Karen Hao, Empire of AI

 

- If you’re looking for a clear, detailed and timely guide to how artificial intelligence is reshaping global power, this new book is an essential read. 

- Empire of AI examines how Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs have marshalled state resources, talent, data, and industry to become a major force in artificial intelligence. Karen Hao, an experienced AI journalist and former MIT Technology Review reporter, traces the history, institutions, and people behind the AI push. She explores the interplay between government strategy, private companies, academic labs, and everyday uses of AI like surveillance and social management. The book is part reportage, part policy analysis, and part ethical inquiry into what concentrated AI power means for democracy, security, and human rights. [This para was written by AI, which is why it's so flat and boring!]

- The book is a fascinating and very clearly written story about the beginnings of AI and its development over the last decade. Sam Altman is central to the drama. He is a brilliant entrepreneur with deep connections to billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk. Over the last ten years he has assembled a small group of computer programming geniuses and other heavyweights in Silicon Valley. He founded OpenAI in 2015 to compete with Google Search, and was able to source huge funding from Microsoft particularly. 

- Altman's ambition from the start was to purchase a huge number of computer chips from Nvidia and build massive data mining operations. He viewed this data consumption as absolutely essential, not just to build a new business, but to position AI as a groundbreaking service to humanity. It was to be a check against purely market forces. That early and noble ambition of course turned out very quickly to be complete nonsense. Hao was given unparalleled access to the management and staff of OpenAI, and also its Board members. She discloses the truth and doesn't hold back. 

- The essence of this massively disruptive sector is that it requires an unprecedented amount of proprietary resources: the 'compute' power of scarce high-end chips, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans on the ground 'cleaning it up' for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the need for energy and water underlying everything. 

- Hao also explores very personal details about Altman and his family, and his peculiar management style. He was considered untrustworthy and deceptive by key staff and board members. 

- What I really enjoyed about the book was the intricate way Hao delves deep into how data is amassed on such a huge scale, of course without permission. Then tested and refined by heaps of poorly paid staff from third world countries, many of whom could barely speak English. 

- I learnt so much from this book. It's totally absorbing. And so well written and edited. There's not one editorial mistake in the whole 482 pages. Congratulations Penguin.

Paul Daley, The Leap

 

- Acclaimed journalist and writer Paul Daley has written an intriguing novel about Australia - its colonial history, its people and its blokey way of life. 

- Your typical Englishman, Benedict Fotheringham-Gaskill, MA Philosophy and Theology (Oxon), is posted to Canberra as a diplomat. He and his now wife, Lucy, were familiar with Australia, particularly Sydney and its beaches. They had toured as backpackers years ago. But now there are bushfires all over southeastern NSW, including Canberra, making it difficult to enjoy the old haunts.  

- The book is riddled with so many dopey Aussie cliches unfortunately - blokes, beers, pubs, fights, pig hunting, Bondi beach. It focuses on the ugly. And of course snakes and crocs are mentioned. Canberra has become unwelcoming due to the haze and ash in the hot air, prompting Ben to become a little cynical about the War Memorial, the vacant suburbs, and even ANZAC Day. 

- An Australian woman, Charlene Sloper, an air hostess, is killed by falling from a high window in Saudi Arabia. Two Northern Irish women, both known petty thieves, were arrested for having pushed her. The Saudi government will summarily execute them, as it usually does to offending women, by a beheading or a stoning. Ben is tasked with persuading Cecil Sloper, the father of the dead woman, not to continue pressing for their execution as he's been doing. The British government is anti this primitive Islamic behaviour. 

- Cecil Sloper is a successful grazier with a long family history. His forebears were granted an 'empty land' in 1818. 'There was no one here. Not a damned civilised soul…The wretched natives! They’d no rightful claim to this place.’ He's fond of quoting passages from the Old Testament, ones praising retribution and revenge. And legitimising violence. Ben quotes New Testament passages back to him, focussing on love and forgiveness. They don't wash with Sloper. 

