2023 in Books

December 15, 2023

In light of recent advances in AI, I spent this year thinking about the future of work and education. These books offer useful perspectives:

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. (Nick Bostrom, 2014). A key introduction to the risks of artificial intelligence.
Going Remote: How the Flexible Work Economy Can Improve Our Lives and Our Cities. (Matthew E. Kahn, 2022). How will advances in remote work affect cities? Kahn says that competition between jurisdictions to provide desirable public goods will intensify and that people will increasingly choose to live in locations with desirable consumption amenities. I expect LLMs and other AI tools will accelerate these shifts. There is a direct analogy to offshoring and automation in manufacturing.
Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. (Alec Nevala-Lee, 2018). As humanity wrestled with the promise and perils of nuclear energy, science fiction authors led the discussion and educated the public. This biography of John. W Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine and “the most powerful force in science fiction ever,” describes a group of authors who were deeply committed to science fiction as a tool to envision and achieve a better future. One way that Campbell shaped the genre was by constantly coming up with ideas for new stories. He would hand out the same idea to several authors and publish the best of the resulting entries.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Robert A. Heinlein, 1966). A classic science fiction novel about a lunar colony that rebels against Earth with the help of a sentient computer named Mike. This book really nails how it feels to interact with Github Copilot:

Greatest shortcoming of computers isn’t computer shortcoming at all but fact that a human takes a long time, maybe hours, to set up a program that a computer solves in milliseconds. One best quality of Mike was that he could program himself. Fast. Just explain problem, let him program.
Empire of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China. (William C. Kirby, 2022). Eight case studies of universities that concludes with a discussion of whether China can lead world higher education in the 21st century. Great universities are an amalgamation of three distinct traditions: the German research university, the British liberal arts college, and the American vocational land-grant university. How will these institutions adapt to LLMs?

What I Learned

The idea for Monte Carlo experiments came to the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam as he recovered from viral encephalitis in a hospital bed. While attempting to calculate the probability of victory in a game of solitaire using combinatorics, he realized that it would be much easier to “lay out 100 hands and simply observe and count the number of successful plays.” Scientists at the Los Alamos project immediately applied the idea to simulating chain reactions as they developed the atomic bomb. From The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhatttacharya (2021).
During the early colonial era, the English colonies had no public official with responsibilities equivalent to the modern district attorney. Instead, the victim of a crime, or her relations, would seek justice themselves. The Dutch colony of New Amsterdam did include such a figure, called a schout, and from there the practice spread into the Enlish colonies. From The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto (2004).
At the beginning of the second century BC, King Eumenes II founded a library in Pergamum, a city in present day Turkey, to compete with the cultural brilliance of the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Ptolomy V was fiercely jealous of his capital’s reputation, so he banned the export of papyrus to the upstart rival. In response, artisans in Pergamum developed the technology of writing on animal skins, which were called pergamena, or “parchment” in honor of their efforts. From Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World by Irene Vallejo (2022).
Before the Revolutionary War, the state of Virginia supported an established Anglican church. Each parish provided their minister with a salary of 16,000 pounds of tobacco and a farm, or glebe. After independence, the state confiscated the glebes, and Thomas Jefferson secured the proceeds from the sale of two glebes in Albemarle County to finance the University of Virginia. From Thomas Jefferson’s Education by Alan Taylor (2019).

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