If you’re casually interested in AI, then I think Ethan Mollick’s “Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI” is a book that you might find interesting. It’s not a technical book, and I believe it would be easy for someone not deeply involved in this world to read. It provides a very general introduction into how to utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) and serves as an introduction of what it means to live and work alongside these new tools.

“Co-Intelligence” unpacks the arrival and impact of LLMs, including tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s Gemini models. Mollick, a professor of management at Wharton, approaches AI not as a computer scientist, but rather focuses on the practical applications and societal implications. In his own classroom, he has made AI mandatory, designing assignments that require students to engage with AI for tasks ranging from critiquing AI-generated essays to empowering them to tackle ambitious projects that might otherwise seem impossible (like encouraging non-coders to develop working app prototypes or create websites with original AI-generated content). He guides the reader through understanding AI as a new form of “co-intelligence,” which can be harnessed to help improve our own productivity and knowledge.

One concept I found interesting is what Mollick calls the “jagged frontier” of AI. This refers to the sometimes unpredictable nature of AI’s abilities. It might perform complex tasks with ease, like drafting a sophisticated marketing plan, and then struggle with something that seems simple to us. He gives an example of an AI easily writing code for a webpage but then providing a clearly wrong answer to a simple tic-tac-toe problem. This highlights why we can’t blindly trust AI and understanding its specific strengths and weaknesses through experimentation is key.

Mollick also delves into AI’s creative ability. He discusses how AI can excel in creative tasks, sometimes outperforming humans on subjective tests. This leads to interesting discussions about the future of creative work and education. The “Homework Apocalypse” he describes, where AI can effortlessly complete traditional school assignments, is a challenge educators and parents are currently facing. Mollick suggests this doesn’t mean the end of learning, but rather a shift in how and what we learn, emphasizing the need for human expertise to guide and evaluate AI.

The sheer volume of AI generated content being posted on the internet has is also becoming a problem and something we need to figure out how to navigate.

Even if AI doesn’t advance further, some of its implications are already inevitable. The first set of certain changes from AI is going to be about how we understand, and misunderstand, the world. It is already impossible to tell AI-generated images from real ones, and that is simply using the tools available to anyone today.

[…]

Our already fragile consensus about what facts are real is likely to fall apart, quickly.

Well, that’s just downright cheery! If anything, it highlights the importance of developing our ability to think critically and analytically in an AI-influenced information age.

Mollick lays out ways that we can better work with AI and leverage its strengths to help us, calling it the “four rules of co-intelligence.” These include always giving AI tools a seat at the table to participate in tasks, maintaining a human-in-the-loop throughout the the process to validate and verify AI work, treating AI as a specific kind of collaborator by telling it what persona to adopt, and remembering that current AI is likely the “worst” version we’ll ever use due to rapid improvements.

The bit on assigning personas was interesting. In my own experience, I’ve seen the benefits of giving AI a persona through system prompts. There’s also this fun example.

To make the most of this relationship, you must establish a clear and specific AI persona, defining who the AI is and what problems it should tackle. Remember that LLMs work by predicting the next word, or part of a word, that would come after your prompt.

[…]

Telling it to act as a teacher of MBA students will result in a different output than if you ask it to act as a circus clown. This isn’t magical—you can’t say Act as Bill Gates and get better business advice—but it can help make the tone and direction appropriate for your purpose.

The idea of these rules is that it can (theoretically) make working with AI feel less like a technical challenge and more like a collaborative effort.

Mollick also examines some philosophical questions that the use of AI brings, such as a “crisis of meaning” in creative work of all kinds. One specific example:

Take, for example, the letter of recommendation. Professors are asked to write letters for students all the time, and a good letter takes a long time to write. You have to understand the student and the reason for the letter, decide how to phrase the letter to align with the job requirements and the student’s strengths, and more. The fact that it is time-consuming is somewhat the point. That a professor takes the time to write a good letter is a sign that they support the student’s application. We are setting our time on fire to signal to others that this letter is worth reading.

Or we can push The Button.