- Ben flies to a regional town called The Leap, adjacent to Sloper's property. He meets a driver called Nelson, who's an Indigenous leader and musician. And, as it turns out, highly intelligent and influential. 

-The Leap is an ugly town full of uneducated, racist, drunk morons. The name comes from the leap that native women and their children did over a cliff to escape the murderous colonial forces in 1856. As Sloper's ancestor wrote: ‘We slayed the warriors with gunshot and blade and instilled into the stragglers the greatest terror so that they ran like so many lemmings and leapt off the highest cliffs, a pitiful procession one after another, whereupon their bodies were dashed on the stony ravine floor far, far below.’ 

- The drunk blokes in the pub decide to go pig hunting and demand Ben come too. He is utterly weak when it comes to succumbing to beers, whiskeys, smokes and pills. He is forced to kill a boar by slitting its throat. ‘He realises that these men…dwell on the edge of another civilisation’. Nelson tells him he's like 'that other poor English bookish type who drank himself to death in the hut the other side of the Babylon'. We're reminded of the classic ‘Wake in Fright’.

- There is another side to Ben however, and it emerges slowly. He's angry and articulate and holds nothing back in condemning Sloper outright. 

- The novel ends dramatically but it's a satisfying resolution. 

Andrew Roff, Here Are My Demands

 

- This debut novel from 'child-wrangler' and lawyer Andrew Roff is simply superb on so many levels. It's a novel with two dimensions - we're immersed in the technological and social world of 2058, and we're bogged down in a major political row in Canberra, now officially known as Ngunnawal-Ngambri.

- Getting familiar with Roff's future is a challenge, yet it's entirely credible. There are no mobile phones any more, and AI has greatly reduced work hours and job opportunities. The dominant technology is augmented reality via 'shrouds', activated by facial implants around the eyes, nose and ears, that offer projectors, cameras, microphones and earbuds that just need to be touched. In addition to projecting virtual representations of non-occupants into the virtual space, the shroud allows for physical occupants to see and hear the virtual visitors. 

- The main character is Maggie. She's twenty-six and a lobbyist. A new progressive government has been elected after 19 years in opposition. Labor and the Greens merged in the early 40’s, and transformed into the Australian Progressive Party, OzProg. Other parties are the Truvies (conservatives who broke away from the Liberal Party in the 30’s), and the Liberals. The new government, in their election campaign, promised to introduce a Universal Basic Income scheme, since this was their way of dealing with high levels of unemployment and the greatly reduced work hours available to those employed. Automation had wiped out loads of jobs, low-skilled but also accountants, winemakers, auctioneers, and middle managers.

- Maggie wrote the basic Income proposal for Tan, the Treasurer, to take to Cabinet. She is passionate about it. ‘Almost half the country lives below the poverty line…there aren’t enough human jobs to go around’. But as she's told constantly the business class will hate it, as will many MPs, and the Americans who Australia still bows and scrapes to.

- Now Tan and her boss Brij are tasking her with the job of liason. The Liberal/Truvie alliance is chucking a tantrum. One of their leaders is willing to ‘compromise’ provided corporates won't face substantially increased taxes. Maggie is morally outraged. She's asked to take some leave.

- There are a number of side stories in the novel, including family, relationships, and the press, that add richness to the central political and social focus. 

- Andrew Roff has written a deep, stimulating and fundamentally realistic novel. I found it very hard to put down. 

Anne Irfan, A Short History of the Gaza Strip.

 

- I can do no better than this back-cover summary in capturing the essence of this magnificent, detailed, and lucidly written book. It was completed in March 2025, so it is fully up to date. 

- Anne Irfan is a multiple award-winning historian and lecturer in Interdisciplinary Race, Gender and Postcolonial Studies at University College London. 

'The world‘s eyes are on the Gaza Strip. After more than a year of Israeli military bombardment, it is the scene of unimaginable destruction. It is also one of the most politically significant territories on the planet. Yet how many of us know anything of its history?

