can’t possibly be done rapidly or for an affordable price anymore.

The authors point out that the result is not only that fewer people vote for these Democratic governments and candidates, but in many places, people actually vote with their feet, moving to states where less liberal Republican administrations can provide cheaper housing, mass transit, highways and other desirable infrastructure and services because of the lesser constraints on governmental power and overreach.

If any of this (like the call for fewer regulations) sounds like an argument from the right, it isn’t. Klein and Thompson explicitly direct their arguments internally toward the left, in the hope of influencing liberals and progressives to see the value of diagnosing and fixing their own failures to build as a way of winning back votes and much of the popular support they have lost.

They also strongly contrast their abundance approach, the idea that creating social wealth and benefits creates a more just, fair and prosperous society, to the Trumpist “scarcity” style of politics, which constantly hammers away at the idea that there isn’t enough of anything, and whatever wealth there is, someone else is trying to take it away from you.

Abundance is not the last word on how Democrats and liberals need to reinvent the party, or fix all their problems. There is much here to debate, to consider and investigate further. But there is little doubt that Klein (with Thompson) has again written a groundbreaking, provocative book that is launching another movement or tendency on the left (“abundance” theory) that will become an important influence in liberal thought in the near future. Very highly recommended.

Book Review: The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel. Genius, Power and Deception on the Eve of World War I (2023). Douglas Brunt.

During the past year, I've read a number of excellent books that seemed to resonate as part of the backstory to some of the most urgent issues of our time. I will be reviewing several of them over the next few weeks, but this book seemed to be an intriguing place to start exploring some of these missing threads from which our contemporary world has been woven.

Everyone has heard of Diesel engines, the rugged machines that power much of our transportation across the globe, from ships, to trains, to trucks, cars and airplanes, as well as giant electrical generators and many other industrial and military applications. But far fewer of us know the story of the invention of the Diesel engine, or what was so significant about it as opposed to the other internal combustion engine designs of the modern era. 

 

Despite having reached a stage in life where I know quite a bit about history, this fascinating story about a crucial modern technology was almost a complete surprise to me. It begins with an account of the formative years of the inventor, Rudolph Diesel, starting with his impoverished childhood in France, Germany and England in the late nineteenth century, during which he managed to obtain an excellent engineering education despite his family’s poverty,  because of his prodigious and obvious mechanical genius. 

 

The author also introduces us along the way to John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil, and traces Rockefeller’s drive to create monopolistic control over the miraculous new energy source of the twentieth century: oil. This profile was also very enlightening, in showing us how Rockefeller sought to steer new industrial and popular energy technologies inexorably toward those that used his petroleum products as fuel, even as other possible sources of energy were being discovered and tried at the same time.

For example, Rockefeller first pushed to replace whale oil for city lighting with kerosene, a refined oil product, only to have kerosene’s future in the lighting market rapidly eclipsed by Edison’s electric light bulbs and the creation of early electrical power grids. With the market for kerosene lighting collapsing almost as quickly as it had opened, Rockefeller then became determined to see that all powered means of transportation should use the newly-invented internal combustion engine, which required highly refined petroleum products like kerosene and gasoline to function.   

Diesel’s remarkable engine design came into being at the exact same time the internal combustion engine was being invented. What was different about Diesel’s engine, though, was that rather than relying on the inherently combustible and explosive nature of gasoline, his engine used mechanical pressure on the fuel to create the heat needed to make the fuel combust. 

 

This meant that a diesel engine could run on many different types of inert, safer and more stable fuels, as it still can today, including fuels that could be created without needing to have oil wells or refineries. It could run on many types of vegetable oils, for example, like the bio-diesel fuels of our era made from corn or used cooking oil. And once Diesel had the engine fully designed, and the problems worked out, these engines proved to be simple and utterly reliable.

 

Rudolph Diesel apparently was driven from an early age to develop this engine for two reasons: first, to massively improve the efficiency of an engine’s use of fuel, compared to the pitiful 2% efficiency of the coal-burning steam engines of the nineteenth century. Second, Diesel wanted to provide endless and accessible “clean” power for the betterment of mankind, in contrast to the smoky miasma produced by coal engines. He appears to have been very much an idealist in that sense.

 

Nevertheless, when his engine invention took off on the world stage, he became a very wealthy man, one of the richest and most important men of the age. His story of brilliant invention, and then growing wealthy and famous on the basis of his world-changing new technology, is familiar. It's very much like the stories of the tech titans of our own era. But as with some of the more well-meaning tech entrepreneurs of our age, at a certain point Diesel could not avoid politics, nor business and engineering competition, at a time when the world’s major power technologies of the twentieth century were being invented. 

 

Brunt then explores a number of the important cross-currents Diesel had to navigate throughout his career. Diesel had to compete with the invention and rapid development of the internal combustion engine, and its backing by Rockefeller, who was determined to prevent any power plant type becoming dominant in the world market that did not require his oil. 