The Button, of course, is AI.

Then The Button starts to tempt everyone. Work that was boring to do but meaningful when completed by humans (like performance reviews) becomes easy to outsource—and the apparent quality actually increases. We start to create documents mostly with AI that get sent to AI-powered inboxes, where the recipients respond primarily with AI. Even worse, we still create the reports by hand but realize that no human is actually reading them.

Side note: this exact scenario is something I’ve recently joked about with a manager at work. We have our yearly performance reviews and have to write a self assessment. Everyone now feeds a list of bullet points into their favorite LLM. The manager takes this overly verbose text and feeds it into an LLM to simplify the text.

On top of all this, Mollick also points out the need to always be skeptical of AI generated output, citing a famous case in 2023 where an attorney used ChatGPT to prepare a legal brief and was caught when defense lawyers could not find any records of 6 cases that were cited in the filing.

There is an interesting website I recently heard about, that is tracking fake citations used in court filings. 121 instances have currently been identified!

All in all, it’s a clear reminder of AI’s capacity for hallucination and the critical need for human oversight. The book frames AI not as a replacement, but as a powerful, though sometimes flawed, partner that can augment our abilities.

Overall, “Co-Intelligence” offers a decent overview for those curious about using current AI tools and thinking about their future integration into our lives. While it may present a more surface-level exploration for those already deeply familiar with LLMs, it provides some useful insights into the shifts AI is bringing to work and creativity. For someone looking for a general, non-technical introduction to the topic, it’s a solid read.

Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, was a fascinating (if sometimes overwhelming) journey through human history that explores the power (and the peril) of information. From the first markings inscribed on stone walls to the potential all-seeing eye of artificial intelligence, Harari takes readers on a sweeping tour of how information and stories have shaped human networks — and, by extension, civilization.

The central idea in Nexus is that information is one of the key forces that connects people, enabling us to cooperate on a massive scale. Harari illustrates this point with a bunch of historical examples, from the canonization of the Bible to the use of propaganda under totalitarian regimes. He argues that information doesn’t merely represent reality; rather, it creates new realities through the power of shared stories, myths, and ideologies. This gives us some insight into the forces that have shaped society—sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

One interesting part of the book is Harari’s thoughts on the relationship between information and truth. Harari references a Barack Obama speech in Shanghai in 2009, where Obama said, ‘I am a big believer in technology and I’m a big believer in openness when it comes to the flow of information. I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes.‘

Harari calls this view naive, pointing out that while openness is important, the reality of how information is used is much more complicated. He argues that information isn’t inherently the same as truth; it’s been manipulated countless times throughout history to serve those in power. This kind of manipulation is especially evident in the recent rise of populism, which, as Harari explains, is all about the belief that there’s no objective truth and that power is the only reality.

He explains, ‘In its more extreme versions, populism posits that there is no objective truth at all and that everyone has “their own truth,” which they wield to vanquish rivals. According to this worldview, power is the only reality. All social interactions are power struggles, because humans are interested only in power. The claim to be interested in something else—like truth or justice—is nothing more than a ploy to gain power.‘

Harari warns that when populism uses information purely as a weapon, it ends up eroding the very concept of language itself. Words like ‘facts,’ ‘accurate,’ and ‘truthful’ lose their meaning, as any mention of ‘truth’ prompts the question, ‘Whose truth?’ This theme feels especially relevant today, with misinformation and propaganda shaping public opinion in big ways.

Harari gives a sobering take on the rise of AI and how it could impact our information networks. He says, “silicon chips can create spies that never sleep, financiers that never forget and despots that never die” and goes on to warn that AI, with its power for massive surveillance and data processing, could lead to levels of control and manipulation we’ve never seen before—potentially an existential threat we need to face.

For me, Nexus was a thought-provoking and engaging read, though at times it felt very alarmist. While Harari’s concerns are definitely worth thinking about, I think adaptation is key: these AI systems and tools are here, and we have to learn how to use them and live with them — like right now — today!