In this vital book, Anne Irfan, a leading historian of Palestine-Israel, examines six key moments that bring us to the present day. She begins with Israel’s expulsion of the Palestinian people in 1948, when Israel was established and the Gaza region was truncated to a tiny territory of just 141 square miles. Going on to detail Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the Palestinian national struggle and formation of the PLO, the first intifada, the creation of the Palestinian Authority and the rise of Hamas, Irfan argues that, collectively, these events help explain how we have arrived at the catastrophe of the 2020s and the genocidal violence unleashed by Israel in Gaza after the Hamas-led attacks of October 7.

Written with remarkable clarity, A Short History of the Gaza Strip draws on a decade of meticulous research, weaving in the voices and stories of Palestinians from farmers and teachers to poets and activists. It is an indispensable read for anyone seeking to deepen their knowledge of Palestine and the wider region. In Irfan‘s words, 'History matters, especially in Palestine' - and never more so than today.

'A timely, short, highly informative history that is sure to dispel many of the misconceptions currently widespread about Gaza. It will remind readers of what was lost in the course of Israel’s aggression, as well as recognising Gaza's resilience'.

(Raja Shehada, author of 'What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?')

Cheon Seon-Ran, The Midnight Shift

 

- This bestselling cult novel from Korea is about vampires and how challenging they find humans. I found it exquisitely boring.  

- Nevertheless I continued reading it, not just because I'd bought it, but to see if some underlying theme would emerge that would give it some deeper meaning. It did, sort of. Loneliness is central. Vampires exploit loneliness. Children for example kill Santa when they're young, which is why every child gets lonelier and lonelier as they grow up.

- There are two central characters, Suyeon, a female detective, and Violette, a vampire hunter. Six suicides, or so it seems, have occurred at a Rehabilitation Hospital. The old women, who suffered from dementia or depression, had jumped from the sixth floor over a period of weeks. Surprisingly, there was hardly any blood. Violette concludes that a vampire did it. There were two holes above the left clavicle on each victim. Vampires suck so much blood that if humans fall from a height immediately afterwards, a minimal amount of blood leaves the body. 

- Or is there a human serial killer involved? Nanju, a nurse at the hospital, is a suspect, because she cared for all the victims, and was recently identified as a drug dealer. She owed money to criminals and was desperate. Nanju would have picked the victims, who were ‘tired of living'. 

 - Violette is an expert on vampires and knows some intimately. Lily is one. Lily discloses that vampires are two hundred years older than most humans. Violette also knows another vampire, Greta, who tells her about the old Agreement between humans and vampires: vampires would not kill humans by drawing human blood. They would only weaken them, and the victims would fully recover after a few weeks. 

- The novel doesn't end satisfactorily at all. The police don't believe in vampires, and mistrust Detective Suyeon and vampire hunter Violette. So that's it. 

 

Katie Kitamura, Audition

 

- Acclaimed American author Katie Kitamura's new novel is brilliant, to say the least. It focuses on the precariousness of life and relationships. Everything is a play. We're all actors. But pretence can’t last. Playacting can’t last. We can play it hard of course but eventually we're exhausted. 

- Then the quandary: what is the truth about us and our lives? Is it possible to get to the bottom of it?

- It's a 200 page novel in two parts. In Part One a middle-aged woman, who is an actress, meets a young student, Xavier, for lunch at a restaurant in the West Village in New York. Her husband Tomas, a writer, walks in, but suddenly leaves. He had come to the wrong restaurant. Did he see her there, with the young attractive man?

- Xavier had good reason to believe she was his mother. But she didn’t ‘give up a child’ as a journalist's article claimed. She had an abortion, we're told.

- She miscarried the second time, we're told. Her marriage was difficult. She had affairs, ‘an expression of restlessness’. 

- Currently she's rehearsing for the main role in a play called Rivers, and she's struggling with the role of a woman who switches at a key moment between two different characters. She has to move from a woman in grief to a woman of action. 

