Category Archives: books

Where millipedes grow more than six feet long

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Reading Riley Black’s When the Earth Was Green for New Scientist, 26 February 2025

Plants are boring. Their behaviours are invisible to the naked eye, they operate on timescales our imaginations cannot entertain (however much we strain them), and they run roughshod over familiar categories of self, other and community.

Wandering among (or is it through?) a 14,000-year old aspen clone (or should that be “a stand of aspen trees?”), palaeontologist Riley Black wonders, “how many living things have alighted on, chewed up, dwelled within, pushed over, and otherwise had a brush with a tree so enduring it probably understands the nature of time better than I ever will?”

When the Earth Was Green is a paean to plants. It’s a series of vignettes, each seperated from its neighbours by gaps of millions, tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of years. It’s an account of how vegetable and animal life co-evolved. It’s not as immediately startling as Black’s last book, 2022’s The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, but it’s a worthy successor: as I wrote of Last Days, “this is palaeontology written with the immediacy of natural history”.

If you winced just now at the twee idea of a tree “understanding time”, you may want to hurry past Black’s last chapter — a virtue-signalling hymnal to the queerness of trees. This crabbed reviewer comes across many such passages, and reckons they’re getting increasingly formulaic. Black, seemingly unaware of the irony, pokes gentle fun at an earlier rhetoric that imagined, say, tideline plants “colonising” and “invading” the land. Maybe all writers who attempt to engage with plants suffer this fate: the rhetorical tools they stretch for will date far faster than their science.

Riley excels at conveying life’s precarity. Life does not “recover” or “regenerate” after extinction events. It reinvents itself. Early on — 425 million years ago, to be exact — we find life flourishing in strange lands, under skies so short of oxygen, fires can only smoulder and dead plants cannot decompose. When oxygen levels rise, existing insect species grow gigantic in a desperate (and, ultimately, losing) battle to elude its toxic effects. When an asteroid brings the Cretaceous Period to a fiery end, 66 million years ago, we find surviving plant species innovating unexpected relationships with their surviving pollinators. 15,000 years ago the planet grew so verdant, some plant species could afford to abandon photosynthesis entirely, and simply parasitise their neighbours.

Adaptation is a two-edged sword in such a changeable world. It allows you to take full advantage of today’s ecosystems, but how will you cope with tomorrow’s? Remaining unspecialised has allowed the Ginkgo tree to survive the world’s worst catastrophe and persist for millions and millions of years.

Black allows her imagination full rein. Wandering through a dense, warm, humid, million-year-old forest in Ohio, where “millipedes grow more than six feet long and alligator-size amphibians silently watch the shoreline for unwary insects,” the reader may wonder where the science stops and the speculation begins. Riley’s extensive endnotes explain the limits of our current knowledge and the logic behind her rare fancies. These passages are integral to the text and include some of her most insightful writing.

Above all, this is a book about how animals and plants shape each other. When animals large enough to knock over trees disappeared, forests grew more dense, with a continuous overstory that gave even large animals a third dimension to explore. Thick forests forced surviving mammals and surviving dinosaurs into novel shapes and, even more important, novel behaviours. Both classes learned to spend more time with their young. And, if we’re prepared to cherry-pick our mammalian examples, we can just about say that both learned to fly.

When the Earth Was Green may be too cutesy for some. The sight of a couple of sabercats rolling about in a patch of catnip will either enchant you or, well, it won’t. And I still think plants are boring. I’d happily pulp the lot of them to make books as fascinating as this one.

“This is the story of Donald Trump’s life”

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Reading The Sirens’ Call by Chris Hayes for the Telegraph, 15 February 2025

It seems to me, and might seem to you, as though headlines have always ticked across the bottom of our TV screens during news broadcasts. Strange, how quickly technological innovations lose their novelty. In fact, this one is only 23-and-a-half years old: the “ticker” was reserved for sports scores until the day in 2001 when two hijacked passenger jets were flown into New York’s World Trade Center. Fox News gave its ticker over to the news service that day, and MSNBC and CNN quickly followed. Cable channels, you might say, quickly and seamlessly went from addressing their viewers’ anxieties to stoking them.

That’s Chris Hayes’s view, and he should know: the political commentator and TV news anchor hosts a weekday current affairs show on MSNBC. The Sirens’ Call, his new book, is first of all an insider’s take on the persuasion game. Hayes is a hard worker, and a bit of a showman. When he started, he imagined his regular TV appearances would bring him some acclaim. “And so,” he writes, “the Star seeks recognition and gets, instead, attention.” This experience is now common. Thanks to the black mirrors in our pockets, we’re now all stars of our own reality TV show.

To explain how he and the rest of smartphone-wielding humanity ended up in this peculiar pickle – “akin to life in a failed state, a society that had some governing regime that has disintegrated and fallen into a kind of attentional warlordism” – Hayes sketches out three kinds of attention. There’s the conscious attention we bring to something: to a book, say, or a film, or a painting. Then there’s the involuntary attention we pay to environmental novelties (a passing wasp, a sudden breeze, an unexpected puddle). The more vigilant we are, the more easily even minor stimuli can snare our attention.

This second kind is the governing principle of advertising, an industry that over the last two decades has metastasised into something vast and insidious: call it “the attention economy”. Everything is an advertisement now, especially the news. The ticker and its evolved cousins, the infinitely-scrolling feed (think X) and the autoplaying video-stream (think TikTok) exist to maintain your hypervigilance. You can, like Hayes, write a book so engaging that it earns the user’s conscious focus over several hours. If you want to make money, though – with due respect to Scribe’s sales department – you’re better off snaring the user’s involuntary attention over and over again with a procession of conspiracy theories and cat videos.

The third form of attention in Hayes’s typology is social attention: that capacity for involuntary attention that we reserve for events relating specifically to ourselves. Psychologists dub this the “cocktail-party effect”, from our unerring ability to catch the sound of our own name uttered from across a crowded and noisy room. Social attention is extraordinarily pregnant with meaning. Indeed, without a steady diet of social attention, we suffer both mentally and physically. Why do we post anything on social media? Because we want others to see us. “But,” says Hayes, “there’s a catch… we want to be recognised as human by another human, as a subject by another subject, in order for it to truly be recognition. But We Who Post can never quite achieve that.”

In feeding ourselves with the social attention of strangers, we have been creating synthetic versions of our most fundamental desire, and perfecting machines for the manufacture of empty calories. “This is the story of Donald Trump’s life,” Hayes explains, by way of example: “wanting recognition, instead getting attention, and then becoming addicted to attention itself, because he can’t quite understand the difference, even though deep in his psyche there’s a howling vortex that fame can never fill.” Elon Musk gets even harsher treatment. “What does the world’s richest man want that he cannot have?” Hayes wonders. “What will he pay the biggest premium for? He can buy whatever he desires. There is no luxury past his grasp.” The answer, as Musk’s financially disastrous purchase of Twitter demonstrates all too clearly, and “to a pathological degree, with an unsteady obsessiveness that’s thrown his fortune into question, is recognition. He wants to be recognised, to be seen in a deep and human sense. Musk spent $44 billion to buy himself what poor pathetic Willy Loman [in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman] couldn’t have. Yet it can’t be purchased at any sum.”