Overall, I’d give Nexus 4 out of 5 stars. Harari offers a sweeping narrative that makes you think about the role of information in our lives, and the choices we need to make as we stand on the brink of the AI era. It’s a worthy read for anyone interested in understanding the historical roots of our current information age and what it might mean for our future.

I really struggled and finished this out of spite.

I went into it wanting to like it and hoping to learn more about the history of a specific part of California (I recently read and enjoyed “California: An American History” by John Faragher and it stoked my interest in looking for more books related to our state).

Oh, wow. What did I get myself into? This book could have been half as long and still tried to make its point: Palo Alto is the center of all evil and suffering on Earth, anyone who went to school at Stanford or started a company there had ulterior motives on world domination and fantasies of oppression, everyone is driven by a profit motive above all else, here’s 1,000 reasons why capitalism is bad, the only way to right the wrongs of the millions that have suffered or been killed due to Palo Alto ideas and inventions is to give the land back, blah, blah, blah.

Okay, Yes! There are unfortunate things that happened due to people and companies in this town that have caused people around the world to suffer. But this is not an exclusively Palo Alto problem, nor is it exclusively a capitalist problem. There are a lot of things that happened or been created here that have also been a benefit and this book just takes every opportunity to tear down and complain… about literally everything.

Maybe 1.5 stars? I am loathe to round up because I think this book is a bit disingenuous in its claims and the author has an axe (probably made in Palo Alto) that they wish to grind.

Way back in 2015, I read The Three-Body Problem and thought it was an alright book, if a bit dry at times. This probably goes along with me liking the idea of hard science-fiction more than I actually like reading it.

That said, the upcoming Netflix release of Three-Body Problem reminded me that I still wanted to continue reading the trilogy, especially since I’ve heard absolutely rave reviews of the second book, The Dark Forest.

The only problem?

I honestly don’t remember what happened in the first book. Something something about science, space,, first contact, invasion, quantum entanglement, etc.

So, I decided to go ahead and re-read it this past week.

Oh, man! I enjoyed it immensely. Maybe it’s just a time-and-place kind of thing.

I am definitely looking forward to this.

I didn’t do a great job of reviewing every book I read this year, but still read a good number of books this year. My Goodreads goal was 24 books and I hit 30.

This is down from 40 in 2022, 56 in 2021, and 60(!) in 2020. Kind of an interesting correlation between the pandemic years and what has happened as we’ve come out of various lockdowns (e.g., more activity outside is less time reading inside).

Anyway, this year’s list of books is below. My favorites were The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Tracers in the Dark. My least favorite was easily Blindsight.

• Apollo 8 by Jeffrey Kluger
• They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera
• Tracers in the Dark by Andy Greenberg
• Prequel by Rachel Maddow
• Imperial Deserter by Andrew Moriarty
• The Explosive Child [Sixth Edition]  by Ross W.Greene
• Blindsight by Peter Watts
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• The Last Island by Adam Goodheart
• Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
• Blasphemy by Douglas Preston
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
• The Ferryman by Justin Cronin
• Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Spy by David Wise
• Tyrannosaur Canyon by Douglas Preston
• Slow Horses by Mick Herron
• The End of the World Is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan
• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
• How Not to Kill Yourself by Clancy Martin
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
• From Cold War to Hot Peace by Michael McFaul
• All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley
• Red Rising by Pierce Brown
• Heroes by Stephen Fry
• Trinity by Conn Iggulden
• The Monster’s Bones by David K. Randall
• Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright
• Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

I’m just going to start off and say that this was a beautifully written book and it really struck a chord with me.

The Anthropocene Reviewed is a collection of essays adapted from a number of episodes from John Green’s podcast. I hadn’t actually heard of the podcast before, so the material in this book was new to me. Each chapter in the book is a review of a different subject on something created by or affecting humankind.

Everything from Dr. Pepper and Canadian geese to the Notes app on our phones and the Internet in general. The chapters are part review and also part historical research. I just loved it. I think part of the reason I enjoyed this book was because we’re roughly the same age. So, a number of his thoughts and experiences roughly correlated with my own. “Are you me?!” is something I thought a number of times in the book.