- In Part Two of the novel we learn that Rivers was a huge success, and her performance was enthusiastically celebrated by reviewers. But the story takes a shocking twist, which adds a whole new dimension to the novel. She is now continually referring to Xavier as her ‘son’ and she his ‘mother’. She even refers to Tomas as his ‘father’, and ‘our child’. Xavier, who has been promoted to the position of Assistant Director at the local theatre, ruptures their tired patterns. Like a kid coming into your life. There's a horror story element to it.

- She and Tomas agree to allow Xavier to stay in their large apartment ‘for as long as you like, it’s your home after all’. ‘I had a memory of the room in his adolescent years, a mess of dirty clothes and half-eaten sandwiches’. 

- Tomas is enlivened by Xavier’s presence in their apartment. ‘…a loosening of the old habits and constraints that had drawn the boundary around this person and made him who he was’. 

- Xavier asks if his girlfriend Hana can come live with him. Hana turns out to be a strong person. ‘He needs to grow up', she said of Xavier. And Tomas, 'an old man', seems attracted to Hana 'a young woman'. Another familiar pattern. 

- Eventually the actress recognises that the story they are playing is a pretence. ‘…in the end it took very little for the whole thing to collapse’. She realises she has become, or was always, a woman who cannot distinguish between what is real and what is not real. 

- Kitamura has written a provocative novel that challenges our ordinary patterns of life deeply. Acting, pretence, marriage, childlessness, loneliness, delusion. 

- As I said, brilliant. 

-(Unfortunately the novel is poorly edited. There are misplaced commas everywhere, and clumsy verbiage like this: ‘I was not indeterminate to myself’.)

Caro Llewellyn, Love Unedited

 

- Caro Llewellyn has written a lovely, delicious, paean to the publishing industry. Set in Sydney, Melbourne and New York it is a story of personal relationships and secret histories. People can love and care, but they can also deeply hurt and betray, parents included. 

- The book has a charm from the word go. Wet Melbourne streets, the leaves, the restaurants (Melbourne's much loved The European especially) all feature in multiple and enmeshed stories that are simply captivating. 

- The prime focus is the editor Edna and her passionate relationship with a famous (unnamed unfortunately) English author who is now living in New York. His wife and five-year-old daughter were killed by a speeding car when he was young man. He and Edna exchange affectionate emails every day.  

- Her parents 'abandoned' her, and she feels pangs of guilt. Her mother died when Edna was a child and her father shot himself a decade later. Edna departed Australia and found a job in NY as an editor at Random House. She attends the Frankfurt Book Fair, giving us a great description of it. And of course she meets up with her author/lover. They travel to Rome and indulge in its food and architectural glory. 

- As readers we glide between timeframes and cities. And we also meet Molly, an Australian book editor whose mother was called Edna. Edna died of Multiple Sclerosis when Molly was five. The echoes are ominous. 

- Molly settles in New York and meets Giancarlo, an Italian chef. They becomes lovers and longtime partners. She contemplates at one point: ‘how much literary business is done in the presence of food and wine’. Delicious food and whiskey and champagne are central in their lives. 

- Molly is reading the early chapters of a manuscript of a memoir that had been sent to her by literary agent Elaine Grimes. Grimes had died a few months earlier. Unfortunately the name of the author was never disclosed. But Molly is deeply affected by it and is eager to find her. 

- We know the memoir was written by Edna. And eventually Molly discovers that. Edna is currently in a nursing home suffering from MS. They eventually meet but Edna refuses to give her the full manuscript. However they talk for hours and bond with each other. Molly tells her about her career and her love for Giancarlo. Edna softens and hints she will complete it and gift it to her. 

- Edna dies a few weeks later and Molly receives the completed memoir. 

- The novel's ending is a gut-punch. It upends so much of what Molly and we as readers were led to believe. 

- This book is just so excellent on every level. One of the best I've read over the last few years. 

(The cover is disappointing. The model doesn’t look intelligent and looks bored. The very opposite of Edna).