 

Diesel also had to keep innovating and improving his engines, managing his licenses and patents in many countries, and solving problems created by foreign engineers as they tried to implement his designs. And eventually, he had to come to terms with the fact that political leaders in numerous countries – especially Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany – were intent on using his marvelous engine design to power war machines, like submarines  and battleships, uses of which he morally disapproved. 

 

This is all fascinating history in its own right, but there is an added twist Brunt unveils toward the end of the story. It turns out that Rudolph Diesel disappeared, at the height of his fame and fortune, just before World War I began, apparently by falling or jumping overboard off a channel ferry on a night trip from France to Britain.

 

You can imagine the public fascination and uproar a mysterious and improbable disappearance like that would set off today if it happened to one of our major tech celebrities, particularly if the stories in the news kept changing and becoming less believable as the days went by. But the mystery was never solved. Brunt does a nice job laying out the threads of the mystery, reviewing the various theories that came and went, and then coming up with a startling but very plausible answer of his own as to what really happened to Rudolph Diesel.

 

This is an excellent piece of historical writing about an essential figure in the development of the modern world, whose remarkable story, and fame and fortune, somehow vanished from popular memory with the passing of time, and with his own mysterious disappearance. He may be gone, and mostly forgotten, but his remarkable invention still powers much of our world, even if in the end most diesel engines are powered by one of the oil-based fuel products Rockefeller and his heirs owned and controlled, and not one of the other non-petroleum fuels Diesel preferred.

 

Reading this book gave me new perspectives on the history of the engine technologies and fuels that power our world, and how those decisions were first made. It also reconfirmed the extent to which Big Oil, since its inception just as today, has been hyper-focused on pushing our society and its technology choices in ways that favor their profits and their political and economic control above all other factors. I didn’t know this particular part of that backstory, and I’m glad I do now. Highly recommended.

 

Book Review: The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (2025). Chris Hayes.

I heard on the news last night that this brand new book by the popular MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes has zoomed to the #1 position on the New York Times bestseller list, only a couple of weeks after its release. Having now read it, and given the political trends of the past few years, and the chaos flowing out from the new administration since January 20^th, it’s not hard to understand why.

The topic of attention, and the adverse effects that our modern communications and social media technologies have on us as individuals, as well as on our political and social systems, has been much discussed and analyzed recently, in magazine articles, books and on TV. Given all that “attention on attention”, it might be tempting to assume Hayes’ book is just more noise on a by-now tired subject. But it is no such thing. Instead, it is a deeply thoughtful and well-researched volume, written in a clear, honest and accessible style, which is a pleasure to read.

 

Hayes makes clear from the outset that he is bringing two very different sets of eyes and perspectives to his analysis. On the one hand, he is one of us, a person of our time and place, who constantly uses and is frequently disturbed by his own use of social media on his smartphone, and the troubling effects it has on his own mind, his ability to focus and his relationships with family and friends.

 

On the other hand, in his professional role as a cable news host, his success is completely dependent on his ability to understand and use the tools of manipulating and commanding the attention of his viewers, to keep them watching, and his advertisers happy. So he is able to bring both his personal, subjective feelings and his informed, rational understanding of attention in our current media environment to explore many important aspects of attention, and to explain why and how the ability to control attention has become the most important currency of power and control in our society.

 

In the process of his wide-ranging exploration of this vital topic for understanding what is happening right now in our society, our lives and our politics, he writes beautifully and with real insight about many aspects of attention.

 

He begins with an explanation of the book’s title, which is a reference to the scene in the Odyssey, where Circe warns Odysseus to plug the ears of his ship’s crew, and tie himself to the mast, to avoid being lured to death by the Sirens. He continues to revisit that analogy throughout the book, which he uses to portray the constant conflict between our desire to be stimulated by interesting things in our environment, and our need to filter out and block distractions.

 

From there, he’s off on a fascinating trip through many aspects of attention. He talks about “moral panics”, and many of the past instances through history where new technologies were greeted first with delight and amazement, then with fear, because of their perceived harms to existing modes of attention, focus and memory. He compares and contrasts those “moral panics” to the present moment, and the phenomenon of social media on smartphones.

 

Hayes moves on to discuss the purpose of attention in the human and animal worlds, and the forms it takes, including voluntary (when one deliberately focuses), involuntary (when we respond to startling noises or threats in our environment) and social (the conscious and unconscious attention we pay to others, and what they are saying and doing). He does a nice job of surveying some of the earlier theories of psychology and philosophy relating to attention and our human lives, and the strengths, weaknesses and relevance of various ideas from the past.

 

One area I found particularly intriguing was his discussion of fame and celebrity, and how it affects and disrupts social attention for both the famous person, and the people observing and interacting with that famous person. It’s unusual to get such a perceptive, self-aware and relatively modest account of the subjective personal experience of celebrity from someone who is himself quite famous. I appreciated the fact that he recognizes the conflicting responses he and other famous people have to being “important” and instantly recognizable, and could reflect thoughtfully upon both the positive and negative aspects of it.  

 

Inevitably, his narrative leads him to draw conclusions about how social media and our current information and media markets have essentially turned our attention into a commodity, like labor in the Industrial Age, that has been expropriated from us by monopoly capitalism. He then turns to the problem of Donald Trump, and how his mastery of the ability to constantly bring attention back to himself, even if it’s negative attention, has led him to his current domination of the American political scene.

