books

Joshua Foer’s “Moonwalking with Einstein” is one of the rare books that I found worth rereading. In it, Foer, a young journalist, enters the bizarre world of memory competitions after being assigned to cover the world championship. He describes in vivid detail the unusual characters he encounters, mnemonic techniques he learns, and books he reads to help prepare him for the U.S. Memory Championship. The “memory athletes” he interviews are able to memorize a deck of cards in thirty-two seconds, recall over eighty thousand digits of pi, and recite the entire works of Shakespeare....

“The Coming Wave” explores the advantages and risks associated with a surge of emerging technologies. Authored by Mustafa Suleyman, a British artificial intelligence researcher and co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI, the book extends beyond just AI. It delves into the merits and drawbacks of other developing technologies, such as quantum computing and synthetic biology. In the initial sections of the book, the author paints a picture of the potential benefits of these emerging technologies, reading like utopian science fiction....

Sebastian Mallaby’s “The Power Law” traces the early history of the venture capital industry up to the present day, highlighting its significant impact on the development of technology. Contrary to common claims that venture capitalists (VCs) are merely opportunistic lemmings following trends, the book argues that venture capital requires genuine skill and provides various examples to support this claim. It covers successful venture capital investments in tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, as well as notable failures such as WeWork and Theranos....

Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Guns, Germs, and Steel” begins with a question posed by a New Guinea politician named Yali: “Why do white men have so much cargo [i.e., steel tools and other products of civilization], and we New Guineans have so little?” The book attempts to answer this question by uncovering the historical and evolutionary reasons for the vast wealth disparities between nations. Diamond’s answer to the question is summarized as follows: “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves....

Melanie Michell is an AI researcher and professor at the Santa Fe Institute. In her book “Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans,” she seeks to make artificial intelligence understandable for laypeople, and for the most part, achieves that goal. She begins by discussing the history of artificial intelligence, starting from the “perceptron” and working up to deep learning for natural language. Michell explains each concept in concrete terms and apt metaphors, with minimal technical jargon and math....