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538. The Scholar

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Dervla McTiernan

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, Foreign

377 pages, published March 7, 2019

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Hoopla

Summary

The Scholar is book #2 in Dervla McTiernan’s Cormac Reilly series.  It opens with Reilly’s girlfriend Emma stumbling across a hit and run victim in the early morning outside of Darcy Therapeutics, the research lab where she works, and calling Reilly.  The deceased girl is found with ID identifying her as Carline Darcy, the grandaughter of the founder of Darcy Therapeutics, Ireland’s most successful pharmaceutical company.  Reilly is assigned to the case and soon discovers that the victim is not Carline, but a poor waitress who dropped out of the nearby university.  As he continues to investigate, he discovers a tangled web which threatens is relationship with Emma.

Quotes 

 

My Take

After thoroughly enjoying the first Cormac Reilly novel The Ruin, I had high hopes for The Scholar.  I was not disappointed. McTiernan does more than just deliver an intriguing detective procedural, she sets you firmly in a time, place and the lives of the characters.  Additionally, her insights into human nature make for compelling reading.

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537. Olive, Again

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Elizabeth Strout

Genre:  Fiction

289 pages, published October 15, 2019

Reading Format:   e-book on Hoopla

Summary

The sequel to Olive Kitteridge, Olive, Again continues the story of the unique Olive Kitteridge as she enters old age,  struggling to make sense of her own life and the lives of others in the small town of Crosby, Maine.

Quotes 

“I think our job–maybe even our ‘duty’–is to–To bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”

 

“Because in February the days were really getting longer and you could see it, if you really looked. You could see how at the end of each day the world seemed cracked open and the extra light made its way across the stark trees, and promised. It promised, that light, and what a thing that was.”

 

“And it came to him then that it should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness were choices that required respect.”

 

“When you get old,” Olive told Andrea after the girl had walked away, “you become invisible. It’s just the truth. And yet it’s freeing in a way.”

 

“But we’re both old enough to know things now, and that’s good.” “What things?” “When to shut up, mainly.”

 

 “What frightened him was how much of his life he had lived without knowing who he was or what he was doing. It caused him to feel an inner trembling, and he could not quite find the words—for himself—to even put it exactly as he sensed it. But he sensed that he had lived his life in a way that he had not known. This meant there had been a large blindspot directly in front of his eyes. It meant that he did not understand, not really at all, how others had perceived

 

“God, Olive, you’re a difficult woman. You are such a goddamn difficult woman, and fuck all, I love you. So if you don’t mind, Olive, maybe you could be a little less Olive with me, even if it means being a little more Olive with others. Because I love you, and we don’t have much time.”

 

“And Olive thought about this: the way people can love those they barely know, and how abiding that love can be, and also how deep that love can be, even when—as in her own case—it was temporary. She thought of Betty and her stupid bumper sticker, and the child who had been so frightened that Halima Butterfly had told her about, and yet to tell any of this right now to Betty, who was genuinely suffering—as Olive had suffered—seemed cruel, and she kept silent.”

 

“No. I had enough of babies growing up.” “Never mind. Kids are just a needle in your heart.”

 

“You’re an easy woman to please,” he had said to her. And she had said, “You may be the first person to think that.”

 

“But it was almost over, after all, her life. It swelled behind her like a sardine fishing net, all sorts of useless seaweed and broken bits of shells and the tiny, shining fish—all those hundreds of students she had taught, the girls and boys in high school she had passed in the corridor when she was a high school girl herself (many—most—would be dead by now), the billion streaks of emotion she’d had as she’d looked at sunrises, sunsets, the different hands of waitresses who had placed before her cups of coffee— All of it gone, or about to go.”

 

“I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.”

 

 “When you get old,” Olive told Andrea after the girl had walked away, “you become invisible. It’s just the truth. And yet it’s freeing in a way.”

 

“I am the opposite of a snob.” Jack laughed a long time. “You think being a reverse snob is not being a snob? Olive, you’re a snob.”

 

“And that woman is not politics. She’s a person, and she has every right to be here.”

 

“And so the day they had had together folded over on itself, was done with, gone.”

 

“he was an old man who was talking to himself on a wharf in Portland, Maine, and he could

 

“Stop it! Tell me how it’s really been! He sat back, pushed his glass forward. It’s just the way it was, that’s all. People either didn’t know how they felt about something or they chose never to say how they really felt about something.”

 

“She did not have a family as other people did. Other people had their children come and stay and they talked and laughed and the grandchildren sat on the laps of their grandmothers, and they went places and did things, ate meals together, kissed when they parted.”