We’re not short of books about how our digital helpmates are ushering in the End of Days. German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer’s How to Stay Smart in a Smart World (2022) gets under the hood of systems that ape human wisdom just well enough to disarm us, but not nearly well enough to deliver happiness or social justice.The US social psychologist Jonathan Haidt took some flak for over-egging his arguments in The Anxious Generation (2024), but the studies he cites are solid enough and their statistics amount to a litany of depression, self-harm and suicide among young (and predominantly female) users of social media. In Unwired (2023), Gaia Bernstein, a law professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, explains how we can (and should) sue GAMA (Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple) for our children’s lost childhood.

Among a crowded field, Hayes singles out Johann Hari’s 2022 book Stolen Focus for praise, though this doesn’t reflect well on Hayes himself, whose solutions to our digital predicament are weak beer compared to Hari’s. Hari, like Gigerenzer and Bernstein, had bold ideas about civil resistence. He used his final pages to construct a bare-bones social protest movement.

Hayes, by contrast, “fervently hopes” that the markets will somehow self-correct, so that newspapers, in particular, will win back their market share, ushering in an analogue, pre–attention age means of directing attention in place of the current attention-age version. “I think (and fervently hope) we will see increasing growth in businesses, technologies, and models of consumption that seek to evade or upend the punishing and exhausting reality of the endless attention commodification we’re living through,” Hayes says. But what evidence has he, that such a surprising reversal in our cultural fortunes is imminent? The spread of farmers’ markets in US cities and the resurgence of vinyl in record stores. I’d love to believe him, but if I were an investor I’d show him the door.

With so many other writers making analogous points with a near-revolutionary force, The Siren’s Call says more about Hayes than it does about our crisis. He’s the very picture of an intelligent, engaged liberal, and I came away admiring him. I also worried that history will be no kinder to his type than it was to the Russian liberals of 1917.

 

Anything but a safe bet

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Reading The Gambling Animal: Humanity’s evolutionary winning streak—and how we risk it all by Glenn Harrison and Don Ross. For New Scientist, 29 January 2025

Insights into animal evolution used to come from studying a creature’s evolutionary relationships to its closest relatives. To lampoon the idea slightly: we once saw human beings as a kind of chimp.

Our perspectives have widened: looking across entire ecosystems, we begin to see what drives animals who share the same environment toward similar survival solutions. This is convergent evolution — the process by which, say, if you’re a vertebrate living in an aquaeous medium, you’re almost certainly going to end up looking like a fish.

Economists Glenn Harrison and Don Ross look at this process from an even further remove: they study evolution in terms of risks to a species’ survival, and trace the ways animals evolve to mitigate those risks. From this distance, it makes more sense to talk about communities and societies, than about individuals.

We used to understand social behaviour as the expression of intelligence, and that intelligence was rather simplistically conceived. Social animals thought at least a little bit “like us”. Of course this was never more than hand-waving in the absence of good data. Now Harrison and Ross arrive with good news from their research station amid the grasslands of South Africa: they’ve worked out how elephants think, why they never forget (the old saw is true), and why Pleistocene elephants and humans both acquired such huge and peculiar brains. their encephalisation suggests they co-evolved a neurological solution to the climate’s growing unpredictability. Faced with a landscape that was rapidly drying out, they both learned how to gamble on the likely location of future resources.

But while humans developed an overgrown frontal cortex, and learned to imagine, elephants overgrew their cerebellum. and learned to remember. For most of evolutionary history, the elephants were more successful than the hominins. Only recently has our borderline-delusional thinking allowed us to outcompete the once ubiquitous elephant.

Harrison and Ross are out to write a dense, complex, closely argued exposition of their risk-and-reward experiments with humans and elephants, and to discuss the evolutionary implications of this work. They are not writing a work of literature. It may take a chapter or two for the casual reader to settle to their meticulous style. Treats lie in store for those who stay patient. Not the least of them is a mischievously conceived “science fiction”, laying out exactly what elephant scientists in some wildly alternate Earth might make of those desperately challenged and almost-extinct humans, struggling out there in the veldt. The point is not merely to have fun (although the authors’ intellectual exuberance is clear); the authors are out to describe the workings of a complex but fundamentally non-human intelligence: a mind that weighs probabilities far more easily than it dreams up might-bes and nice-to-haves.

How does a mind that can’t remember more than seven numbers for more than five minutes still arrive at a decent scientific understanding of the world? The authors cheerfully admit that, having worked for so long with elephants, they find humans ever more baffling.

Tracing the way human societies evolved to manage risk, from the savannah to Wall Street, the authors note that while human individuals are mildly risk-averse, they innovate behavioral norms — and from those norms, institutions — that collectivise risk with astonishing effectiveness. The (possibly terminal) flowering of this ability may be the the concept of limited liability, pioneered in New York State in 1811, which has turbocharged the species’ runaway growth “across multiple dimensions, particularly of population and per-capita wealth.” However much you and I might fear the future, the institutions we have built are free to take the most horrible chances — not least, in recent decades, with the climate.

Human-style thnking is an unbelievably high-risk strategy that has paid off only because humans have enjoyed a quite incredible evolutionary winning streak. But past performance is no guarantee of future returns, and the authors are far from optimistic about our prospects: “The history of humans,” they suggest, “is not a record of safe bets.”

“Starvation… starvation… starvation… died at front…”

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Reading The Forbidden Garden: The Botanists of Besieged Leningrad and Their Impossible Choice by Simon Parkin. For Nature, 14 January 2025

Past Simon Parkin’s account of the siege of Leningrad, and the fate there of the world’s first proper seed bank, past his postscript and his afterword, there are eight pages which — for people who know this story already — will be worth the rest of the book combined.

It’s the staff roll-call, meticulously assembled from Institute records and other sources, of what Parkin calls simply the Plant Institute. That is, more fully, the Leningrad hub of the Bureau of Applied Botany, the Vsesoyuzny Institut Rastenievodstva, founded in the nineteenth century by German horticulturalist and botanist Eduard August von Regel and vastly expanded by Russian Soviet agronomist Nikolai Vavilov.

It does not make for easy reading.

“Starvation… starvation… starvation… died at front…” Between 8 September 1941 and 27 January 1944, while German forces besieged the city, the staff of the Institute in St Isaac’s Square sacrificed themselves, one by one, to protect a collection whose whole raison d’être<OK?Good! SI] was to one day save humanity from starvation.