Take, for example, his review of Super Mario Kart:

I was in tenth grade when Super Mario Kart was released, and as far as my friends and I were concerned, it was the greatest video game ever. We spent hundreds of hours playing it. The game was so interwoven into our high school experience that, even now, the soundtrack takes me back to a linoleum-floored dorm room that smelled like sweat and Gatorade. I can feel myself sitting on a golden microfiber couch that had been handed down through generations of students, trying to out-turn my friends Chip and Sean on the final race of the Mushroom Cup.

We almost never talked about the game while playing it—we were always talking over each other about our flailing attempts at romance or the ways we were oppressed by this or that teacher or the endless gossip that churns around insular communities like boarding schools. We didn’t need to talk about Mario Kart, but we needed Mario Kart to have an excuse to be together—three or four of us squeezed on that couch, hip to hip. What I remember most was the incredible—and for me, novel—joy of being included.

That rang so true.

Another chapter of the book reviews Canadian geese. Fun fact: growing up, my mom had a flock of (non-Canadian) geese in our yard. The wings were clipped, so they couldn’t fly away. But I have distinct memories of them running after me in the backyard, pecking at my legs and back. And that awful honking. It’s no wonder that I really think that geese are the worst animals in the world.

But even though Canada geese are perfectly adapted to the human-dominated planet, they seem to feel nothing but disdain for actual humans. Geese honk and strut and bite to keep people away, even though they’re thriving because of our artificial lakes and manicured lawns. In turn, many of us have come to resent Canada geese as a pest animal. I know I do.

Image of how I remember what my mom’s geese looked like. Probably. Image generated using Midjourney AI.

The Anthropocene Reviewed is of my favorite books that I’ve read this year.

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

Josh Foer’s book starts out by looking into an esoteric competition featuring mental athletes competing in various memory competitions. Along the way, he discovers interesting mnemonic tricks for memorizing various types of things and follows a group of people who frequently compete in these events. With dedicated practice, he uses this effort to win the United States Memory Championship just a year later!

While Foer’s book documents his journey in becoming a mental athlete, it also features a number of interesting asides that dive into the latest research in memory and explores how and why humans are good (and not so good) and remembering various types of things.

The book opens with what seems like a non-sequitur:

“Dom DeLuise, celebrity fat man (and five of clubs), has been implicated in the following unseemly acts in my mind’s eye: He has hocked a fat globule of spittle (nine of clubs) on Albert Einstein’s thick white mane (three of diamonds) and delivered a devastating karate kick (five of spades) to the groin of Pope Benedict XVI (six of diamonds). Michael Jackson (king of hearts) has engaged in behavior bizarre even for him. He has defecated (two of clubs) on a salmon burger (king of clubs) and captured his flatulence (queen of clubs) in a balloon (six of spades). Rhea Perlman, diminutive Cheers bartendress (and queen of spades), has been caught cavorting with the seven-foot-seven Sudanese basketball star Manute Bol (seven of clubs) in a highly explicit (and in this case, anatomically improbable) two-digit act of congress (three of clubs).”

You read this and immediately think, “what?!” But! There’s a method to this madness. It’s a specific technique that Foer describes later in the book. He’s built a “memory palace” to make recalling a list of items easier. It’s something I hadn’t heard of before and is an interesting concept.

Foer describes a memory palace as:

“The idea is to create a space in the mind’s eye, a place that you know well and can easily visualize, and then populate that imagined place with images representing whatever you want to remember. Known as the “method of loci” by the Romans, such a building would later come to be called a “memory palace.”

[…]

When we see in everyday life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvelous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonorable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable, that we are likely to remember for a long time.

The more vivid the image, the more likely it is to cleave to its locus. What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I was learning, is the ability to create these sorts of lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any that has been seen before that it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly. Which is why Tony Buzan tells anyone who will listen that the World Memory Championship is less a test of memory than of creativity.

When forming images, it helps to have a dirty mind. Evolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: jokes and sex—and especially, it seems, jokes about sex.