 

“Her son had married his mother, as all men—in some form or other—eventually do.”

 

“the way people can love those they barely know, and how abiding that love can be, and also how deep that love can be, even when—as in her own case—it was temporary.”

 

 “thought of the ants that were still going about trying to get their sand wherever they needed it to go. They seemed almost heartbreaking to him, in their tininess and their resilience.”

 

 “Personality disorder? Given the extensive and widespread array of human emotions, why was anything a personality disorder?”

 

“Betty was still weeping, but she was smiling more too, and she said, “Oh, it’s just a life, Olive.” Olive thought about this. She said, “Well, it’s your life. It matters.”

 

My Take

It was a pleasure to revisit the character of Olive Kitteridge.  Through her, author Elizabeth Strout shares so many insightful observances of human nature that I often found myself re-reading portions of the book to make sure I registered what was being said.  If you have read Olive Kitteridge and enjoyed it, then by all means read Olive, Again.

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535. The Ruin

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Joni Renee

Author:   Dervla McTiernan

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, Foreign

380 pages, published July 3, 2018

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Hoopla

Summary

The Ruin (Book no. 1 in the Cormac Reilly series) opens with DI Cormac Reilly discovering the body of Hilaria Blake in her crumbling Georgian home, dead from a drug overdose, along with her two children, Maude and Jack.  Twenty years later, Aisling Conroy’s boyfriend Jack is found dead in a freezing river and the police conclude it was suicide. A surgical resident, Aisling suspects something is not quite right, especially after Jack’s sister Maude reappears in Ireland after a 20 year absence.  When  Cormac Reilly is assigned to re-investigate Hilaria’s accidental overdose, he also comes to suspect that things are not as they seem.

Quotes 

 

My Take

Having read and loved many books by the Irish writer Tana French, I was keen to check out Dervla McTiernan, a writer in the same vein.  I was not disappointed.  Her spot on character insights and sense of place enrich and deepen this crackling mystery.  I will continue to read her books and look forward to the second Cormac Reilly book.

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534. Machines Like Me

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Ian McEwan

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction

306 pages, published April 18, 2019

Reading Format:   e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

Author Ian McEwan tells the story of a world where fully functional robots that closely resemble humans are introduced in an alternate reality 1980’s  Britain.  The UK has lost the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing is alive.

In his early 30’s, Charlie finds himself unemployed and adrift when he comes into a small inheritance.  He uses the money to purchase Adam, one of the first group of synthetic humans sold to the public. With the assistance of his neighbor Miranda, whom Charlie is in love with, Charlie co-designs Adam’s personality. Adam, who is beautiful, strong and clever, develops feelings for Miranda and the three protagonists are soon emeshed in a love triangle.

Quotes 

“We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world. Devised along generally rational lines, well disposed to others, such a mind soon finds itself in a hurricane of contradictions. We’ve lived with them and the list wearies us. Millions dying of diseases we know how to cure. Millions living in poverty when there’s enough to go around. We degrade the biosphere when we know it’s our only home. We threaten each other with nuclear weapons when we know where it could lead. We love living things but we permit a mass extinction of species. And all the rest – genocide, torture, enslavement, domestic murder, child abuse, school shootings, rape and scores of daily outrages.”

 

“As Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you’re not free to choose your desires.”

 

“Factory settings—a contemporary synonym for fate.”

 

“An old friend of mine, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.”

 

“We live alongside this torment and aren’t amazed when we still find happiness, even love. Artificial minds are not so well defended.”

 

“I couldn’t motivate myself. I was subject to occasional depression, relatively mild, certainly not suicidal, and not long episodes so much as passing moments like this, when meaning and purpose and all prospect of pleasure drained away and left me briefly catatonic. For minutes on end I couldn’t remember what kept me going. As I stared at the litter of cups and pot and jug in front of me, I thought it was unlikely I would ever get out of my wretched little flat. The two boxes I called rooms, the stained ceilings walls and floors would contain me to the end. There was a lot like me in the neighbourhood, but thirty or forty years older. I had seen them in Simon’s shop, reaching for the quality journals from the top shelf. I noted the men especially and their shabby clothes. They had swept past some crucial junction in their lives many years back – a poor career choice, a bad marriage, the unwritten book, the illness that never went away. Now there options were closed, they managed to keep themselves going with some shred of intellectual longing or curiosity. But their boat was sunk.”

