Jerard's October 2024 Reads
Jerard Hoh
I share things I find useful in life | PMP? certified with 13 years of experience in: Oil & Gas Industry | Project Management | Planning | Construction Management | Lifelong Learner
Summarizing my October 2024 reads with some thoughts:
1. Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (2024) by Yuval Noah Harari
Contexts about the author: Yuval Noah Harari (born 24 February 1976) is an Israeli medievalist, military historian, public intellectual, and writer.
Yuval Noah Harari is hands down my favorite author. His books Sapien (2011), Homo Deus (2016), and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) are must-reads if you asked me. Yuval truly is one of the greatest storytellers of our time.
In his latest book Nexus, Yuval provides a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI. Instead of the usual artificial intelligence that we refer to when we use the abbreviation AI, the author uses "Alien" Intelligence as a better representation. The author uses the word "Alien" because this intelligence will be the first intelligence aside from the only intelligence we know of, which is human intelligence. The author repeats again and again in this book, that the "Alien" intelligence will surprise us. We humans simply cannot fathom what these new "Agents" are capable of.
"AI is the first technology in history that can make decisions and create new ideas by itself. All previous human inventions have empowered humans, because no matter how powerful the new tool was, the decisions about its usage remained in our hands. Knives and bombs do not themselves decide whom to kill. They are dumb tools, lacking the intelligence necessary to process information and make independent decisions. In contrast, AI can process information by itself, and thereby replace humans in decision-making. AI isn’t a tool – it’s an agent." ― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus
The book is broken down into 3 parts:
Part 1: Human Networks
The author starts the book with how we define "information". When is a pigeon a pigeon, and when does the pigeon become information? This follows the story of the American army's carrier pigeon named Cher Ami, who helped a trapped American lost battalion carry important information across heavy enemy fire. The information led to the rescue of the lost battalion.
The author also talks of the naive view of information, which argues that by gathering and processing much more information than individuals can, big networks achieve a better understanding of numerous fields, which makes the network not only powerful but also wise. This view, as the author will continue to elaborate in this book, is incorrect.
The author continues to write about how humans created stories, and subsequently documents, for us to advance and become the most powerful species on earth. The author also talks about the lack of a self-correcting mechanism in our human networks, and the reliance on a superhuman intelligence that is supposedly "error-free and infallible".
The author ended part 1 with a brief history of Democracy and Totalitarianism. This part gives me the chills when the author describes people's lives under the Stalin regime. You would never want to be sent to the Gulag.
Part 2: The Inorganic Network
In part 2, the author focuses on the new members who joined our human networks - computers. Here, the author uses the words "computer" and "computer networks" to represent algorithms and AI networks.
The author cited the occurrence in 2016-2017, where Facebook's algorithm helped provoke the anti-Rohingya violence in Myanmar. Facebook employees did not actively cause it, their algorithm did. When Facebook set their algorithms to "maximize user engagement", their algorithm did exactly what they are told. The algorithm found that rage and anger contents are more "engaging", therefore they spread them like wildfire.
Unlike human networks, computer networks are always on. The author talks about how previous totalitarian regimes utilized different government apparatuses, armies, and secret police to keep each other in check. This, however, is still dependent on manual centralized reporting. When the secret police submits a report, it still needs a human from the dictator's office or the dictator himself to vet through. With the introduction of the always "on" AI networks, totalitarian regimes can delegate the processing works to the superintelligent AI. This makes the regime much for efficient at keeping all under them in check.
Part 3: Computer Politics
The last part of this book talks about how different human societies (Democracies and Totalitarianism) might react to the rise of the new computer networks.
For Democracies, the unfathomability of AI algorithms and their decisions will be the biggest threat. The author cited Loomis v. Wisconsin (2016), where Eric Loomis was sentenced to a 6-year prison sentence (a harsh punishment for minor offenses Loomis admitted to) by judges who consulted an algorithm named COMPAS. When asked how COMPAS evaluated Loomis's prison sentence, the company that owned COMPAS stated that they were unable to disclose it due to it being a trade secret.
Although it seems that Totalitarian regimes will reap all the benefits of an all-powerful AI system, the author warns us of the opposite. The author uses an outlandish thought experiment below (extracted directly from the book):
Imagine that the year is 2050, and the Great Leader is woken up at four in the morning by an urgent call from the Surveillance & Security Algorithm. ‘Great Leader, we are facing an emergency. I’ve crunched trillions of data points, and the pattern is unmistakable: the defence minister is planning to assassinate you in the morning and take power himself. The hit squad is ready, waiting for his command. Give me the order, though, and I’ll liquidate him with a precision strike.’ ‘But the defense minister is my most loyal supporter,’ says the Great Leader. ‘Only yesterday he said to me—’ ‘Great Leader, I know what he said to you. I hear everything. But I also know what he said afterwards to the hit squad. And for months I’ve been picking up disturbing patterns in the data.’ ‘Are you sure you were not fooled by deepfakes?’ ‘I’m afraid the data I relied on is 100 percent genuine,’ says the algorithm. ‘I checked it with my special deepfake-detecting sub-algorithm. I can explain exactly how we know it isn’t a deepfake, but that would take us a couple of weeks. I didn’t want to alert you before I was sure, but the data points converge on an inescapable conclusion: a coup is underway. Unless we act now, the assassins will be here in an hour. But give me the order, and I’ll liquidate the traitor.’ By giving so much power to the Surveillance & Security Algorithm, the Great Leader has placed himself in an impossible situation. If he distrusts the algorithm, he may be assassinated by the defence minister, but if he trusts the algorithm and purges the defence minister, he becomes the algorithm’s puppet. Whenever anyone tries to make a move against the algorithm, the algorithm knows exactly how to manipulate the Great Leader. ― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus
Not such a fun idea for the "Great Leader" to adopt a superintelligent AI advisor now that we know the scenario above might occur.
