Category Archives: Books

Arts, Books, History, Nuclear Weapons, Russia, Society, United States

Book Review: The Nuclear Age

LITERARY REVIEW

FOLLOWING that day in the summer of 1945 when, on a testing ground in the New Mexico desert – when the first nuclear bomb exploded – many people of that era and generation have lived their entire lives under the threat of universal extermination.

It caused Robert Oppemheiemer, the brilliant scientist heading the US’s Manhattan Project, to proclaim melodramatically (but entirely accurately) an ancient Hindu prophecy: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Just three weeks later, in early August, the bomb was used for real for the first time against an enemy – in a blinding flash, and a shockwave that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

Pavements melted, skin peeled off faces, more than 60,000 perished immediately, and in the following five months another 60,000 died from injuries and radiation.

Three days later, Nagasaki was given the same treatment. The original target had been a different city but heavy cloud cover saved it, diverting the US B29 bomber 125 miles south. Two square miles of the city centre were pulverised. Some 70,000 people died a horrible death.

And amazingly, those were the last fatalities of nuclear explosions. Eighty years on the world has somehow managed to avoid that apocalyptic and life-threatening tripwire of its own making.

So far.

This history is necessary to understand and should be imprinted on all our brains. It’s a miracle we are still here. Because in an unstable world (and increasingly so) we are all one reckless move, one miscalculation, one technical glitch, one individual’s moment of madness, away from Doomsday.

How the lid has been kept on nuclear Armageddon is plotted by acclaimed historian Serhii Plokhy in this chilling and bewildering book.

Bewildering because all we have ever done is make the threat greater, while posturing about the importance of containing it, claiming nonsensically that massive overkill is making the world a safer place.

In 1962, Soviet Union ships carrying nuclear weapons headed for a clash with an American blockade of Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was the nuclear confrontation between US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that came toe to toe.

If no one blinked, it was inevitable that those red buttons would have been pushed, missiles would’ve been fired, and the world would have been a goner. The end of history itself had beckoned.

Other than being flippant towards the world ending, how else could you deal with the apocalypse being hours, minutes, or just seconds away? Because the very idea is impossible to grasp. Do you hide under a desk as a civilisation built up over millennia is blown apart and a world of abundance is reduced to ashes?

With Cuba, the moment passed. The world survived. Plokhy argues that neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev was ready to push the button. They both pulled back.

And next time? Can we rely on the same calculated response from today’s leaders, from the likes of Putin, Trump, Kim Jong-un, Xi?

Since that’s the threat we live under, and yet we not only get on with our lives and look the other way, but we up the arsenal – increasing the destructive power to the point of absurdity.

Only recently, Putin boasted of a new Russian super-submarine with “unstoppable” weaponry that can fire nuclear drones at Western coastlines from thousands of miles away. In direct response, Trump ordered the US to restart nuclear testing.

Escalation and proliferation like this are the underlying narratives of the nuclear age: the powerful few believing they can keep the weapons to themselves, but finding all they have done is to provide an incentive to other nations to follow suit as quick as possible for fear of being left behind. The cat- and- mouse of the nuclear age; history is littered with such examples. The US threw its scientists into nuclear research for fear of Hitler getting there first and the Nazis snatching a late victory in the Second World War.

Then Stalin had to have his, Britain, too, then France, China, Israel, India. The club just got bigger; containment became harder and much more problematic. World leaders talked non-proliferation, but that’s easier said than done once the genie is firmly out of the bottle.

That genie is now ubiquitous. Officially there are nine fully fledged nuclear-armed states in the world. Yet, the most worrying assertion of all in this deeply disturbing book is that around 40 more states have access to the requisite technology, raw material and capability to produce nuclear weaponry, in some cases at very short notice.

That’s the size and extent of the timebomb each and every global citizen is sitting on.