 

“The present is the frailest of improbable constructs. It could have been different. Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise.”

 

“Have you any idea what it takes to catch a ball, or raise a cup to your lips, or make immediate sense of a word, a phrase or an ambiguous sentence? We didn’t, not at first. Solving maths problems is the tiniest fraction of what human intelligence does. We learned from a new angle just how wondrous a thing the brain is. A one-litre, liquid-cooled, three-dimensional computer. Unbelievable processing power, unbelievably compressed, unbelievable energy efficiency, no overheating. The whole thing running on twenty-five watts — one dim light bulb.”

 

 

“It’s about machines like me and people like you and our future together…the sadness that’s to come. It will happen. With improvements over time…we’ll surpass you…and outlast you…even as we love you.”

 

“What people queued the entire weekend for became, six months later, as interesting as the socks on their feet. What happened to the cognition-enhancing helmets, the speaking fridges with a sense of smell? Gone the way of the mouse pad, the Filofax, the electric carving knife, the fondue set. The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.”

 

“Self-aware existence. I’m lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it’s for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.”

 

“My prejudice was that any machine that could not tell you by its very functioning how it should be used was not worth its keep.”

 

“other minds, must continue to fascinate us. As artificial people became more like us, then became us, then became more than us, we could never tire of them. They were bound to surprise us. They might fail us in ways that were beyond our imagining. Tragedy was a possibility, but not boredom.”

 

“Europe was not simply a union that chiefly benefited large corporations. The history of the continental member states was vastly different from our own. They had suffered violent revolutions, invasions, occupations and dictatorships. They were therefore only too willing to submerge their identities in a common cause directed from Brussels. We, on the other hand, had lived unconquered for nearly a thousand years. Soon, we would live freely again.”

 

“A man newly in love knows what life is.”

 

“The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.”

 

“My opinion,” he said, “is that the haiku is the literary form of the future.”

 

“The other day, Thomas reminded me of the famous Latin tag from Virgil’s Aeneid. Sunt lacrimae rerum – there are tears in the nature of things.”

 

“football in the immaculate empty cupboards. He had lived there three years, he had told me. He was successful and rich and he inhabited a house of failure, of abandoned hope, probably.”

 

 “property, fed on each side by nationalistic stupidity. I summoned the Borges observation: two bald men fighting over a comb.”

 

“…I despised even more the agglomeration of routines and learning algorithms that could burrow into my life, like a tropical river worm, and make choices on my behalf.”

 

“The academic movement known generally as ‘theory’ had taken social history ‘by storm’ – her phrase. Since she had studied at a traditional university which offered old-fashioned narrative accounts of the past, she was having to take on a new vocabulary, a new way of thinking. Sometimes, as we lay side by side in bed (the evening of the tarragon chicken had been a success) I listened to her complaints and tried to look and sound sympathetic. It was no longer proper to assume that anything at all had ever happened in the past. There were only historical documents to consider, and changing scholarly approaches to them, and our own shifting relationship to those approaches, all of which were determined by ideological context, by relations to power and wealth, to race, class, gender and sexual orientation.”

 

My Take

Ian McEwan’s combination of an alternative history with fully realized robotic artificial intelligence make Machines Like Me a fascinating read.  The plot itself is compelling in that we want to see what robotic Adam will do next and how he will interact with the human co-creators of his personality.  However, the subtext of the book raises intriguing questions: what makes us human? Our actions or our inner selves? Could a machine understand the human heart and be capable of love?

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533. A Column of Fire

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ken Follett

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, Foreign

916 pages, published September 12, 2017

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

A Column of Fire is the third book in Ken Follett’s series of historical fiction that focuses on the town of Kingsbridge, England during succeeding time periods.  In this book, the focus is on the continent wide conflict between Protestants and Catholics.  The story unfolds with a focus on characters from England, France and Spain as they navigate the treacherous mid 1500’s.  In England, after a young Ned Willard is stymied in his desire to marry Margery Fitzgerald by class and religious differences he enlists in service to Princess Elizabeth.  When she becomes queen, all Europe turns against England. Over a turbulent half century, the love between Ned and Margery seems doomed as extremism sparks violence from Edinburgh to Geneva.

Quotes 

“When a man is certain that he knows God’s will, and is resolved to do it regardless of the cost, he is the most dangerous person in the world.”

 

“Some men craved deference; others craved wine, or the bodies of beautiful women, or the monastic life of order and obedience. What did Ned crave? The answer came into his mind with a speed and effortlessness that took him by surprise: justice.”