 

This is one of those books that is too sweeping to be fully summarized in a review. But it is well worth reading, both for the pleasure of following Hayes’ ideas and insights, and for the assistance it provides us in thinking about our own lives, and how we might begin to reassert control over the devices and social media apps that have so powerfully captured our own attention. Highly recommended.     

Book Review: The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration and Discovery at the Dawn of AI. Dr. Fei-Fei Li (2023).

This week, with all the sensational news of corporate upheaval and intrigue at OpenAI, the leading artificial intelligence (AI) company in the world, we’re all suddenly taking note of this strange new chapter in the history of human technological innovation. Indeed, ever since the release of ChatGPT last year, with its astounding capabilities to generate text and write software, it’s become an unavoidable new topic of conversation and thought, as we try to figure out what it portends for the future of work, society and even the human race itself.

 

It was in this context that I noticed and picked up a copy of The Worlds I See by Dr. Fei-Fei Li at my local library.  I’m so glad I did, because it’s a truly excellent book, combining a poignant personal account of the author’s life as a young Chinese immigrant girl, along with her parents, as they try to build a better life in America, with an insider’s look at how the quest for AI has developed over the past two decades inside our major universities and corporations.

 

If you dive into the details of AI and its history in the various news stories now appearing almost daily in the media, you will quickly find not only Dr. Li’s name and story, but also those of many of the other influential players with whom she has worked and who she names and describes in her book, who are now leading the industry and its ongoing research and development. 

 

Li’s most notable contribution to the field flowed from her decision as a young professor to try to build a huge database (called Image Net) holding digitized, labelled images of all the physical objects in our world. She succeeded, despite the seemingly overwhelming size of the project, and the discouragement of some older eminent scientists in the field, who saw it as both a hopeless and pointless undertaking. Her account of the process by which she led a small group of young scientists to overcome every obstacle in their way is a fascinating and inspiring story of scientists and engineers at work in our own era.

 

But her success in creating Image Net had unexpected consequences that accelerated the larger AI project. After sponsoring a contest to have other researchers use her database to train algorithms for computerized visual recognition of objects over several years, it suddenly turned out that neural networks – an AI architecture that had been tried in the past but had been in academic disfavor for several decades – proved to be massively more effective than more recent techniques, once it had been trained with a sufficiently large database.

 

From this major achievement, Dr. Li became one of the top experts in computer vision in the world. She was sought after as a scientist, researcher and teacher, and ended up moving from Princeton to Stanford, and then ultimately to a top position in AI at Google, where she found a very different culture than that of academia, with different priorities, and a far larger budget for her fast-growing research department.

    

At the same time she was leading this world-changing AI research, though, she was also living a human life we would all recognize. For example, her mother has suffered for many years with a chronic, life-threatening health condition, which led Dr. Li to think about new uses to which AI could and should be put in serving the needs of humanity.

 

As a result of her mother’s challenge to use her research to help others, she became involved in an effort to apply computer vision to problems of patient care in hospitals. But when she encountered unexpected resistance from those she thought she was helping (the nurses and medical staff), she was forced to begin considering more closely the negative side of the AI equation, and to think more deeply about the ethical and moral implications of her life’s work.

 

In the course of this life she recounts, she has also been a wife, a mother, a friend and mentor to many colleagues, and a loving daughter to both her parents, and she nicely weaves many of those important personal relationships and how they influenced her work into the larger story of her brilliant career.

 

So much of how we reached this technological moment, and what it portends for our futures, has taken place behind the closed doors of university laboratories and in corporate board rooms.  This outstanding and compassionate personal account by a leading scientist in AI explains how we got here, what it felt like to be one of the key contributors in such a dramatic process of human discovery and innovation, and also how both the perils and potential rewards of this technology have come into sharper focus at each step forward. Very highly recommended.

Book Review: Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity and Democracy (2023). Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud.

This brand new non-fiction book combines the true story of a recent masterpiece of complex investigative journalism with revelations that are disturbing and important for all who value privacy, individual rights and democratic norms.

The authors are two noted French journalists, Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud.  They are both leaders in a French non-profit journalism organization called Forbidden Stories, which seeks to continue the investigative work of assassinated reporters from many dangerous authoritarian countries around the world. To accomplish this mission, they make use of the skills of a team of their own organization's staff, who work in collaboration with top reporters and technical experts from major news media companies and human rights groups from many nations.

The target of the special investigation described in this book was an Israeli company called NSO. NSO was a high-tech security company that developed and sold surveillance tools to governments. Among their most valuable tools was a secret product known as Pegasus, a combination of spy software and hosted I.T. services which allowed their customers to hack into smartphones, and to use the compromised phones and their data in a variety of nefarious ways.