Those scientists – the Einsteins, Bohrs, and so on – who first developed the principle and then the practicality of releasing unimaginable amounts of energy through nuclear fission and fusion, begged their political and military leaders to concentrate on the massive peaceful benefits of their discoveries.

Presidents and generals agreed; but first, they said, there is the enemy to defeat, this opponent and adversary to match, this military threat to see off.

Eight decades on, that’s where we still are. Plokhy’s account of the nuclear age hardly inspires optimism for the future.

He concludes that fundamentally it is the fear of annihilation that has kept us from the brink – the general agreement that it is in no one’s interest to perish in a global nuclear apocalypse. That held true in the Cuba crisis. He writes: “We must enhance the instinct of self-preservation shared by friends and foes alike to save the world once again.”

And keep our collective fingers crossed.

– The Nuclear Age by Serhii Plokhy is published by Allen Lane, 432pp

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Arts, Books, History, Nature, Science

Book Review: The Origin of Language

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: According to an evolutionary biologist, it takes a village to raise a child. And that’s why we started talking to each other

THE story of human evolution has undergone a distinct feminisation in recent decades. Or, rather, an equalisation: a much-needed rebalancing after 150 years during which, we were told, everything was driven by strutting and brawling males, with females tagging along for the ride. This reckoning has finally arrived at language.

The origins of our species’ exceptional communication skills constitute one of the more nebulous zones of the larger evolutionary narrative, because many of the bits of the human anatomy that allow us to communicate – notably the brain and the vocal tract – are soft and don’t fossilise. The linguistic societies of Paris and London even banned talk of evolution around 1870, and the subject only made a timid comeback about a century later. Plenty of theories have been thrown into the evidentiary void since then, mainly by men, but now evolutionary biologist Madeleine Beekman, of the University of Sydney, has turned her female gaze on the problem. Unlike a baby chimp that can cling to its mother, a human infant is entirely helpless for years.

Her theory, which she describes as having been hiding in plain sight, is compelling: language evolved in parallel with caring for our “underbaked” newborns, because looking after and caring for a helpless human baby on the danger-filled plains of the African savannah required more than one pair of hands (and feet). It needed a group among whom the tasks of food-gathering, childcare, and defence could be divided. A group means social life, which means communication. Social bonding meant language evolved to negotiate help, share information about infant safety, and for those bonds to be necessarily strengthened to keep “helpless” infants alive.

The evidence to support Beekman’s theory isn’t entirely lacking, but a lot of it is, as a matter of course, circumstantial. We know that the compromise that natural selection hit upon to balance the competing anatomical demands of bipedalism (walking upright and narrowing pelvises) and an ever-expanding brain was to have babies born early (before that brain and its bony casing were fully formed).

One of the discoveries of the newly feminised wave of evolutionary science has been that alloparents – individuals other than the biological parents who contribute parenting services – played a critical role in ensuring the survival of those half-developed human children. Another is that stone-age women hunted alongside men. In the past it was assumed that hunting bands were exclusively male, and one theory held that language arose to allow them to cooperate. But childcare was another chore that called for cooperation, probably also between genders, and over years, not just hours or days.

Fortuitously, the reconfiguration of the head and neck required to accommodate the ballooning brain had a side-effect of remoulding the throat, giving our ancestors more control and precision over their utterances. With the capacity to generate a large range of sounds came the ability to convey a large range of meanings. To begin with, this was useful for coordinating childcare, but as speech became more complex and sophisticated, alloparents – particularly grandmothers – used it to transmit their accumulated knowledge. This nurtured infants who were even better equipped to survive. The result of this positive feedback loop was Homo sapiens, the sole survivor of a once diverse lineage.

Regrettably, critics are likely to highlight that Beekman takes a very long time to get to this exciting idea. She does spend about half the book laying the groundwork, padding it out with superfluous vignettes as if she is worried the centre won’t hold. Once she gets there, she makes some thought-provoking observations. Full-blown language probably emerged about 100,000 years ago, she says, but only in our line – not in those of our closest relatives. “We may have made babies with Neanderthals and Denisovans,” she writes, “but I don’t think we had much to talk about.”