 

“Trials rarely found men not guilty. The general view was that if a man were innocent he would not have got into trouble in the first place.”

 

“I may yet go through anguish in hell for my sin. But if I had to live that time again I would do the same, to end Margery’s ordeal. I preferred to suffer myself than to know that her agony continued. Her well-being was more important to me than my own. I have learned, during the course of a long life, that that is the meaning of love.”

 

“Changing your beliefs with every change of monarch was called “policy,” and people who did it were “politicians.”

 

“there are no saints in politics, but imperfect people can make the world a better place.”

 

“he thinks the aldermen’s job is to make decisions and then enforce them. When your father was mayor he said that aldermen should rule the town by serving it.” Ned said impatiently: “That sounds like two ways of looking at the same thing.” “It’s not, though,” said his mother. “It’s two different worlds.”

 

“We hanged him in front of Kingsbridge Cathedral. It is the usual place for executions. After all, if you can’t kill a man in front of God’s face you probably shouldn’t kill him at all.”

 

“My father taught us to learn as much as possible of any tongue we came across. He says it’s better than money in the bank.”

 

“The simple idea that people should be allowed to worship as they wished caused more suffering than the ten plagues of Egypt.”

 

“Elizabeth’s true attitude was probably that of someone who hears two drunks fighting in the street at night: it did not matter who won so long as neither tried to get into the house.”

 

My Take

With his engaging style that effortlessly weaves historical figures into compelling stories, I always find Ken Follett a pleasure to read and A Column of Fire is no exception.  I had previously read several authors’ take on the frought Elizabethan era, but gained some new information and insights from Follett’s book.  I also found myself involved with the characters and often kept playing the audio book to see what would happen next.  If you like this book, then check out the rest of the Kingsbridge series:  The Pillars of the Earth, World Without End and The Evening and the Morning.  All are excellent.

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532. False Black Power?

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Jason Riley

Genre:  Non Fiction, Race, History, Politics, Public Policy

129 pages, published May 30, 2017

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

In False Black Power, Wall Street Journal Editorial Board member Jason Riley challenges the identity politics and Critical Race Theory advocated by Black civil rights leaders as a dead end for Black Americans.  Riley demonstrates that the strategy of integrating political institutions, i.e. if more Blacks hold elective office then the lives of Blacks will be improved, has not worked.  In fact, Blacks are qualitatively worse off in cities controlled by Black elected officials (see Detroit).  The book also includes critiques by John McWhorter and Glenn Loury along with responses from Riley.

Quotes 

 

My Take

I found False Black Power well researched and documented critique of the failure of left wing policies to uplift Black America.  Riley proposes solutions that empower Blacks, rather than promote an embrace of victim status, such as increased school-choice vouchers and reducing social safety nets (making them a more temporary form of welfare rather than the multigenerational welfare system).  In the same vien as White Guilt and Shame by Shelby Steele and Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell, Riley thoughtfully contributes to our national conversation about race in America.

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531. The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Kate DiCamillo

Genre:  Fiction, Young Adult, Children, Fantasy

200 pages, published February 14, 2006

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane is a children’s fable about an impeccably dressed china rabbit named Edward Tulane.  Edward was owned by a girl named Abilene who treated him with the utmost care and adored him completely until one day he was lost overboard while Abilene’s family was at sea.  Edward then embarks on an extraordinary journey, from the depths of the ocean to the net of a fisherman, from the top of a garbage heap to the fireside of a hoboes’ camp, from the bedside of an ailing child to the bustling streets of Memphis.  Along the way, he learns the lesson that “Someone will come for you, but first you must open your heart.”

Quotes 

“Open your heart. Someone will come. Someone will come for you. But first you must open your heart.”

 

 “Once there was a princess who was very beautiful. She shone bright as the stars on a moonless night. But what difference did it make that she was beautiful? None. No difference.”

Why did it make no difference?” asked Abilene.

Because,” said Pellegrina, “She was a princess who loved no one and cared nothing for love, even though there were many who loved her.”

 

“Edward knew what it was like to say over and over again the names of those you had left behind. He knew what it was like to miss someone. And so he listened. And in his listening, his heart opened wide and then wider still.”

 

“Perhaps,” said the man, “you would like to be lost with us. I have found it much more agreeable to be lost in the company of others.”

 

“I have been loved, Edward told the stars. So? said the stars. What difference does that make when you are all alone now?”