While, just around the corner, Leningrad’s Hermitage art museum’s two million artefacts were squirreled away for safety, the Plant Institute faced problems of a different order. Its 2,500 species — hundreds of thousands of seeds, rhizomes and tubers — were alive and needed to be kept a degree or two above freezing. And among those, 380,000 examples of potato, rye and other crops would only survive if planted annually. This in a city that was being shelled for up to eighteen hours at a time and where the temperature could — and in February 1942, did — fall to around -40degC.

Iogan Eikhfeld, the institute’s director following Vavilov’s disappearance (his arrest and secret imprisonment, in fact), was evacuated to the town of Krasnoufimsk in the Ural mountains. A train containing a large part of the collection was to follow<OK? Yes SI], but never made it. Eikhfeld eventually got word to the Institute, begging his staff to eat the collection and save themselves. But they had lost the collection to hunger once before, in the dreadful winter of 1921-1922; they weren’t going to again.

January and February 1942 were the worst months. In the dark, freezing building of the Institute, workers prepared seeds for long-term preservation. They divided the collection into several duplicate parts, while bombs burst around them.

The Germans never did succeed in overrunning Leningrad. The rats did. That first winter, hordes of vermin swarmed the building. No effort to protect the collection proved rat-proof: they’d break into the ventilated metal boxes to devour the seeds. Still, of the Institute’s quarter of a million accessions, only 40,000 were consumed by vermin or failed to germinate.

The collection survived, after a fashion. The plantsman and Stalinist poster-child Trofim Lysenko — Vavilov’s inveterate opponent — maintained that the whole enterprise was disordered and for a long time, until the 1970s, it was allowed to deteriorate.

Contributions from abroad helped sustain it. It once received potatoes from the Tucaman University in Argentina, thanks to a chance meeting between its director Peter Zhukovsky and a German plant collector, Heinz Brücher. [It turned out that Brücher had been an officer in the SS Nazi paramilitary group in the late 1990s, Slightly garbled here. “In the 1990s it emerged that during the war, Brücher had been an officer” etc. etc.] leading a special commando unit charged with raiding Soviet agricultural experimental stations. So Brücher hadn’t really been donating valuable varieties of potato after all: he had been returning them.

The fortunes of war
The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad is a generous and desperately sad account of human generosity and sacrifice. If it falls short anywhere, it’s at exactly the place Parkin himself identifies. In this city laid to waste, among the bodies of the fallen, the frozen — in some hideous cases, the half-eaten — starving people make for rotten witnesses of their own condition. The author only had scraps to go on <OK? Good! SI].

And, you can’t research and produce at the pace Parkin does without some loss of finesse; his last book, The Island of Extraordinary Captives, about the plight of foreign nationals interned by the British on the Isle of Man, only came out in 2022. Parkin can tend to turn incidental details into emblems of things he hasn’t got time to discuss. The passing mention that Vavilov’s calloused hands are “an intimate sign of his deep and enduring connection to the earth”, for example, leaves the reader wanting more <OK? Good SI].

Sensation will carry your account so far, and Parkin’s horrors are few and carefully chosen. “Some ate joiner’s glue,” he writes, “made from the bones and hooves of slaughtered animals, just about edible when boiled with bay leaves and mixed with vinegar and mustard.” A nurse is arrested “on suspicion of scavenging amputated limbs from the operating room”. At the Institute, biochemist Nikolai Rodionovich Ivanov prepares some raw-hide harnesses, “cut into tagliatelle-like strips and boiled for eight hours”, for a dinner party.

But hunger hollows out more than the belly. Soon enough, it hollows out the personality. In the relatively few interviews Parkin was able to source, he tells us, survivors from the Institute “spoke in broadly emotionless terms of how the moral, mortal dilemma they faced was, in fact, no dilemma at all”. Their argument was that, in the end, purpose sustained them better than a few extra calories. Vadim Stepanovich Lekhnovich, curator of the tuber collection, can speak for all here: “It was impossible to eat up [the collection], for what was involved was the cause of your life, the cause of your comrades’ lives.”

Parkin applies skill and intelligence to the (rather thankless) business of recasting familiar stories in a fresh light and has a reputation for winkling out obscure but important episodes of wartime history. It is reasonable, then, that he should cut to the chase and condense the science. Two 2008 books on Vavilov’s arrest amidst scientific disagreements with Lysenko do a better job on that front <OK? Good SI]: Peter Pringle’s The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov and Gary Paul Nabhan’s brilliant though boringly titled Where Our Food Comes From. For example, Parkin dubs Lysenko’s theories of developmental plasticity an “outlier theory”, even though it wasn’t. Vavilov had wanted translated into English an Institute report that contained a surprisingly positive chapter about Lysenko’s ideas.

Parkin does get the complicated relationship between the two agronomists <OK? Yes SI], though. What perhaps caused the most friction between the two biologists was Lysenko’s ineptitude as an experimentalist. Parkin, to his credit, nails the human and political context with a few adept and well-timed asides.

And he broadens his account to depict what, to a modern audience is a very strange world indeed — a pre-‘green revolution’ world in which even the richest nations lived under the threat of starvation, even in times of peace; and a world which, when it went to war, wielded famine as a weapon.

The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad is a greatly enjoyable book. Parkin’s chief accomplishment, though, has been to unshackle an important story from its many and complex ties to botany, genetics and developmental science, and lend it a real edge of human desperation.

I’d sooner gamble

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Speculation around the 2024 US election prompted this article for the Telegraph, about the dark arts of prediction

On July 21, the day Joe Biden stood down, I bet £50 that Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, would end up winning the 2024 US presidential election. My wife remembers Whitmer from their student days, and reckons she’s a star in the making. My £50 would have earned me £2500 had she actually stood for president and won. But history makes fools of us all, and my bet bought me barely a day of that warm, Walter-Mittyish feeling that comes when you stake a claim in other people’s business.

The polls this election cycle indicated a tight race – underestimating Trump’s reach. But cast your mind back to 2016, when the professional pollster Nate Silver said Donald Trump stood a 29 per cent chance of winning the US presidency. The betting market, on the eve of that election, put Trump on an even lower 18 per cent chance. Gamblers eyed up the difference, took a punt, and did very well. And everyone else called Silver an idiot for not spotting Trump’s eventual win.

Their mistake was to think that Silver was a fortune-teller.

Divination is a 6,000-year-old practice that promises to sate our human hunger for certainty. On the other hand, gambling on future events – as the commercial operation we know today – began only a few hundred years ago in the casinos of Italy. Gambling promises nothing, and it only really works if you understand the mathematics.