Pegasus enabled not only access to all the existing content (email, text, video, audio) on any  phone it compromised, but also the ability to plant data on it (such as child porn, or other fake evidence used to besmirch the phone owner’s reputation, and justify arrest and prosecution). It also allowed the cracker to activate the microphone and cameras on the phone remotely, to serve as an unintended bugging device against the phone's owner, as well as being able to use the phone's GPS information to track the phone's owner's location. And it enabled the cracker to interact with the phone in other ways too, to control it, and download a vast array of personal private information from it on demand.

The product was quietly sold to select governmental agencies in allied countries with the permission of the Israeli government. In the beginning, it was marketed and defended by NSO as a tool for democratic governments, primarily in the west, to defend themselves and their populations from terrorists and criminals, in response to the many new apps and tools for data encryption on Apple and Android phones. The ability to hack into suspects' phones appealed to worried law enforcement agencies and officials in many countries, who feared that new phone encryption apps would prevent them from being able to monitor and investigate lawbreakers effectively.

However, this positive spin on the purpose and uses of NSO's tools took a dark turn when Forbidden Stories obtained a list of over 10,000 phone numbers from a secret source (probably within the NSO company), from nations around the world, which had been hacked using Pegasus. 

It quickly became obvious from the journalists' initial review of the phone numbers on the list that NSO must also be selling the product to repressive regimes and unsavory leaders in many places, to allow those dangerous customers to surveil, monitor and track individuals who were considered a threat to them or to their regime(s).  Pegasus suddenly looked to be a terrifyingly powerful new weapon for authoritarian dictatorships hunting dissidents, and seeking to silence or punish political opponents and inquisitive reporters.

Once Forbidden Stories realized the threat posed by the existence and sale of this tool, to them as journalists as well as to anyone who might fear the sort of all-knowing governmental surveillance and targeting made possible by Pegasus, they set to work on trying to find out more about it. To do that, they had to slowly and carefully build a wide network of respected journalists and media outlets in many countries, who would contribute to a large group investigative journalism project, but under very strict security restrictions.

One of the greatest risks to the project, and to the journalists working on it, was that each of their own smartphones might become a potential source of leaks that could blow the story wide open, before they were able to complete the deep and wide research needed to document it. Indeed, just by tracing the owners of many of the phone numbers on the list, the journalists working on the project quickly discovered that some of their own phones had already been hacked by Pegasus customers from repressive regimes.  

The reporters, computer experts and Forbidden Stories project organizers thus had to find ways to do their work, coordinate all their efforts and handle communications among participants on different continents, over a period of many months, without relying on the most common tools of their trade, the ones we all take for granted now – their phones and the internet.  This made their achievements all the more difficult, and their success that much more astonishing.

This is a truly disturbing, but impressive and thoroughly researched story on how a voluntary network of idealistic journalists around the globe pieced together the truth about a set of repressive surveillance tools, aimed directly at our smartphones, that could destroy the ability of anyone to trust in their own personal safety or security from malevolent governments and criminals anywhere in the world.  Having managed to uncover and document the story in astonishing detail, they then made it public, with a highly synchronized barrage of stories from many reporters in different places, with each report addressing the local instances and effects of the Pegasus spyware and operations in their many respective countries.  

The fact that Forbidden Stories' investigation, and its revelations, ultimately drove NSO out of its very lucrative phone spyware business is encouraging, but only somewhat. Unfortunately, as the authors point out, we still have to recognize how relatively easy it is to create spyware systems like Pegasus, tools that can use all the wonderful technological capabilities of our smartphones against us. The authors suggest we need to try to prepare for the next time in advance, by passing laws to try to limit or prevent development of these kinds of Orwellian surveillance technologies in the future.

This is an exciting real-world thriller of investigative journalism, combined with a vital cautionary tale about the threats to freedom and privacy posed by our ubiquitous smartphone technology. It includes a powerful and enlightening introduction by Rachel Maddow. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Fire in the Sky: Cosmic Collisions, Killer Asteroids, and the Race to Defend Earth (2019). Gordon L. Dillow.

I stumbled on this intriguing book over the holidays, in a pile of remaindered science books in one of our local bookstores. It turned out to be one of the better impulse book buys I’ve made lately.

The title itself is suggestive of the contents, but doesn’t nearly capture the richness of the author's presentation. The general topic is asteroids colliding with earth, and the threat they pose to life on earth and modern civilization, but Dillow approaches the subject with a measure of humor, a longtime journalist’s talent for research and storytelling, and a truly cosmic problem to consider.

The book begins with the author describing a large meteorite exploding in the atmosphere over his home in Arizona a few years ago, a spectacular natural event which he and many others witnessed, and which started him down the road toward writing this book.

From that beginning, he moves to the story of the 50,000-year-old meteorite crater near Flagstaff, Arizona, which is a now a local tourist site. He explains how it was created, how it was “discovered” by white settlers in the nineteenth century, and how (as with other meteorite crash sites around the world) it was initially believed to be the residue of some sort of volcanic event. He then recounts the history of the clear-sighted individuals who eventually realized what it was, but then had to convince a skeptical worldwide scientific community over many decades that it really was the result of a massive meteorite impact.