While there’s no secret to easily unlocking a flawless memory, I found this book really enjoyable to read and thought some of the techniques for recall were pretty useful.

As far as the title of the book goes — it ultimately has nothing to do with Einstein. It’s related to using a mnemonic technique he used for remembering a set of cards (in this case, a four of spades, king of hearts, and three of diamonds).

“Moonwalking with Einstein” image generated using Midjourney AI.

Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer

The recent horrific (and all too frequent) school shooting in Uvalde is shocking, sickening, and absolutely impossible to understand. I can’t even begin to imagine what the parents of those children are even going through.

Dropping my kids off at school the day after this happened was especially emotional. I wasn’t the only parent wiping tears away from my eyes as we waved good bye to our little ones.

In an effort to try to understand more about these sorts of tragedies, I decided to read about the event (that I feel like) started this madness: the tragedy at Columbine.

I have a vague recollection of hearing about the news. I was in high school myself at the time, and I remember leaving school a bit early for a volleyball match against another school. As we were loading up the bus and getting ready to depart, I heard another student ask if anyone heard about “what happened at a high school in Colorado?”

At the time, we had little information and kind of just filed it away in the back of our mind.

It wasn’t until I got home later that night that I began to understand just how horrific it was. The media was quick to come up with scapegoats: music, video games, trench coats, loners who were bullied, etc.

We tried to comprehend it, even though we couldn’t. We also couldn’t imagine something like that happening again because it was so egregious. It was a random, unfortunate (and terrible) act, designed to inflict terror. We would move past it.

And we did… for a bit.

And then the school shootings kept happening. (And mass shootings in general.)

Dave Cullen’s book does a deep dive into the events around the massacre at Columbine — using journal entries and videos recorded from both the shooters and evidence sourced from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office. He creates a detailed timeline of the things that actually happened that day, and how the city has since tried to recover.

One of the things that stood out to me at first was how shockingly… normal Eric seemed. He had a lot of friends, got good grades, had girlfriends, and people generally had nice things to say about him. Deep down though, he was a true psychopath with a deep seated anger toward everything and everyone.

When he and Dylan were caught stealing electronic equipment from someone’s work van one night, they were assigned community service work and ordered to attend counseling services.

According to the counselors notes, he excelled at the program and always said the right things and displayed the right amount of humility and sorrow for what he had done. At the same time, he was writing in his journal at home about how much he hated the world and wanted everything to burn.

Eric was a full on psychopath in every sense of the term. A section in the book dives into this history of this psychological phenomenon.

Psychopaths are distinguished by two characteristics. The first is a ruthless disregard for others: they will defraud, maim, or kill for the most trivial personal gain. The second is an astonishing gift for disguising the first. It’s the deception that makes them so dangerous. You never see him coming. (It’s usually a him–more than 80 percent are male.) Don’t look for the oddball creeping you out. Psychopaths don’t act like Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates. They come off like Hugh Grant, in his most adorable role.

In the wake of these mass shootings, people often talk about warning signs and mental health issues (but never the easy access to guns and the carnage they cause, because God forbid we ever talk about those). I myself have thought, “if only this person could have gotten therapy or been helped earlier, it might have changed things.”

Cullen digs into this with a simple answer regarding true psychopaths: it doesn’t work. An excerpt from the book:

Dr. Hare’s EEGs suggested the psychopathic brain operates differently, but he could not be sure how or why. […] Dr. Kent Kiehl wired subjects up and showed them a series of flash cards. Half contained emotionally charged words like rape, murder, and cancer; the others were neutral, like rock or doorknob. Normal people found the disturbing words disturbing: the brain’s emotional nerve center, called the amygdala, lit up. The psychopathic amygdalae were dark. The emotional flavors that color our days are invisible to psychopaths.

Dr. Kiehl repeated the experiment with pictures, including graphic shots of homicides. Again, psychopaths’ amygdalae were unaffected; but the language center activated. They seemed to be analyzing the emotions instead of experiencing them.