The assumption that the world is inherently unpredictable – so that every action has an upside and a downside – got its first formal expression in Jacob Bernoulli’s 1713 treatise Ars Conjectandi (“The Art of Conjecturing”), and many of us still can’t wrap our heads around it. We’d sooner embrace certainties, however specious, than take risks, however measurable.
We’re risk-averse by nature, because the answer to the question “Well, what’s the worst that could happen?” has, over the course of evolution, been very bad indeed. You could fall. You could be bitten. You could have your arm ripped off. (Surprise a cat with a cucumber and it’ll jump out of its skin, because it’s still afraid of the snakes that stalked its ancestors.)

Thousands of years ago, you might have thrown dice to see who buys the next round, but you’d head to the Oracle to learn about events that could really change your life. A forthcoming exhibition at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Oracles, Omens and Answers, takes a historical look at our attempts to divine the future. You might assume those Chinese oracle bones are curios from a distant and more innocent time – except that, turning a corner, you come across a book by Joan Quigley, who was in-house astrologer to US president Ronald Reagan. Our relationship to the future hasn’t changed very much, after all. (Nancy Reagan reached out to Quigley after a would-be assassin’s bullet tore through her husband’s lung. What crutch would I reach for, I wonder, at a moment like that?)

The problem with divination is that it doesn’t work. It’s patently falsifiable. But this wasn’t always the case. In a world radically simpler than our own, there are fewer things that can happen, and more likelihood of one of them happening in accordance with a prediction. This turned omens into powerful political weapons. No wonder, then, that in 11 AD, Augustus banned predictions pertaining to the date of someone’s death, while at the same time the Roman emperor made his own horoscope public. At a stroke, he turned astrology from an existential threat into a branch of his own PR machine.

The Bamoun state of western Cameroon had an even surer method for governing divination – in effect until the early 20th century. If you asked a diviner whether someone important would live or die, and the diviner said they’d live, but actually they died, then they’d put you, rather than the diviner, to death.

It used to be that you could throw a sheep’s shoulder blade on the flames and tell the future from the cracks that the fire made in the bone. Now that life is more complicated, anything but the most complicated forms of divination seems fatuous.

The daddy of them all is astrology: “the ancient world’s most ambitious applied mathematics problem”, according to the science historian Alexander Boxer. There’s a passage in Boxer’s book A Scheme of Heaven describing how a particularly fine observation, made by Hipparchus in 130 BC, depended on his going back over records that must have been many hundreds of years old. Astronomical diaries from the Assyrian library at Nineveh stretch from 652BC to 61BC, making them (as far as we know) the longest continuous research project ever undertaken.

You don’t go to that amount of effort pursuing claims that are clearly false. You do it in pursuit of cosmological regularities that, if you could only isolate them, would bring order and peace to your world. Today’s evangelists for artificial intelligence should take note of Boxer, who writes: “Those of us who are enthusiastic about the promise of numerical data to unlock the secrets of ourselves and our world would do well simply to acknowledge that others have come this way before.”

Astrology has proved adaptable. Classical astrology assumed that we lived in a deterministic world – one in which all events are causally decided by preceding events. You can trace the first cracks in this fixed view of the world all the way back to the medieval Christian church and its pesky insistence on free will (without which one cannot sin).

In spite of powerful Church opposition, astrology clung on in its old form until the Black Death, when its conspicuous failure to predict the death of a third of Europe called time on (nearly) everyone’s credulity. All of a sudden, and with what fleet footwork one can only imagine, horoscopists decided that your fate depended, not just upon your birth date, but also upon when you visited the horoscopist. This muddied the waters wonderfully, and made today’s playful, me-friendly astrologers – particularly popular on TikTok – possible.

***

The problem with trying to relate events to the movement of the planets is not that you won’t find any correlations. The problem is that there are correlations everywhere you look.
And these days, of course, we don’t even have to look: modern machine-learning algorithms are correlation monsters; they can make pretty much any signal correlate with any other. In their recent book AI Snake Oil, computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor spend a good many pages dissecting the promise of predictive artificial intelligence (for instance, statistical software that claims to identify crimes before they have happened). If it fails, it will fail for exactly the same reasons astrology fails – because it’s churning through an ultimately meaningless data set. The authors conclude that immediate dangers from AI “largely stem from… our desperate and untutored keenness for prediction.”

The promise of such mechanical prediction is essentially astrological. We absolutely can use it to predict the future, but only if the world turns out, underneath all that roiling complexity, to be deterministic.

There are some areas in which our predictive powers have improved. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts opened in Reading in 1979. It was able to see three days into the future. Six years later, it could see five days ahead. In 2012 it could see eight days ahead and predicted Hurricane Sandy. By next year it expects to be able to predict high-impact events a fortnight before they happen.

Drunk on achievements in understanding atmospheric physics, some enthusiasts expect to predict human weather using much the same methods. They’re encouraged by numerical analyses that throw up glancing insights into corners of human behaviour. Purchasing trends can predict the ebb and flow of conflict because everyone rushes out to buy supplies in advance of the bombings. Trading algorithms predicted the post-Covid recovery of financial markets weeks before it happened.

Nonetheless, it is a classic error to mistake reality for the analogy you just used to describe it. Political weather is not remotely the same as weather. Still, the dream persists among statistics-savvy self-styled “superforecasters”, who regularly peddle ideas such as “mirror worlds” and “policy flight simulators”, to help us navigate the future of complex economic and social systems.

The danger with such prophecies is not that they are wrong; rather, the danger lies in the power to actually make them come true. Take election polling. Calling the election before it happens heartens leaders, disheartens laggards, and encourages everyone to alter their campaigns to address the anxieties and fears of the moment. Indeed, the easiest, most sure-fire way of predicting the future is to get an iron grip on the present – something the Soviets knew all too well. Then the future becomes, quite literally, what you make it.

There are other dangers, as we increasingly trust predictive technology with our lives. For instance, GPS uses a predictive algorithm in combination with satellite signals to plot our trajectory. And in December last year, a driver followed his satnav through Essex, down a little lane in Great Dunmow called Flitch Way, and straight into the River Chelmer.

We should not assume, just because the oracle is mechanical, that it’s infallible. There’s a story Isaac Asimov wrote in 1955 called Franchise, about a computer that, by chugging through the buzzing confusion of the world, can pinpoint the one individual whose galvanic skin response to random questions reveals which political candidate would be (and therefore is) the winner in any given election.

Because he wants to talk about correlation, computation, and big data, Asimov skates over the obvious point here – that a system like that can never know if it’s broken. And if that’s what certainty looks like, well, I’d sooner gamble.

You’re being chased. You’re being attacked. You’re falling. You’re drowning

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To mark the centenary of Surrealism, this article in the Telegraph

A hundred years ago, a 28-year-old French poet, art collector and contrarian called André Breton published a manifesto that called time on reason.