Dillow then continues to weave together other aspects of the related scientific discoveries and events which inform our current understanding of the asteroid and comet threats to our planet. He explains how science had long had a consensus view that natural processes in the earth sciences were controlled by the uniformitarian doctrine, the idea that all changes were gradual, and caused by the same processes we now know about, a concept that was recently disrupted by the rise of the catastrophism doctrine. 

Catastrophism is the contrary view (to uniformitarianism) that contends that some major changes in earth’s history were the result of cataclysmic but rare events, such as asteroid strikes. Inevitably, this leads the author to a discussion of the changing scientific beliefs about what caused the end of the dinosaur era, a debate which has played out over the past half century or so in popular culture as well as the scientific community.

Some of the most fascinating parts of the book detail several major asteroid strikes in historical memory, and how scientists came to understand and prove what they really were, in contrast to earlier religious and pseudo-scientific explanations (spoiler alert: they weren't caused by UFOs). 

The 1908 Tunguska explosion in Russia, which I can recall was still considered a scientific mystery when I was young, is one of the best examples, as well as the 2013 Chelyabinsk asteroid event (also coincidentally in Russia). Dillow includes fascinating descriptions of both, and the means by which scientists eventually were able to confirm and explain what happened, including being able to calculate the approximate size and speed of the asteroids, and explaining why they created the particular explosive effects they did.

From there, the story moves on to the networks of governmental organizations and resourceful amateur citizen astronomers who have gradually built a database of Near Earth Objects (NEOs), and have begun to plan for the planetary defense. Needless to say, there are some wonderfully interesting and eccentric personalities involved. Dillow also looks at the growing public recognition and acceptance of the risks posed by asteroid strikes, the strategies proposed for defending against asteroids on a collision course with our planet, the politics of it all, and also includes evaluations of the Hollywood science fiction movies that have been made about it.

This book was written just a little too early to include a discussion of Don’t Look Up, the satirical 2021 disaster film about an impending asteroid strike starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence (previously reviewed here). It’s too bad, because at the time, most people (including me) thought the movie was really not about an asteroid strike, but about climate change, and our collective failure to do anything effective to stop it from destroying our planet and civilization. It was very much in keeping with a long history of popular culture and science belittling and laughing about the idea of giant asteroids striking earth, whether in the ancient past or in the future.

But in retrospect, Dillow’s presentation makes it clear that while a catastrophic asteroid strike may be a far less likely event in any of our lifetimes, it is one that is no less potentially devastating to us, our global human society and life on earth than the climate crisis. For that reason, he suggests, we should take it seriously too, and keep working on ways to try to protect our world from this low probability but very high-impact threat.

Fire in the Sky is an excellent piece of science reporting. It includes an enjoyable and educational mix of human stories of individual dedication and collective folly, along with plenty of science history. It also provides clear explanations of what we currently know and believe about asteroids, comets, and their frequent collisions with other celestial bodies, especially Earth and the moon. Highly recommended.

Book Review: God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor and the Search for Meaning (2021). Meghan O’Gieblyn.

Here as the subject for my last post and review for 2022 is one of the more unusual and challenging, yet fun books I’ve read this year. I discovered the author, Meghan O’Gieblyn, from reading her amusing advice column Cloud Support in Wired magazine, and decided she seemed somehow unusual and funny enough as a writer that I should read her latest book, God, Human, Animal, Machine.

I knew from the title that it had something to do with technology, A.I., and what it all means, but beyond that I didn’t know what to expect. As it turned out, it was a strange delight, a series of chapter essays exploring the state of the world and the human condition in the midst of the advanced technologies that now shape our lives, as seen through her own life and story.

O’Gieblyn is a fascinating narrator. Born into and raised in a strict Christian fundamentalist family, and a committed believer throughout her youth, she attended a Bible college, where she dove deep into the history of Western and Christian philosophy. But somewhere along the way, she lost her religion, became an atheist and a non-believer, and later for a time a cocktail waitress with an addiction problem.

Despite this dramatic change in her beliefs and circumstances, she never lost her curiosity about the mysteries of existence. She became a writer about technology, which clearly fascinates her, but the issues which remain at the fore for her as a writer have to do with how we humans relate to and are affected by the marvelous things we invent. She also has a unique ability as a writer to probe these issues in essays by combining her own life experiences, emotional responses to people and situations she encounters, and her exhaustive knowledge of the history and ideas of philosophy.

The first chapter begins with a discussion of her experience with a small robotic dog which was provided to her temporarily by the manufacturer for research purposes. In a story that is both amusing and poignant, she talks about her first interactions with the robot dog, the uses to which she puts it, the role it takes on in her life, and the disquieting emotions she develops as she and the toy become more familiar with each other.

From this funny initial anecdote, she expands into a wider discussion of mind, consciousness, the capacity of artificial creations to have them, and what it means for us as humans to develop relationships with them. That discussion becomes quite deep and informative, as she contrasts and compares current ideas on these foundational human questions with those of many of the greatest philosophers throughout history.

I’ve never seriously studied philosophy, but this book was a crash course in the ideas of being, existence, mind, consciousness and the nature of reality, going back more than two thousand years. What made it particularly exciting was to realize the extent to which these same issues that surface with respect to artificial intelligence and robotics are the same existential questions that have been asked and pondered for millennia, before any of our current science and technology existed.

