Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave

 

- This is an extraordinarily good book. It delves deep into AI, its revolutionary promise, but also the huge dangers and challenges it presents to society. 

- Suleyman, an AI expert and founding father, has written a powerful, must read treatise on an invention that will radically change all human lives and communities in the very near future. The book is full of detail and for that reason not an easy read at times, yet it is absolutely enthralling. 

- The first few chapters present a comprehensive historical picture about previous technological revolutions - agricultural, transport, electricity, digitalisation - and how thoroughly our lives, economies and societies changed. Suleyman's premise is that the AI wave will be far more rapid and profound.  

- The back cover blurb says it all:

We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change.

Soon we will live surrounded by AIs. They will organise our lives, operate our businesses and run core government services. We will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy. It represents nothing less than a step change in human capability. 

We are not prepared.

Mustafa Suleyman has been at the centre of this revolution, one poised to become the single greatest accelerant of progress in history. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies. Driven by overwhelming political and commercial incentives, these tools will help address our global challenges and create vast wealth - but also upheaval on a once unimaginable scale. 

In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how these forces threaten the grand bargain of the nation-state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into disaster, we face an existential dilemma: unprecedented harm arising from unchecked openness on one side, the threat of over-bearing surveillance on the other. Can we forge a narrow path between catastrophe and dystopia? 

This groundbreaking book from the ultimate AI insider establishes 'the containment problem' - the task of maintaining control over powerful technologies - as the essential challenge of our age. 

Sebastian Faulks, The Seventh Son

- I really loved Sebastian Faulks's two previous novels Paris Echo and Snow Country. Faulks's gift is to write love stories set in fractious times, and to bring the personal, political and social brilliantly alive. 

- In The Seventh Son, his new novel, he attempts the same portrayal, but unfortunately fails dismally. 

- Talissa is a young post-grad seeking a permanent academic position. She needs money and seizes an opportunity to be a surrogate mother. A clinic owned by a billionaire philanthropist swaps the donor's semen for a manufactured one with genes harnessed from a neanderthal specimen.  

- The baby Seth is born. He grows up a pretty strange kid with some intellectual limitations and some unusual talents. He's a homo sapiens and homo neanderthal hybrid. But as a person he's nothing extraordinary. 

- Faulks is asking whether human limitations can be overcome or are we stuck with them. As his main character in Snow Country reflects We are obsessive. We appear to have bigger brains than other creatures, but we behave in a way that's contrary to our own interests. These harmful passions that drive us mad with love or with the need to slaughter one another. We don't seem very well...evolved. Can we rise to a higher level of humanity, and one without dementia, schizophrenia, depression, and other mental ailments for example? 

- Obviously this is an intriguing premise, but is it realistic, or just a fantasy? At one point a bunch of scientists are debating these issues in very scientific jargon. As ordinary readers we simply don't know whether they are talking real science. What we do know is that Faulks is enjoying the conversation and teasing and challenging us. 

- I was way more attracted to the group of friends caught up in this evolutionary drama. They are loving, affectionate, intelligent, kind and passionate humans, with worthwhile jobs. Humanity’s best. What’s to improve? 

- So I found the main plot line boring and pointless. 

Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional.

 

- She's an unnamed woman, an atheist, separated from her husband, and fleeing to ‘the high, dry Monaro plains, far from anywhere’. Her destination is a small convent. Her parents died. She's alone.

- Welcome to the world of Charlotte Wood: a group of women dealing with their plight in a challenging, often male dominated, world. The convent, which welcomes her as a visitor, has half a dozen Catholic nuns who adhere to a daily ritual of Vespers, Lauds, and the Middle Hour. The wife of her old school friend Richard who is the convent's gardener and handyman …thinks there’s something…sick about it. Something unnatural about the way you all live here. 

- Wood's two previous novels The Natural Way of Things (2015) and The Weekend (2019) also focused on small groups of women, their group dynamics and individual personalities, quirks and obsessions. 

- What is intriguing about this new novel is the wider scope of Wood's exploration. Her narrator recalls all sorts of incidents and people that were in some way important to her as a child, a young woman, and an adult. Slowly and surely a common thread emerges. The people that matter to her are not the tepid nuns and their meaningless lives, but the strong individuals she's encountered who go against the grain confidently and fearlessly. Yet she's spent four years as a permanent resident in the convent. She just…didn’t go home. She thinks of the mass graves in which nuns…had buried babies they called illegitimate…the savagery of the Catholic Church…Yet here I am. Wrestle. Wrestle...Choosing disappearance...I had a need, an animal need, to find a place I had never been but which was still, in some undeniable way, my home. 

- Sister Jenny and Sister Andrea left the convent a few years previously to go to Thailand where they set up a shelter for abandoned women. Jenny was attacked by an abusive American priest and never seen again, but her bones have now been found. They will arrive at the convent in eight days, brought by Sister Helen Parry. Helen was a classmate St Ursula's High School and rebellious. She was bullied but is now a charismatic, formidable woman, a fighter and a global 'celebrity nun', leading a life of protest for justice around the world. 

- Her mother was an inspiration. She was kind and an independent thinker, as was her father. They welcomed the Vietnamese immigrants. We're confronted with the extremes of being alive, of quiet servitude at one end, and of fulfilling, challenging immersion at the other. Wood plunges us into the intricacies, and the ideas and reflections they prompt. It's an intriguing exploration.

- There are many memories of people our narrator's known in her life. Cleo for example, the beautiful young vegetarian. Everyone in the town hated her. She didn’t mind. All the rebels are attractive, free spirited, charismatic leaders. Following the social rules are foreign to them. There’s a toughness about them. A loathing of shallow genuflecting. It’s been my observation over many years that those who most powerfully resist convention quite peaceably accept the state of being reviled. 

- The novel prompts so many reflections it's a joy to read. Perhaps the best Wood has written so far.