Eight years before, in 1916, Breton was a medical trainee stationed at a neuro-psychiatric army clinic in Saint-Dizier. He cared for soldiers who were shell-shocked, psychotic, hysterical and worse, and fell in love with the mind, and the lengths it would go to survive the impossible present.

Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism was, then, an inquiry into how, “under the pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy.”

For Breton, surrealism’s sincerest experiments involved a sort of “psychic automatism” – using the processes of dreaming to express “the actual functioning of thought… in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” He asked: “Can’t the dream also be used in solving the fundamental questions of life?”

Many strange pictures appeared over the following century, as Breton’s fellow surrealists answered his challenge, and plumbed the depths of the unconscious mind. Their efforts – part of a long history of humans’ attempts to document and decode the dream world – can be seen in a raft of new exhibitions marking surrealism’s centenary, from the hybrid beasts of Leonora Carrington (on view at the Hepworth Wakefield’s Forbidden Territories), to the astral fantasies of Remedios Varo (included in the Centre Pompidou’s blockbuster Surrealism show.)
Yet, just as often, such images illustrate the gap between the dreamer’s experience and their later interpretation of it. Some of the most popular surrealist pictures – Dalí’s melting clocks, say, or Magritte’s apple-headed businessman – are not remotely dreamlike. Looking at such easy-to-read canvases is like having a dream explained, and that’s not at all the same thing.
The chief characteristic of dreams is that they don’t surprise or shock or alienate the person who’s dreaming – the dreamer, on the contrary, feels that their dream is inevitable. “The mind of the man who dreams,” Breton writes, “is fully satisfied by what happens to him. The agonizing question of possibility is no longer pertinent. Kill, fly faster, love to your heart’s content… Let yourself be carried along, events will not tolerate your interference. You are nameless. The ease of everything is priceless.”

Most physiologists and psychologists of the early 20th century would have agreed with him, right up until his last sentence. While the surrealists looked to dreams to reveal a mind beyond conciousness, scientists of the day considered them insignificant, because you can’t experiment on a dreamer, and you can’t repeat a dream.

Since then, others have joined the battle over the meaning – or lack of meaning – of our dreams. In 1977, Harvard psychiatrists John Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley proposed “random activation theory” ‘activation-synthesis theory’, in a rebuff to the psychoanalysts and their claim that dreams had meanings only accessible via (surprise, surprise) psychonalysis. Less an explanation, more an expression of exasperation, their theory held that certain parts of our brains concoct crazy fictions out of the random neural firings of the sleeping pons (a part of the brainstem).

It is not a bad theory. It might go some way to explaining the kind of hypnagogic imagery we experience when we doze, and that so delighted the surrealists. It might even bring us closer to actually reconstructing our dreams. For instance, we can capture the brain activity of a sleeper, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, hand that data to artificial intelligence software that’s been trained on about a million images, and the system will take a stab at what the dreamer is seeing in their dream. The Japanese neuroscientist Yukiyasu Kamitani made quite a name for himself when he tried this in 2012.

Six years later, at the Serpentine Gallery in London, artist Pierre Huyghe integrated some of this material into his show UUmwelt — and what an astonishing show it was, its wall screens full of bottles becoming elephants becoming screaming pigs becoming geese, skyscrapers, mixer taps, dogs, moles, bat’s wings…

But modelling an idea doesn’t make it true. Activation-synthesis theory has inspired some fantastic art, but it fails to explain one of the most important physiological characteristics of dreaming – the fact that dreams paralyse the dreamer.

***

Brains have an alarming tendency to treat dreams as absolutely real and to respond appropriately — to jump and punch when the dream says jump! and punch! Dreams, for the dreamer, can be very dangerous indeed.

The simplest evolutionary way to mitigate the risk of injury would have been to stop the dreamer from dreaming. Instead, we evolved a complex mechanism to paralyse ourselves while in the throes of our night-time adventures. 520 million years of brain evolution say that dreams are important and need protecting.

This, rather than the actual content of dreams, has driven research into the sleeping brain. We know now that dreaming involves many more brain areas, including the parietal lobes (involved in the representation of space) and the frontal lobes (responsible for decision-making, problem-solving, self-control, attention, speech production, language comprehension – oh, and working memory). Mice dream. Dogs dream. Platypuses, beluga whales and ostriches dream; so do penguins, chameleons, iguanas and cuttlefish.[

We’re not sure about turtles. Octopuses? Marine biologist David Scheel caught his snoozing pet octopus Heidi on camera, and through careful interpretation of her dramatic colour-shifts he came to the ingenious conclusion that she was enjoying an imaginary crab supper. The clip, from PBS’s 2019 documentary Octopus: Making Contact is on YouTube.

Heidi’s brain structure is nothing like our own. Still, we’re both dreamers. Studies of wildly different sleeping brains throw up startling convergences. Dreaming is just something that brains of all sorts have to do.

We’ve recently learned why.

The first clues emerged from sleep deprivation studies conducted in the late 1960s. Both Allan Rechtschaffen and William Dement showed that sleep deprivation leads to memory deficits in rodents. A generation later, and researchers including the Brazilian neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro were spending the 1990s unpicking the genetic basis of memory function. Ribiero himself found the first molecular evidence of Freud’s “day residue” hypothesis, which has it that the content of our dreams is often influenced by the events, thoughts, and feelings we experience during the day.

Ribeiro had his own fairly shocking first-hand experience of the utility of dreaming. In February 1995 he arrived in New York to start at doctorate at Rockefeller University. Shortly after arriving, he woke up unable to speak English. He fell in and out of a narcoleptic trance, and then, in April, woke refreshed and energised and able to speak English better than ever before. His work can’t absolutely confirm that his dreams saved him, but he and other researchers have most certainly established the link between dreams and memory. To cut a long story very short indeed: dreams are what memories get up to when there’s no waking self to arrange them.

Well, conscious thought alone is not fast enough or reliable enough to keep us safe in the blooming, buzzing confusion of the world. We also need fast, intuitive responses to critical situations, and we rehearse these responses, continually, when we dream. Collect dream narratives from around the world, and you will quickly discover (as literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall points out in his 2012 book The Storytelling Animal) that the commonest dreams have everything to do with life and death and have very little time for anything else. You’re being chased. You’re being attacked. You’re falling. You’re drowning. You’re lost, trapped, naked, hurt…

When lives were socially simple and threats immediate, the relevance of dreams was not just apparent; it was impelling. And let’s face it: a stopped clock is right at least twice a day. Living in a relatively simple social structure, afforded only a limited palette of dream materials to draw from, was it really so surprising that (according to the historian Suetonius) Rome’s first emperor Augustus found his rise to power predicted by dreams?