 

“Look at me, he said to her. His arms and legs jerked. Look at me. You got your wish. I have learned how to love. And it’s a terrible thing. I’m broken. My heart is broken. Help me. The old woman turned and hobbled away. Come back, thought Edward. Fix me”

 

“But answer me this: how can a story end happily if there is no love?”

 

“It is a horrible, terrible thing, the worst thing, to watch somebody you love die right in front of you and not be able to do nothing about it.”

 

“You are down there alone, the stars seemed to say to him. And we are up here, in our constellations, together.”

 

“But let’s not speak of what might have been. Let us speak instead of what is. You are whole.”

 

“Never in his life had Edward been cradled like a baby. Abilene had not done it. Nor had Nellie. And most certainly, Bull had not. It was a singular sensation to be held so gently and yet so fiercely, to be stared down at with so much love. Edward felt the whole of his china body flood with warmth.”

 

“Edward thought about everything that had happened to him in his short life. What kind of adventures would you have if you were in the world for a century? The old doll said, “I wonder who will come for me this time. Someone will come. Someone always comes. Who will it be?” “I don’t care if anyone comes for me,” said Edward. “But that’s dreadful,” said the old doll. “There’s no point in going on if you feel that way. No point at all. You must be filled with expectancy. You must be awash in hope. You must wonder who will love you, whom you will love next.” “I am done with being loved,” Edward told her. “I’m done with loving. It’s too painful.” “Pish,” said the old doll. “Where is your courage?” “Somewhere else, I guess,” said Edward. “You disappoint me,” she said. “You disappoint me greatly. If you have no intention of loving or being loved, then the whole journey is pointless. You might as well leap from this shelf right now and let yourself shatter into a million pieces. Get it over with. Get it all over with now.” “I would leap if I was able,” said Edward. “Shall I push you?” said the old doll”

 

“It was a singular sensation to be held so gently and yet so fiercely, to be stared down at with so much love.”

 

“They were always on the move.But in truth said bull we are all going nowhere”

 

 “SEASONS PASSED, FALL AND WINTER and spring and summer. Leaves blew in through the open door of Lucius Clarke’s shop, and rain, and the green outrageous hopeful light of spring. People came and went, grandmothers and doll collectors and little girls with their mothers. Edward Tulane waited. The seasons turned into years. Edward Tulane waited. He repeated the old doll’s words over and over until they wore a smooth groove of hope in his brain: Someone will come; someone will come for you.”

 “But in truth,’ said Bull, ‘we are going nowhere. That my friend, is the irony of our constant movement.”

 

“Edward knew what it was like to say over and over again the names of those you had left behind. He knew what it was like to miss someone. And so he listened. And in his listening, his heart opened wide and then wider still.”

 

“I have already been loved,” said Edward. “I have been loved by a girl named Abilene. I have been loved by a fisherman and his wife and a hobo and his dog. I have been loved by a boy who played the harmonica and by a girl who died. Don’t talk to me about love,” he said. “I have known love.”

 

My Take

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane is a beautifully written adventure story for children but which also has a lot to say to adults.  It’s theme of loving and being loved, even when your heart is broken, is an eternal one and is conveyed through a compelling and heartwarming story.  The illustrations are exquisite and add quite a bit to the narrative.  A great book to read to a child.

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529. The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Benjamin Lorr

Genre:  Nonfiction, Public Policy, Nutrition

336 pages, published September 8, 2020

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

The Secret Life of Groceries is a behind the scenes investigation into the human lives that contribute to the modern miracle of the American grocery store.  Lorr looks at what it takes to stock and run an American supermarket, from the truck drivers who deliver the food, to the entrepreneurs who develop new food products, the managers and employees who run the operation to the foreign exporters who engage in human rights violations to produce cheap shrimp.  Lorr reports on all of these issues and more by embedding himself alongside the people he is reporting on.   He delivers a first hand account that contributes to a much greater understanding of how our grocery store industry operates.

Quotes 

 

My Take

I could not put this book down.  Benjamin Lorr is a very talented writer and has a lot to say in this expose on the American grocery store.  The Secret Life of Groceries opened my eyes to all of the good and the bad that goes into stocking the shelves of the average American supermarket.  I will never look at them the same way again.  Well worth a read.