So what’s the treatment for psychopathy? Dr. Hare summarized the research on a century of attempts in two words: nothing works. It is the only major mental affliction to elude treatment. And therapy often makes it worse. “Unfortunately, programs of this sort merely provide the psychopath with better ways of manipulating, deceiving, and using people,” Hare wrote. Individual therapy can be a bonanza: one-on-one training, to perfect the performance. “These programs are like a finishing school,” a psychopath boasted to Dr. Hare’s team. “They teach you how to put the squeeze on people.”

To me, that was one of the most frightening passages in the book.

I don’t think this book helped me understand why these sorts of things continue to happen — can anything really do that? That said, it was a fascinating piece of investigative journalism that pieced together material from a variety of sources. I can’t say I enjoyed reading it (because the contents are obviously tragic and heavy), but I felt that it was interesting and informative.

For me, this book was a bit of a slog to get through. I had originally started it early last year and had read pieces of it in fits and starts. It’s been partially read for nearly 12 months now, so I decided to try and finish it in earnest.

It’s an account of the near future, as drastic side effects due to climate change become more prevalent and catastrophic (the book opens with a heat wave in India that kills millions).

The story is told through a series of eyewitness accounts that take us across the world, detailing the effects of climate change and some of the (far-fetched and even fantastical) ideas people have to cope with it.

Some of the accounts and stories told by various characters are compelling, but a number of them are dry and uninteresting.

Eventually we get into current events and a discover a sort of utopia being created around the world to combat climate change together. Side note: the negative response of various groups of citizens and even some countries to the COVID-19 pandemic makes me think this sort of thinking is truly in the realm of fiction. Cli-fi if you will.

Anyway, I really couldn’t get into it. In general, I think I like the idea of Kim Stanley Robinson books more than I like reading them.

(That said, there are still a number of his other books on my bucket list that I will inevitably read.)

★★☆☆☆

I’ve been making a conscious effort to be more mindful in various aspects of my life. Somehow, I stumbled upon this book (perhaps it was a Goodreads recommendation), and thought the blurb sounded interesting. Could this be what I need to take my mindfulness practice to the next level?

Uhhhhhhhhhhh. What?

First, the good news: I finished it!
The bad news: Seriously, what did I just read?

Okay, sure, maybe I should have been more familiar with “integral theory and practice” before I started reading this, (“more” meaning, any sort of familiarity at all). But come on, the blurb sold me: “a radical approach to mindfulness—combining an ancient meditation technique with leading-edge theory, resulting in a powerful new method of self-transformation.”

The 240ish something pages start off interesting. Ken Wilber makes an effort to explain what integral mediation is and how we can use it to grow up (not just wake up / achieve nirvana). This is the first I’d heard of “growing up” used in this context. Wilber uses various stages of human societal evolution as an analogy for the different aspects of growing up and becoming a better, more aware / awake person.

As the book goes on, it goes deeper down the rabbit hole of how awake you should be for given stages of your personal development and steps are needed to achieve the next level.

But as you progress through the book (and presumably through the levels), things seem to make a lot less sense and start to sound downright silly.

A random, out-of-context quote that highlights some of the word soup you’ll need to wade through:

“This, needless to say, was not an incentive to contemplative development, and the religious engagement of individuals increasingly focused on legalistic creeds, codes, and mythic-literal dogma of a particular stage of spiritual Growing Up, namely the mythic-literal. And so we ended up with the two major problems with religion in today’s Western world: no spiritual Waking Up, and rather low levels of spiritual Growing Up. Taken together, this is a cultural disaster of the first magnitude. I just can’t emphasize enough what a staggering nightmare this has been for Western civilization.”

Ultimately, it was a lot of random words jumbled together that I don’t entirely understand. There might be a time and place for reading it and getting something out of it, but I don’t think I will ever get there.

If you’re a Wilber fan, there’s probably a lot here you’ll like (it seems like others do). If you have no idea who this dude is and it’s your first time wading into one of his books (like me), I wish you the best of luck.

★★☆☆☆