One particularly intriguing part of the book discusses the modern “trans-humanist” movement, now embraced by many Silicon Valley eminences and high-tech visionaries (or would-be visionaries), as first predicted by the futurist Ray Kurzweil. This is the notion that the ultimate end state for humanity, much to be desired, is to upload our personalities and memories to the cloud, and thereby attain immortality across the universe. A book I reviewed recently, Survival of the Richest, concerning the escape and survival fantasies of billionaires, documented the current state and wide popularity of this belief system among the very rich, the tech elites and some celebrities.

O’Gieblyn doesn’t put much stock in this movement or the likelihood of its success, but rather than simply skewering it, she brilliantly lays out her own observations of how closely the dreams, aims and objectives of the trans-humanists match the world view and goals of an earlier Christian apocalyptic movement, a thousand years ago. That one didn’t really work out either, as she gently points out.

Throughout the book, the author relates the ways that her questions about so many new technologies and areas of science – robots, artificial intelligence, quantum uncertainty, chatbots, life extension, the pandemic, and viruses – keep winding back to closely mirror the questions she struggled with in her days as a young Christian student, as she tried to understand and justify her existence, faith and beliefs. The book becomes the story of humanity’s eternal quest for meaning, in parallel with her own personal journey to find answers to the same questions, even though now surrounded by previously unimaginable and novel technologies.

The book is full of smart insights, tough questions, and her personal anecdotes and admissions, all skillfully tied together into an entertaining, challenging and thought-provoking package through her unassuming but expert narration. One of the ways she particularly excels is in her ability to connect topics that we might not have considered together before, and make compelling points in doing so. Who knew philosophy could be so entertaining, as well as so important to the moral and societal choices we face with today's technologies? Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Loop: How Technology is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back (2022). Jacob Ward.

As we approach the end of 2022, and the beginning of a new year, I’m posting my last two book reviews of this first year of my blog, which I began in February. This time of the year is usually a time for reflection, and for looking forward to next year’s projects and challenges, so it’s fitting that I’m choosing to review two books I’ve read recently that take a similar approach to evaluating aspects of the technology-steeped world in which we live.

In The Loop, NBC News Technology Correspondent Jacob Ward coins the term “the loop” to symbolize an iterative dynamic in our society and lives whereby artificial intelligence, and the computerized algorithms that increasingly influence and control many aspects of our modern lives, are in fact shrinking our capacity for personal choice and individual decision-making.

He begins with several chapters on recent research in behavioral psychology that have demonstrated the extent to which we as humans respond unconsciously to stimuli in our environment of which we aren’t even fully aware, and process information and uncertainty in the “reality” we are experiencing on two different levels, one of which is fast and impulsive, and thus prone to being influenced and misled by past experiences and beliefs, while the other is slower, more analytical and fact-based.

From an evolutionary standpoint, this two-level thinking process worked reasonably well to allow us to survive and prosper in the primitive world in which we evolved. System 1, the more automatic and frequently used one, allows us to make fast decisions and act immediately without a lot of thought, while System 2 allows us to apply slower, more “critical thinking” evaluation to difficult information and stimuli. The combination of the two allows for quick response to threats, but also the ability to grow, learn, and change.

Unfortunately, the invention of computer algorithms, based increasingly on vast quantities of data and attempts to build artificial intelligence to help us to make choices, has created a dangerous vulnerability for us. The businesses building these systems, Ward suggests, have studied the weaknesses of our human decision-making processes, and tailored their algorithms to exploit our emotions and impulses for the benefit of their bottom line, or in support of hidden political objectives or opinions, rather than to just help us make better decisions.

This is not a startling new revelation at this point. It’s common knowledge by now that smartphones were designed to use visual and aural rewards to keep us looking at them, and that social media’s algorithms were designed to maximize our emotional engagement with their feeds, by favoring and promoting posts that engender fear and anger, but Ward does an excellent job of demonstrating how the dynamic plays out in a variety of other different contexts and real-world situations.

For example, in one chapter, he describes how the online gaming industry has created incentives in their games that are specifically designed to create addiction in their users. Along the way, he introduces us to Nir Eyal, a Stanford MBA who wrote the popular book Hooked on how to build “habit-forming” products, which became a bible for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and Robert  Cialdini's classic work Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (previously reviewed here) on how to get people to do what you want.

Ward goes on to explore many problems in applying algorithms and artificial intelligence tools in areas such as education, therapy, policing and crime, and discusses troubling aspects of these attempts that surface repeatedly across the different application areas. 

He raises the fact that we often don’t know or understand how many of these algorithms arrive at their decisions. They're usually "black boxes", which we're expected (and often required) to accept as valid on face value, even though some have been challenged in court and ultimately found to be faulty or unreliable.  In many cases, these algorithms are protected by intellectual property rights, so that the individual negatively affected by them is explicitly barred from understanding the basis for the decision the algorithm rendered.