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527. The Evening and the Morning

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ken Follett

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Foreign

913 pages, published September 15, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

The Evening and the Morning is a prequel to Ken Follett’s very popular Pillars of the Earth series which center on life in the medieval town of Kingsbridge, England.  Set in 997 CE, it starts with the pillaging of a coastal English town by the ruthless Vikings.  A young Edgar, who is a skilled boatmaker, survives along with his mother and two brothers.  They start over as farmers in the town that will become Kingsbridge. Around the same time, Lady Ragna, a Norman noblewoman comes to England to marry Wielf, the man she loves.   Finally, we follow the story of Aldred, a monk who dreams of transforming his humble abbey into a center of learning.  The lives of Edgar, Ragna and Aldred intertwine to illuminate life in England during the end of the Dark Ages.

Quotes 

“In dog philosophy it was always better to go somewhere than to be left behind.”

 

“Ma and Pa had taught their sons to keep themselves fresh by bathing at least once a year.”

 

“And so, Aldred thought, great ones sin with impunity while lesser men are brutally chastised.”

 

“And that would be sufficient, if we lived in a world that was ruled by laws.” Aldred sat on a stool, leaned forward, and spoke quietly. “But the man matters more than the law, as you know.”

 

“in the end there’s no way to get rich crops out of poor earth.”

 

 “Coming to Glastonbury was like visiting the grave of his youth.”

 

 “When the Roman Empire declined, Britain went backward. As the Roman villas crumbled, the people built one-room wooden dwellings without chimneys. The technology of Roman pottery—important for storing food—was mostly lost. Literacy declined. This period is sometimes called the Dark Ages, and progress was painfully slow for five hundred years. Then, at last, things started to change”

 

“In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum.” In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Aldred felt he could spend his life trying to comprehend that mystery.”

 

My Take

Having thoroughly enjoyed The Pillars of the Earth trilogy, I looked forward to reading Ken Follett’s prequel to the series.  The Evening and the Morning did not disappoint.  Well developed and intriguing characters interwoven with historical events make for a captivating tale in the hands of the master storyteller Follett.  Well worth reading!

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525. Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Max Tegmark

Genre:   Non Fiction, Science, Public Policy

364 pages, published August 29, 2017

Reading Format:   e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

In Life 3.0, MIT professor Max Tegmark makes a strong case that we are on the precipice of tremendous technological changes that will impact every aspect of life on our planet.  Tegmark explores our post human future and discusses how will artificial intelligence (“AI”) will affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very existence as humans. He looks at possible outcomes after the rise of AI and proposes strategies to keep them beneficial.

Quotes 

“Life 1.0”: life where both the hardware and software are evolved rather than designed. You and I, on the other hand, are examples of “Life 2.0”: life whose hardware is evolved, but whose software is largely designed. By your software, I mean all the algorithms and knowledge that you use to process the information from your senses and decide what to do—everything from the ability to recognize your friends when you see them to your ability to walk, read, write, calculate, sing and tell jokes.”

 

“Your synapses store all your knowledge and skills as roughly 100 terabytes’ worth of information, while your DNA stores merely about a gigabyte, barely enough to store a single movie download.”

 

 “If consciousness is the way that information feels when it’s processed in certain ways, then it must be substrate-independent; it’s only the structure of the information processing that matters, not the structure of the matter doing the information processing. In other words, consciousness is substrate-independent twice over!”

 

 “If we don’t know what we want we’re less likely to get it.”

 

“… when people ask about the meaning of life as if it were the job of our cosmos to give meaning to our existence, they’re getting it backward: It’s not our Universe giving meaning to conscious beings, but conscious beings giving meaning to our Universe.”

“The more automated society gets and the more powerful the attacking AI becomes, the more devastating cyberwarfare can be. If you can hack and crash your enemy’s self-driving cars, auto-piloted planes, nuclear reactors, industrial robots, communication systems, financial systems and power grids, then you can effectively crash his economy and cripple his defenses. If you can hack some of his weapons systems as well, even better.”

 

“We invented fire, repeatedly messed up, and then invented the fire extinguisher, fire exit, fire alarm and fire department.”

 

 “This ability of Life 2.0 to design its software enables it to be much smarter than Life 1.0”

 

“In other words, we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware.”

 

“The Matrix, Agent Smith (an AI) articulates this sentiment: “Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague and we are the cure.”

 

“I think of this as the techno-skeptic position, eloquently articulated by Andrew Ng: “Fearing a rise of killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars.”

 

“The robot misconception is related to the myth that machines can’t control humans. Intelligence enables control: humans control tigers not because we’re stronger, but because we’re smarter. This means that if we cede our position as smartest on our planet, it’s possible that we might also cede control.”

 

 “Elon Musk argued that what we need right now from governments isn’t oversight but insight: specifically, technically capable people in government positions who can monitor AI’s progress and steer it if warranted down the road.”