Even now, Malaysia’s indigenous Orang Asli people believe that by sharing their dreams, they are passing on healing communications from their ancestors. Recently the British artist Adam Chodzko used their practice as the foundation for a now web-based project called Dreamshare Seer, which uses generative AI to visualise and animate people’s descriptions of their dreams. (Predictably, his AI outputs are rather Dali-like.)

But humanity’s mission to interpret dreams has been eroded by a revolution in our style of living. Our great-grandparents could remember a world without artificial light. Now we play on our phones until bedtime, then get up early, already focused on a day that is, when push comes to shove, more or less identical to yesterday. We neither plan our days before we sleep, nor do we interrogate our dreams when we wake. Is it any wonder, then, that our dreams are no longer able to inspire us?

Growing social complexity enriches our dream lives, but it also fragments them. Last night I dreamt of selecting desserts from a wedding buffet; later I cuddled a white chicken while negotiating for a plumbing contract. Dreams evolved to help us negotiate the big stuff. Having conquered the big stuff (humans have been apex predators for around 2 million years), it is possible that we have evolved past the point where dreaming is useful, but not past the point where dreaming is dangerous.

Here’s a film you won’t have seen. Petrov’s Flu, directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, was due for limited UK release in 2022, even as Vladimir Putin’s forces were bumbling towards Kiev.

The film opens on our hero Petrov (Semyon Serzin), riding a trolleybus home across a snowbound Yekaterinburg. He overhears a fellow passenger muttering to a neighbour that the rich in this town all deserve to be shot.

Seconds later the bus stops, Petrov is pulled off the bus and a rifle is pressed into his hands. Street executions follow, shocking him out of his febrile doze…

And Petrov’s back on the bus again.

Whatever the director’s intentions were here, I reckon this is a document for our times. You see, Andre Breton wrote his manifesto in the wreckage of a world that had turned its machine tools into weapons, the better to slaughter itself — and did all this under the flag of the Enlightenment and reason.

Today we’re manufacturing new kinds of machine tools, to serve a world that’s much more psychologically adept. Our digital devices, for example, exploit our capacity for focused attention (all too well, in many cases).

So what of those devices that exist to make our sleeping lives better, sounder, and more enjoyable?

SleepScore Labs is using electroencephalography data to analyse the content of dreams. BrainCo has a headband interface that influences dreams through auditory and visual cues. Researchers at MIT have used a sleep-tracking glove called Dormio to much the same end. iWinks’s headband increases the likelihood of lucid dreaming.

It’s hard to imagine light installations, ambient music and scented pillows ever being turned against us. Then again, we remember the world the Surrealists grew up in, laid waste by a war that had turned its ploughshares into swords. Is it so very outlandish to suggest that tomorrow, we will be weaponising our dreams?

What about vice?

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Reading Rat City by Jon Adams & Edmund Ramsden and Dr. Calhoun’s Mousery by Lee Alan Dugatkin for the Spectator

The peculiar career of John Bumpass Calhoun (1917-1995, psychologist, philosopher, economist, mathematician, sociologist, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and subject of a glowing article in Good Housekeeping) comes accompanied with more than its fair share of red flags.

Calhoun studied how rodents adapted to different environments; and more specificallly, how the density of a population effects an individual’s behaviour.

He collected reams of data, but published little, and rarely in mainstream scientific journals. He courted publicity, inviting journalists to draw, from his studies of rats and mice, apocalyptic conclusions about the future of urban humanity.

Calhoun wasn’t a “maverick” scientist (not an egoist, not a loner, not a shouter-at-clouds). Better to say that he was, well, odd. He had a knack for asking the counter-intuitive question, an eye for the unanticipated result. Charged in 1946 with a reducing the rat population of Baltimore, he wondered what would happen to a community if he added more rats. So he did — and rodent numbers fell to 60 per cent of their original level. Who would have guessed?

The general assumption about population, lifted mostly from the 18th-century economist Thomas Malthus, is that species expand to consume whatever resources are available to them, then die off once they exceed the environment’s carrying capacity.

But Malthus himself knew that wasn’t the whole story. He said that there were two checks on population growth: misery and vice. Misery, in its various forms (predation, disease, famine…) has been well studied. But what, Calhoun asked, in a 1962 Scientific American article, of vice? In less loaded language: “what are the effects of the social behaviour of a species on population growth — and of population density on social behaviour?”

Among rodents, a rising population induces stress, and stress reduces the birth-rate. Push the overcrowding too far, though (further than would be likely to happen in nature), and stress starts to trigger all manner of weird and frightening effects. The rodents start to pack together, abandoning all sense of personal space. Violence and homosexuality skyrocket. Females cease to nurture and suckle their young; abandoned, these offspring become food for any passing male. The only way out of this hell is complete voluntary isolation. A generation of “beautiful ones” arises, that knows only to groom itself and avoid social contact. Without sex, the population collapses. The few Methusalehs who remain have no social skills to speak of. They’re not aggressive. They’re not anything. They barely exist.

What do you do with findings like that? Calhoun hardly needed to promote his work; the press came flocking to him. Der Spiegel. Johnny Carson. He achieved his greatest notoriety months before he shared the results of his most devastating experiment. The mice in an enclosure dubbed “Universe 25” were never allowed to get sick or run out of food. Once they reached a certain density, vice wiped them out.

Only publishing, a manufacturing industry run by arts graduates, could contrive to drop two excellent books about Dr Calhoun’s life and work into the same publishing cycle. No one but a reviewer or an obsessive is likely to find room for both on their autumn reading pile.

Historians Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams have written the better book. Rat City puts Calhoun’s work in a rich historical and political context. Calhoun took a lot of flak for his glib anthropomorphic terminology: he once told a reporter from Japan’s oldest newspaper, Mainichi Shimbun, that the last rats of Universe 25 “represent the human being on the limited space called the earth.” But whether we behave exactly like rats in conditions of overcrowding and/or social isolation is not the point.

The point is that, given the sheer commonality between mammal species, something might happen to humans in like conditions, and it behoves us to find out what that something might be, before we foist any more hopeful urban planning on the prolitariat. Calhoun, who got us to think seriously about how we design our cities, is Rat City’s visionary hero, to the point where I started to hear him. For instance, observing some gormless waifs, staring into their smartphones at the bottom of the escalator, I recalled his prediction that “we might one day see the human equivalent” of his mice, pathologically crammed together “in a sort of withdrawal — in which they would behave as if they were not aware of each other.”

Dr Calhoun’s Mousery is the simpler book of the two and, as Lee Dugatkin cheerfully concedes, it owes something to Adams and Ramsden’s years of prolific research. I prefer it. Its narrative is more straightforward, and Dugatkin gives greater weight to Calhoun’s later career.

The divided mouse communities of Universe 34, Calhoun’s last great experiment, had to learn to collaborate to obtain all their resources. As their culture of collaboration developed, their birth rate stabilised, and individuals grew healthier and lived longer.