Ward also points out that organizations like courts, law enforcement agencies, insurance companies, credit agencies and banks often use computer algorithms to make life-altering decisions based on underlying big data which may reflect existing social biases and injustices. This process of using real data based on unfair conditions to make new unjust decisions simply perpetuates and reinforces the existing injustice, under the misleading appearance of the algorithm's "objectivity".

This is a wide-ranging and interesting exploration of how the alluring promise of machine intelligence and algorithms to enrich our lives has instead too often been used to limit our choices, and to manipulate us for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. Recommended.

Book Review: Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (2022). Douglas Rushkoff.

I just finished reading this interesting new book by Douglas Rushkoff, a professor of media theory and digital economics at Queens/CUNY, who is also an award-winning author of numerous books, a podcaster, and a long-time technology observer and critic. 

It’s not quite what I thought I was going to be reading, which was just a travelogue through all the ways in which the stupendously wealthy are planning to escape their most feared social and human catastrophes, although it does have plenty of elements of that.

Instead, the author had a broader criticism of the ultra-rich tech magnates in mind, which has to do with what he labels “The Mindset”. The Mindset as he describes it is an intellectual framework coming out of Silicon Valley and other tech centers that combines boyish fantasies and science fiction, “techno-solutionism” (the desire to find tech solutions to every human existential and social question), Ayn Rand-style selfish individualism and libertarianism, misogyny, and a desire to dominate the world while accruing vast wealth and power.

One ironic outcome of The Mindset for the tech billionaires, Rushkoff suggests, is a need to imagine and devise complex personal survival and escape plans, funded by their vast wealth, to survive the very crises their businesses and technologies are helping to cause. These crises include all the familiar ones we’re concerned about these days: political polarization, the climate emergency caused by our fossil-fuel based economy, civil unrest, the threat of war and nuclear disaster, and the rise of authoritarianism around the world.

In the course of the book, the author recounts many of the most egregious and often ridiculous ideas, pursuits and beliefs that have become part of what he calls The Mindset. For example, he talks about the obsessions of men like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson to somehow get themselves and their wealthiest peers into space, in the belief that if they can just make space travel and life possible, they can survive the global collapse on Earth they all fear is coming.

Early in the book, Rushkoff takes us behind the scenes, to visit some of the survival estates and hideouts the super-rich have created, to try to stay alive when everything on Earth goes to pieces. He provides insights into tech-driven phenomena like the rise of blockchain and crypto currencies, which I have long thought (as does he) are massively complex and costly solutions to non-existent problems. He also talks about the plans of some tech leaders to find a way to upload their minds to computers, and to thereby achieve immortality, removed from the needs or reality of our ties to our human bodies, or alternatively to discover and invent medical technologies that will eliminate aging for themselves and their families.

Rushkoff clearly has a political opinion about all this, and constantly contrasts what he characterizes as the cold and narcissistic nature of The Mindset, and its most powerful believers, with a more humane, cooperative and altruistic world view and way of being. And I’m very sympathetic to his general outlook and moral orientation, although in some cases his analysis seems a little too simplistic and rigid.

Nevertheless, Survival of the Richest is a very thought-provoking and detailed look at some of the peculiar fantasies, excesses, projects and ambitions of the super-wealthy tech leaders of our era. Recommended.

Honorable Mentions: Automation, Data and the Big Companies of the Tech Economy.

Today I thought I'd share another group of reviews of five good books I read from a few years back, in my ongoing "Honorable Mentions" series. The topics for today are books about high tech: the companies, our computers, phones and automation, big data, social media and the impact of these contemporary features of life on us as individuals and on society. Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

 

Book Review: World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (2017). Franklin Foer.

The author of this thoughtful critique of the role of the major tech companies on our lives, and particularly its effect on the state of our public discourse, is a well-respected writer from major periodicals such as The New Republic and The Atlantic. He also wrote a popular and fun book about soccer and its place in international sports, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (2010), which I enjoyed, and which has been translated into dozens of languages.

This book is an eloquent rumination on the negative impacts on human society and freedom resulting from the economic and social dominance of the new technological corporate giants of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. Of particular interest are some of the chapters where he extrapolates from his own experiences, for example when he was involved in the attempted “reboot” of The New Republic after it was bought by an early Facebook gazillionaire, Chris Hughes.

Foer explores the philosophical, psychological, ethical, economic and political aspects of our current situation, living in a global economy dominated by monopolistic technology companies and their financial imperatives. Recommended.

 

Book Review: The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (2014). Nicholas Carr.

It can be hard to remember (even for those of us who were there back then) that as recently as the first five or six years of the 2000s, we all lived in a world where no one owned a smartphone, and social media as we now know it was still in its infancy. When these tech innovations first appeared, we were a little skeptical, but mostly full of wonder, for the promise of all the benefits they might bring to our lives.

There is no question that these creations have changed our lives, and in many respects for the better. Yet from early on, some of us also wondered how the world being created by ubiquitous computerization and automation would change and negatively impact us as individuals and as social creatures in the world.

Carr was one of the early social critics of the automation revolution we have experienced since the beginning of the 21st century. He focuses particularly on the changing nature of work, our human creativity, and what it does to us and our freedom to become so entirely dependent on machines to do much of our thinking, production and decision-making for us.