 

“Will life in our Universe fulfill its potential or squander it? This depends to a great extent on what we humans alive today do during our lifetime, and I’m optimistic that we can make the future of life truly awesome if we make the right choices.”

 

“the real risk with AGI isn’t malice but competence. A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble. As I mentioned in chapter 1, people don’t think twice about flooding anthills to build hydroelectric dams, so let’s not place humanity in the position of those ants.”

 

“The question of how to define life is notoriously controversial. Competing definitions abound, some of which include highly specific requirements such as being composed of cells, which might disqualify both future intelligent machines and extraterrestrial civilizations. Since we don’t want to limit our thinking about the future of life to the species we’ve encountered so far, let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate.”

 

“I’m encouraging mine to go into professions that machines are currently bad at, and therefore seem unlikely to get automated in the near future. Recent forecasts for when various jobs will get taken over by machines identify several useful questions to ask about a career before deciding to educate oneself for it. For example: • Does it require interacting with people and using social intelligence? • Does it involve creativity and coming up with clever solutions? • Does it require working in an unpredictable environment?”

 

“The DQN AI system of Google DeepMind can accomplish a slightly broader range of goals: it can play dozens of different vintage Atari computer games at human level or better. In contrast, human intelligence is thus far uniquely broad, able to master a dazzling panoply of skills.

A healthy child given enough training time can get fairly good not only at any game, but also at any language, sport or vocation. Comparing the intelligence of humans and machines today, we humans win hands-down on breadth, while machines outperform us in a small but growing number of narrow domains, as illustrated in figure 2.1. The holy grail AI research is to build “general AI” (better known as artificial general intelligence, AGI) that is maximally broad: able to accomplish virtually any goal, including learning.”

 

 “Evolution optimizes strongly for energy efficiency because of limited food supply, not for ease of construction or understanding by human engineers. My wife, Meia, likes to point out that the aviation industry didn’t start with mechanical birds. Indeed, when we finally figured out how to build mechanical birds in 2011, 1 more than a century after the Wright brothers’ first flight, the aviation industry showed no interest in switching to wing-flapping mechanical-bird travel, even though it’s more energy efficient—because our simpler earlier solution is better suited to our travel needs. In the same way, I suspect that there are simpler ways to build human-level thinking machines than the solution evolution came up with, and even if we one day manage to replicate or upload brains, we’ll end up discovering one of those simpler solutions first. It will probably draw more than the twelve watts of power that your brain uses, but its engineers won’t be as obsessed about energy efficiency as evolution was—and soon enough, they’ll be able to use their intelligent machines to design more energy-efficient ones.”

 

“Yet all these scenarios have two features in common:  A fast takeoff: the transition from subhuman to vastly superhuman intelligence occurs in a matter of days, not decades. A unipolar outcome: the result is a single entity controlling Earth.”

 

“It’s natural for us to rate the difficulty of tasks relative to how hard it is for us humans to perform them, as in figure 2.1. But this can give a misleading picture of how hard they are for computers. It feels much harder to multiply 314,159 by 271,828 than to recognize a friend in a photo, yet computers creamed us at arithmetic long before I was born, while human-level image recognition has only recently become possible. This fact that low-level sensorimotor tasks seem easy despite requiring enormous computational resources is known as Moravec’s paradox, and is explained by the fact that our brain makes such tasks feel easy by dedicating massive amounts of customized hardware to them—more than a quarter of our brains, in fact.”

 

“After all, why should our simplest path to a new technology be the one that evolution came up with, constrained by requirements that it be self-assembling, self-repairing and self-reproducing? Evolution optimizes strongly for energy efficiency because of limited food supply, not for ease of construction or understanding by human engineers.”

 

“a hallmark of a living system is that it maintains or reduces its entropy by increasing the entropy around it. In other words, the second law of thermodynamics has a life loophole: although the total entropy must increase, it’s allowed to decrease in some places as long as it increases even more elsewhere. So life maintains or increases its complexity by making its environment messier.”

 

 “it’s not very interesting to try to draw an artificial line between intelligence and non-intelligence, and it’s more useful to simply quantify the degree of ability for accomplishing different goals.”