So here’s a question worthy of good doctor: did culture evolve the shield us from vice?

A robust sausage sandwich

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Reading Alan Moore’s The Great When for the Telegraph

Londoners! There is another city behind your city, or above it, or within it. This other place, known as Long London, belongs to the Great When, a super-real realm that lurks behind your common-or-garden reality. Whenever there are shenanigans over there – caused by Jungian archetypes called Arcana, who jockey for esoteric advantage – it stirs mundane events over here. An artist-magician called Austin Spare puts it this way: “If this London is what they call the Smoke, then that place is the Fire, you follow me?” A bruiser called Jack “Spot” Comer is more forthright: “This other London, that’s the organ grinder, an’ our London’s just the fackin’ monkey.”

Sometimes one of these Arcana even stumbles from Long London into the real. In 1936, the Beauty of Riots – think Eugène Delacroix’s bare-breasted Liberty Leading the People, only 10 feet tall – finds herself picking through the battle of Cable Street. Sometimes a visit is arranged across the divide. In 1949, Harry Lud, “the red-handed soul of crime itself”, comes at Spot’s beckoning to sort out some bother with the gangster Billy Hill.

If Spare, Spot and the rest – in fact, everything I’ve written above – are unfamiliar to you, look the names up. Alan Moore obsessives, of whom there are many, will be used to how his wildest yarns emerge from the mouths of London’s more colourful historical figures. Yes, this is the oldest, cheapest trick in the arsenal of the London novelist – but, as The Great When proves, Moore keeps getting away with it.

The plot: a few years after the Second World War, underachieving Dennis Knuckleyard has been effectively adopted by Coffin Ada, the nastiest second-hand book-dealer in Shoreditch. Having accidentally purchased a book that doesn’t exist – at least, not in this realm – Dennis finds himself caught between worlds. Can he return the book to Long London and its severed, vitrine-dwelling City Heads, and maintain the wall between the realms? Will his adventures make a man of him? Will he win the favours of tart-with-a-heart Grace Shilling?

Moore’s not doing anything new here. Readers of urban fantasy – and I’m among them – have fallen or forced our way along so many Diagon Alleys over the years, have waited so very long for that bus to Viriconium, or Neverwhere, or Un Lun Dun, that it’s a wonder we have an appetite for (ahem) more. In this, the first of a promised series, what does Moore bring to what is by now a familiar itinerary? More Moore for a start, which is to say characters as if by Dickens, and set dressing as if by Iain Sinclair. It’s a heady brew. His esoteric Long London, when Dennis runs into it at last, is rendered in language so unhinged it teeters on the unreadable, so sure is Moore that the reader will be hooked. His maximalist prose isn’t for everyone. Will you join Dennis as he “glories in a robust sausage sandwich – slabs of fresh bread, soft and baked to flaking umber at the edges, soaking up the hot grease of the bangers”? I did not, though I admit that the “glossy chunks” of chip-shop cod “that slid apart like pages in a poorly stapled magazine” were nicely done.

More impressive is the control Moore has over his architecture. His straightforward story harbours a surprising degree of pathos: when the plot around the misplaced book resolves unexpectedly, halfway through, it leaves Dennis with a couple of hundred pages in which to make ordinary human mistakes, chiefly mistaking friends for enemies, and friendliness for sexual attraction. So our uncomplicated young hero grows up as kinked and keeled-over as the rest of us, while the war, long over, continues to unhinge the world, financing its criminal class and normalising its violence.

You can catch a glimpse of where Moore’s new series is going. His London is too complicated to explain simply. Simple reasons have become a thing of the past, “and we shan’t be seeing ’em again.” Magical thinking is not just possible for Moore’s characters; it’s reasonable. It’s inconceivable that the writer of the 1990s comic sensation From Hell won’t find himself wandering through Victorian Whitechapel at some point. Still, I would like to think that The Great When is edging away from Ripper territory into a wider and more generous vision of what London was, is, and may become.

What about the unknown knowns?

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Reading Nate Silver’s On the Edge and The Art of Uncertainty by David Spiegelhalter for the Spectator

The Italian actuary Bruno de Finetti, writing in 1931, was explicit: “Probability,” he wrote, “does not exist.”

Probability, it’s true, is simply the measure of an observer’s uncertainty, and in The Art of Uncertainty British statistician David Spiegelhalter explains how his extraordinary and much-derided science has evolved to the point where it is even able to say useful things about why things have turned out the way they have, based purely on present evidence. Spiegelhalter was a member of the Statistical Expert Group of the 2018 UK Infected Blood Inquiry, and you know his book’s a winner the moment he tells you that between 650 and 3,320 people nationwide died from tainted transfusions. By this late point, along with the pity and the horror, you have a pretty good sense of the labour and ingenuity that went into those peculiarly specific, peculiarly wide-spread numbers.

At the heart of Spiegelhalter’s maze, of course, squats Donald Rumsfeld, once pilloried for his convoluted syntax at a 2002 Department of Defense news briefing, and now immortalised for what came out of it: the best ever description of what it’s like to act under conditions of uncertainty. Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” weren’t the last word, however; Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek (it had to be Žižek) pointed out that there are also “unknown knowns” — “all the unconscious beliefs and prejudices that determine how we perceive reality.”

In statistics, something called Cromwell’s Rule cautions us never to bed absolute certainties (probabilities of 0 or 1) into our models. Still, “unknown knowns” fly easily under the radar, usually in the form of natural language. Spiegelhalter tells how, in 1961, John F Kennedy authorised the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, quite unaware of the minatory statistics underpinning the phrase “fair chance” in an intelligence briefing.

From this, you could draw a questionable moral: that the more we quantify the world, the better our decisions will be. Nate Silver — poker player, political pundit and author of 2012’s The Signal and the Noise — finds much to value in this idea. On the Edge, though, is more about the unforeseen consequences that follow.

There is a sprawling social ecosystem out there that Silver dubs “the River”, which includes “everyone from low-stakes poker pros just trying to grind out a living to crypto kings and adventure-capital billionaires.” On the Edge is, among many other things, a cracking piece of popular anthropology.

Riverians accept that it is very hard to be certain about anything; they abandon certainty for games of chance; and they end up treating everything as a market to be played.

Remember those chippy, cheeky chancers immortalised in films like 21 (2008: MIT’s Blackjack Team takes on Las Vegas) and Moneyball (2011: a young economist up-ends baseball)?

More than a decade has passed, and they’re not buccaneers any more. Today, says Silver, “the Riverian mindset is coming from inside the house.”

You don’t need to be a David Spiegelhalter to be a Riverian. All you need is the willingness to take bets on very long odds.