This is a thought-provoking analysis of how our clever devices and high tech inventions in the areas of automation and artificial intelligence are changing us, and not necessarily for the better, as individuals and as a species. Recommended.



Book Review: Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race and Identity: What Our Online Selves Tell Us About Our Offline Selves (2015). Christian Rudder.

This and the following book, Everybody Lies, are among my favorites in this genre of modern tech social criticism and theory, because of their focus on what can be learned about whole populations from the vast databases of personal and individual information that we voluntarily provide, often unwittingly, to major online applications and the corporate giants who own them.

Dataclysm was written by an early and very successful entrepreneur in the online dating marketplace, as a co-founder of the dating site OkCupid. In it, he explains how dating and social media sites quickly learned to use the data gathering and population analytics tools of social science and “big data” to make their romantic matching algorithms more effective and successful. But as an unintended consequence, in the process of improving their matching techniques, their data analysts also uncovered vast troves of information about the extent to which the view of ourselves that we want to project to the world differs from the way we really are, and from the opinions, beliefs and prejudices we actually hold.

This book is a fascinating exploration of the ways in which big data from social media and dating sites can tell us larger truths about who we really are, and what we really believe, as opposed to what we tell ourselves and the world, with a particular focus on our true feelings about the endlessly fascinating questions of love, sexuality, sexual roles, racism, identity and other forms of prejudice. Highly recommended. 

Book Review: Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data and What the Internet Can Tell us About Who We Really Are (2017). Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.

As mentioned above, this book and Dataclysm are the two books in this group that focus on social science research based on the “big data” collected by some of our largest tech companies and most popular online applications. The author of Everybody Lies, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, is a Harvard-educated economist and New York Times writer who was formerly a data scientist at Google. His experiences at Google form the basis for much of the story he tells in this book.

The most important point I took from this book had to do with the author's explanation of the differing value and significance of online data collected from two different types of online applications, and the respective usefulness of these two types of data in social science research. The distinction he draws is between the vast troves of information collected from social sites (dating apps and social media, as highlighted in Dataclysm), as opposed to the data compiled from search engine sites, especially Google because of its dominance in the online search market.

The special value of search engine data, as he points out, comes from the fact that unlike the social sites, where people are deliberately trying to create perfected (and therefore often falsified) images of themselves, to show people only what they think the viewers want to see, on search engines people reveal exactly who they really are, by the nature of the questions they want to have answered, in what they presume is a private and anonymous online space.

From this dichotomy between the image people try to present of themselves in seeking approval from others, versus the questions they most urgently want to have answered in private when they think no one is listening, we see how “everybody lies”. 

One of the most compelling anecdotes to demonstrate this point had to do with a discovery made by a researcher in analyzing Google’s data that showed that the relative number of searches for racist jokes about blacks, when broken down by county and voting district, provided an extremely reliable and highly-correlated prediction of voting trends for and against President Obama.

Obviously (at that time, at least, before the Trump era), very few people would put “I’m a racist who hates blacks” on their social media profiles or dating site applications, yet there it was – thousands of people all over the country who thoughtlessly confessed their true beliefs by looking for racist jokes. 

It was a fascinating revelation, that something we take so much for granted now, the use of Google to answer every question that pops into our minds, could show so much about us as a population, who we really are as a people, what we want to know, and what we actually think and believe, as opposed to the images we try to create in our public-facing presentations of ourselves.

This book is an important and readable exploration of the new tools of social science and population research that have arisen as a result of search engines, social media and massive online data collection. Highly recommended.



Book Review: The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google (2017). Scott Galloway.

It’s a measure of how quickly our world has changed in the past twenty to thirty years that a book written in 2017 (only five years ago) already contains some then-startling insights that by now seem like old news, even though they’re about companies whose size, dominance and relevance has only increased in the time since it was written.

Nevertheless, The Four is a valuable and entertaining trip through the world of the four most impactful tech companies (in the author's view) whose creation stories and subsequent successes have so shaped our modern society: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.

Personally, I believe there are really five of these companies. Microsoft has been successfully dodging much of the negative attention now regularly pointed at the other four for many years, due to successful public relations work and corporate image polishing they've done since their own days as the Evil Empire of high tech domination and monopolistic practices in the late 1990s. I applaud the company's efforts over the years to become better corporate citizens, and some of it has been genuine, but I would argue that in their essential nature and behavior, their size and influence, their centrality and importance to the tech world, and in their business practices, Microsoft is not that different from the other four.   

But in any case, Galloway has written a valuable expose’ of each of the other four omnipresent companies who have come to dominate the world of high technology and our modern way of life, and the many ways in which each maintains effective control over its own sphere of influence within the interdependent tech economy. He provides interesting anecdotes and insights into the rise and continuing success of each company and its founder (or founders), along with plenty of interesting commentary. 

Galloway is a professor at New York University, and reportedly an engaging speaker as well as a successful business writer, who brings a very readable mix of humor, outrage, facts, corporate history and good writing to this notable book. Recommended.