 

“DeepMind soon published their method and shared their code, explaining that it used a very simple yet powerful idea called deep reinforcement learning.  Basic reinforcement learning is a classic machine learning technique inspired by behaviorist psychology, where getting a positive reward increases your tendency to do something again and vice versa. Just like a dog learns to do tricks when this increases the likelihood of its getting encouragement or a snack from its owner soon, DeepMind’s AI learned to move the paddle to catch the ball because this increased the likelihood of its getting more points soon. DeepMind combined this idea with deep learning: they trained a deep neural net, as in the previous chapter, to predict how many points would on average be gained by pressing each of the allowed keys on the keyboard, and then the AI selected whatever key the neural net rated as most promising given the current state of the game.”

 

“After DeepMind’s breakthrough, there’s no reason why a robot can’t ultimately use some variant of deep reinforcement learning to teach itself to walk without help from human programmers: all that’s needed is a system that gives it points whenever it makes progress. Robots in the real world similarly have the potential to learn to swim, fly, play ping-pong, fight and perform a nearly endless list of other motor tasks without help from human programmers. To speed things up and reduce the risk of getting stuck or damaging themselves during the learning process, they would probably do the first stages of their learning in virtual reality.”

 

“The main trend on the job market isn’t that we’re moving into entirely new professions. Rather, we’re crowding into those pieces of terrain in figure 2.2 that haven’t yet been submerged by the rising tide of technology! Figure 3.6 shows that this forms not a single island but a complex archipelago, with islets and atolls corresponding to all the valuable things that machines still can’t do as cheaply as humans can. This includes not only high-tech professions such as software development, but also a panoply of low-tech jobs leveraging our superior dexterity and social skills, ranging from massage therapy to acting. Might AI eclipse us at intellectual tasks so rapidly that the last remaining jobs will be in that low-tech category? A friend of mine recently joked with me that perhaps the very last profession will be the very first profession: prostitution. But then he mentioned this to a Japanese roboticist, who protested: “No, robots are very good at those things!”

 

“I’m sure there’ll be new new jobs for horses that we haven’t yet imagined. That’s what’s always happened before, like with the invention of the wheel and the plow.” Alas, those not-yet-imagined new jobs for horses never arrived. No-longer-needed horses were slaughtered and not replaced, causing the U.S. equine population to collapse from about 26 million in 1915 to about 3 million in 1960.  As mechanical muscles made horses redundant, will mechanical minds do the same to humans?”

 

“So who’s right: those who say automated jobs will be replaced by better ones or those who say most humans will end up unemployable? If AI progress continues unabated, then both sides might be right: one in the short term and the other in the long term. But although people often discuss the disappearance of jobs with doom-and-gloom connotations, it doesn’t have to be a bad thing! Luddites obsessed about particular jobs, neglecting the possibility that other jobs might provide the same social value. Analogously, perhaps those who obsess about jobs today are being too narrow-minded: we want jobs because they can provide us with income and purpose, but given the opulence of resources produced by machines, it should be possible to find alternative ways of providing both the income and the purpose without jobs. Something similar ended up happening in the equine story, which didn’t end with all horses going extinct. Instead, the number of horses has more than tripled since 1960, as they were protected by an equine social-welfare system of sorts: even though they couldn’t pay their own bills, people decided to take care of horses, keeping them around for fun, sport and companionship. Can we similarly take care of our fellow humans in need?”

 

“Even if AI can be made robust enough for us to trust that a robojudge is using the legislated algorithm, will everybody feel that they understand its logical reasoning enough to respect its judgment? This challenge is exacerbated by the recent success of neural networks, which often outperform traditional easy-to-understand AI algorithms at the price of inscrutability. If defendants wish to know why they were convicted, shouldn’t they have the right to a better answer than “we trained the system on lots of data, and this is what it decided”? Moreover, recent studies have shown that if you train a deep neural learning system with massive amounts of prisoner data, it can predict who’s likely to return to crime (and should therefore be denied parole) better than human judges. But what if this system finds that recidivism is statistically linked to a prisoner’s sex or race—would this count as a sexist, racist robojudge that needs reprogramming? Indeed, a 2016 study argued that recidivism-prediction software used across the United States was biased against African Americans and had contributed to unfair sentencing.  These are important questions that we all need to ponder and discuss to ensure that AI remains beneficial.”

 

“Perhaps life will spread throughout our cosmos and flourish for billions or trillions of years—and perhaps this will be because of decisions that we make here on our little planet during our lifetime.”

 

My Take

Life 3.0 is a fascinating look at the tremendous technological change that is on our doorstep and what that will mean for the future of human beings, the planet earth and our universe.  Tegmark thoroughly discusses a diverse array of ideas about our past, present and future in language that the lay reader can easily understand.  A real “thinker” book and highly recommended.

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