Professional gamblers learn when and how how to do this, and this is why that subset of gamblers called Silicon Valley venture capitalists are willing to back wilful contrarians like Elon Musk (on a good day) and (on a bad day) Ponzi-scheming crypto-crooks like Sam Bankman-Fried.

Success as a Riverian isn’t guaranteed. As Silver points out, “a lot of the people who play poker for a living would be better off — at least financially — doing something else.” Then again, those who make it in the VC game expect to double their money every four years. And those who find they’ve backed a Google or a SpaceX can find themselves living in a very odd world indeed.

Recently the billionaire set has been taking an interest and investing in “effective altruism”, a hyper-utilitarian dish cooked up by Oxford philosopher Will MacAskill. “EA” promises to multiply the effectiveness of acts of charity by studying their long-term effectiveness — a approach that naturally appeals to minds focused on quantification. Silver describes the state of the current movement, “stuck in the uncanny valley between being abstractly principled and ruthlessly pragmatic, with the sense that you can kind of make it up as you go along”. Who here didn’t see that one coming? Most of the original EA set now spend their time agonising over the apocalyptic potential of artificial intelligence.

The trick to Riverian thinking is to decouple things, in order to measure their value. Rather than say, “The Chick-fil-A CEO’s views on gay marriage have put me off my lunch,” you say, “the CEO’s views are off-putting, but this is a damn fine sandwich — I’ll invest.”

That such pragmatism might occasionally ding your reputation, we’ll take as read. But what happens when you do the opposite, glomming context after context onto every phenomenon in pursuit of some higher truth? Soon everything becomes morally equivalent to everything else and thinking becomes impossible.

Silver mentions a December 2023 congressional hearing in which the tone-deaf presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT, in their sophomoric efforts to be right about all things all at once all the time, managed to argue their way into anti-Semitism. (It’s on YouTube if you haven’t seen it already. The only thing I can compare it to is how The Fast Show’s unlucky Alf used to totter invariably toward the street’s only open manhole.) No wonder that the left-leaning, non-Riverian establishment in politics and education is becoming, in Silver’s words, “a small island threatened by a rising tide of disapproval.”

We’d be foolish in the extreme to throw in our lot with the Riverians, though: people whose economic model reduces to: Bet long odds on the hobby-horses of contrarian asshats and never mind what gets broken in the process.

If we want a fairer, more equally apportioned world, these books should convince us that we should be spending less time worrying about what people are thinking, and concern ourselves more with how people are thinking.

We cannot afford to be ridden by unknown knowns.

 

“Fears about technology are fears about capitalism”

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Reading How AI Will Change Your Life by Patrick Dixon and AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, for the Telegraph

According to Patrick Dixon, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, artificial intelligence will not bring about the end of the world. It isn’t even going to bring about the end of human civilisation. It’ll struggle even to take over our jobs. (If anything, signs point to a decrease in unemployment.)

Am I alone in feeling cheated here? In 2014, Stephen Hawking said we were doomed. A decade later, Elon Musk is saying much the same. Last year, Musk and other CEOs and scientists signed an open letter from the Future of Life Institute, demanding a pause on giant AI experiments.

But why listen to fiery warnings from the tech industry? Of 5,400 large IT projects (for instance, creating a large data warehouse for a bank) recorded by 2012 in a rolling database maintained by McKinsey, nearly half went over budget, and over half under-delivered. In How AI Will Change Your Life, author and business consultant Dixon remarks, “Such consistent failures on such a massive scale would never be tolerated in any other area of business.” Narayanan and Kapoor, both computer scientists, say that academics in this field are no better. “We probably shouldn’t care too much about what AI experts think about artificial general intelligence,” they write. “AI researchers have often spectacularly underestimated the difficulty of achieving AI milestones.”

These two very different books want you to see AI from inside the business. Dixon gives us plenty to think about: AI’s role in surveillance; AI’s role in intellectual freedom and copyright; AI’s role in warfare; AI’s role in human obsolescence – his exhaustive list runs to over two dozen chapters. Each of these debates matter, but we would be wrong to think that they are driven by, or were even about, technology at all. Again and again, they are issues of money: about how production gravitates towards automation to save labour costs; or about how AI tools are more often than not used to achieve imaginary efficiencies at the expense of the poor and the vulnerable. Why go to the trouble of policing poor neighbourhoods if the AI can simply round up the usual suspects? As the science-fiction writer Ted Chiang summed up in June 2023, “Fears about technology are fears about capitalism.”

As both books explain, there are three main flavours of artificial intelligence. Large language models power chatbots, of which GPT-4, Gemini and the like will be most familiar to readers. They are bullshitters, in the sense that they’re trained to produce plausible text, not accurate information, and so fall under philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit as speech that is intended to persuade without regard for the truth. At the moment they work quite well, but wait a year or two: as the internet fills with AI-generated content, chatbots and their ilk will begin to regurgitate their own pabulum, and the human-facing internet will decouple from truth entirely.

Second, there are AI systems whose superior pattern-matching spots otherwise invisible correlations in large datasets. This ability is handy, going on miraculous, if you’re tackling significant, human problems. According to Dixon, for example, Klick Labs in Canada has developed a test that can diagnose Type 2 diabetes with over 85 per cent accuracy using just a few seconds of the patient’s voice. Such systems have proved less helpful, however, in Chicago. Narayanan and Kapoor report how, lured by promises of instant alerts to gun violence, the city poured nearly 49 million dollars into ShotSpotter, a system that has been questioned for its effectiveness after police fatally shot a 13-year-old boy in 2021.

Last of the three types is predictive AI: the least discussed, least successful, and – in the hands of the authors of AI Snake Oil (4 STARS) – by some way the most interesting. So far, we’ve encountered problems with AI’s proper working that are fixable, at least in principle. With bigger, better datasets – this is the promise – we can train AI to do better. Predictive AI systems are different. These are the ones that promise to find you the best new hires, flag students for dismissal before they start to flounder, and identify criminals before they commit criminal acts.

They won’t, however, because they can’t. Drawing broad conclusions about general populations is often the stuff of social science, and social science datasets tend to be small. But were you to have a big dataset about a group of people, would AI’s ability to say things about the group let it predict the behaviour of one of its individuals? The short answer is no. Individuals are chaotic in the same way as earthquakes are. It doesn’t matter how much you know about earthquakes; the one thing you’ll never know is where and when the next one will hit.

How AI Will Change Your Life is not so much a book as a digest of bullet points for a PowerPoint presentation. Business types will enjoy Dixon’s meticulous lists and his willingness to argue both sides against the middle. If you need to acquire instant AI mastery in time for your next board meeting, Dixon’s your man. Being a dilettante, I will stick with Narayanan and Kapoor, if only for this one-liner, which neatly captures our confused enthusiasm for little black boxes that promise the world. “It is,” they say, “as if everyone in the world has been given the equivalent of a free buzzsaw.”