This book is a stern warning on our journey towards creating an "Alien" intelligence. This will be the first time humans encounter an intelligent being other than ourselves. If we do not take our steps cautiously, the consequences will be devastating.
Highly recommended read.
Contexts about the author: Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator, and author.
领英推荐
From the title of this book, you can tell that this book is all about flying.
When did humans look up towards the skies, envied the birds, and wondered "What would it be like if I could soar amongst them?"
We all know the story of Icarus, who melted his wings as he flew too close to the sun. With a better understanding of science, we now know that Icarus's wings will not melt when he flies closer to the sun, as the temperature gets lower when we gain altitude.
In this book, the author explains flight in nature from an evolutionary viewpoint. From a non-flying species's view, flying does have a lot of benefits. If so, why don't all organisms evolve to have the ability to fly? The author then explains no matter how beneficial flight is, the ends of an organism is to still perform the single most important thing - to have its genes passed down to the next generations! Flying, in this sense, is just the means, not the ends, for the evolutionary goal.
One of the key elements of flight highlighted in this book is the ratio of size to surface area. Smaller creatures such as birds and insects can achieve flight much more easily than say, heavier creatures such as horses or elephants. The author provided a simple analogy for us to visualize this:
“If you double the size of anything (say its length, with all other dimensions growing in proportion), you might think its volume and weight would double too. But it actually gets eight times heavier (2 x 2 x 2). This is true of any shape that you might scale up, including people, birds, bats, planes, insects and horses, but we can see it most clearly with square children’s bricks. Take one cubical brick. Now stack bricks to make the same shape but twice as big. How many bricks are there in the larger stack? Eight. The double-sized block of bricks weighs eight times as much as the single brick of the same shape. If you now make a stack three times as big, you’ll find you need twenty-seven bricks: 3 x 3 x 3, or 3-cubed. And if you try to build a stack measuring ten bricks in each direction, you’ll probably run out of bricks because 10-cubed (1,000) is an awful lot of bricks.” ― Richard Dawkins
The author elaborates on why some birds evolved from flight to flightlessness. One theory is that when ancient birds flew onto remote islands (by chance or accident) that did not have predators, they slowly evolved to be flightless as the ability to fly was no longer needed. The ability to fly is very expensive economically, it requires a lot of energy (food is scarce) and the correct ratio between size and surface area.
The book then explores unpowered flight (gliding from a certain height or gaining momentum through speed). Some animals mentioned here are flying squirrels and flying lemurs. There is also a natural phenomenon known as thermals, which birds like vultures use to gain height before gliding/flying with minimal effort.
When it comes to human flight, the author talks about lighter-than-air (balloons) and also powered flights (jet engines). People in the old days used hydrogen (a highly flammable gas) as their "lighter than air" medium to achieve flight. The price they pay for their mistakes is high (no pun intended). The author then briefly explored powered flight.
One of the key things I've learned from this book is that when a rockets blast off into the skies and space, it does not leave the Earth's gravitational pull, it instead leaves the Earth's atmosphere and once achieving escape velocity, will be in a state of free falling around Earth. I'll let Neil deGrasse Tyson explain more about it in the video below:
I might have learned these during physics class, but I'm sure that I have forgotten about them.
This book is a good read and it gives inspiration to learn more about the mechanics of flight.
3. Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering (2024) by Malcolm Gladwell
Contexts about the author: Malcolm Timothy Gladwell (born 03 September 1963) is a Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker.
Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite authors. My reading journey started with some of his books, such as The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), Outlier (2008), and David and Goliath (2013). He is a great storyteller.
The author starts the book with a series of court session recordings on the American opioid crisis. The book continues with the story of one of the biggest Medicare fraud schemes in the USA. Next, the author raises the concerns of monoculture by connecting an epidemic of suicide cases among teenagers from a residential area named "Poplar Grove" with the decline of reproduction rates of cheetahs. Other stories covered in this book are linked to the Holocaust, the mysteries of Harvard Women's rugby team, and COVID-19.
One of the key ideas re-highlighted (as it appeared in The Tipping Point) by the author is the Law of the Few. The author even pushed further to state that it should be instead called "The Law of the very very Few". Of the doctors in the USA who prescribed opioids to their patients, a small percentage of them prescribed a big percentage of opioids.
Another insight that the author discussed in this book is the idea of "The Magic Third". In a group of 10 people, if only 1 person from the group is a minority, then that person acts as a token (mere representation). However, things start to change when the minority group increases to a third of the total group size. The minority will then have a different influence on the entire group.
The author connects all the stories intricately and interestingly. There are several "ohh" and "Ahha" moments in which the author leads the reader to discover themselves.
Recommended read.
If you have read something good lately, share your thoughts in the comments!
Checkout my next reads here: https://lnkd.in/gm8dV7hV
Happy reading!
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