And whereas others have argued that language must have predated Homo sapiens, because without it the older species Homo erectus couldn’t have crossed the forbidding Wallace Line – the deep-water channel that separates Asia and Australasia – she draws on her deep knowledge of social insects to show that communication as relatively unsophisticated as that of bees or ants could have done the job. Having made a persuasive case for the role of alloparents in the evolution of language, Beekman concludes that we did ourselves a disservice when we shrank our basic unit of organisation down from the extended to the nuclear family. Perhaps, but historians including Peter Laslett have dated this important shift to the middle ages, long before the Industrial Revolution where she places it, and the damage isn’t obvious yet. Language is still being soaked up by young children, and is still a vehicle for intergenerational learning. It may take a village to raise a child, but as Beekman herself hints, a village can be constituted in different ways.

Beekman presents a radical shift in how we understand the birth of human speech. While traditional theories often credit hunting, toolmaking, or warfare as the primary drivers of complex communication, the author argues that the true catalyst was the inescapable need for cooperative childcare.

– The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why by Madeleine Beekman is published by Simon & Schuster, 320pp

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Artificial Intelligence, Arts, Books, Computing, Meta, Technology

Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

LITERARY REVIEW

WE shouldn’t worry so much these days about climate change because we’ve been told that our species only has a few years before it’s wiped out by superintelligent AI.

We don’t know what form this extinction will take exactly – perhaps an energy-hungry AI will let the millions of fusion power stations it has built run hot, boiling the oceans. Maybe it will want to reconfigure the atoms in our bodies into something more useful. There are many possibilities, almost all of them bad, say Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and who knows which will come true. But just as you can predict that an ice cube dropped into hot water will melt without knowing where any of its individual molecules will end up, you can be sure an AI that’s smarter than a human being will destroy us all, somehow.

This level of confidence is typical of Yudkowsky, in particular. He has been warning about the existential risks posed by technology for years – on the website he helped to create, LessWrong.com, and via the Machine Intelligence Research Institute he founded (Soares is the current president). Despite not graduating from university, Yudkowsky is highly influential in the field. He is also the author of a 600,000-word publication of fanfic called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Colourful, annoying, and polarising according to some critics, with one leading researcher saying in an online spat that “people become clinically depressed” after reading Yudkowsky’s work. But as chief scientist at Meta, who are they to talk?

While Yudkowsky and Soares may be unconventional, their warnings are similar to those of Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel-winning “godfather of AI”, and Yoshua Bengio, the world’s most-cited computer scientist, both of whom signed up to the statement that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war”.

As a clarion call, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is well timed. Superintelligent AI doesn’t exist yet, but in the wake of the ChatGPT revolution, investment in the datacentres that would power it is now counted in the hundreds of billions. This amounts to “the biggest and fastest rollout of a general-purpose technology in history,” according to the FT’s John Thornhill. Meta alone will have spent as much as $72bn (£54bn) on AI infrastructure this year alone, and the achievement of superintelligence is now Mark Zuckerberg’s explicit goal.

This is not great news, if you believe Yudkowsky and Soares. But why should we? Despite the complexity of its subject, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is as clear as its conclusions are hard to accept. Where the discussions become more technical, mainly in passages dealing with AI model training and architecture, it remains straightforward enough for readers to grasp the basic facts.

Among these is that we don’t really understand how generative AI works. In the past, computer programs were hand coded – every aspect of them was designed by a human. In contrast, the latest models aren’t “crafted”, they’re “grown”. We don’t understand, for example, how ChatGPT’s ability to reason emerged from it being shown vast amounts of human-generated text. Something fundamentally mysterious happened during its incubation. This places a vital part of AI’s functioning beyond our control and means that, even if we can nudge it towards certain goals such as “be nice to people”, we can’t determine how it will get there.

That’s a big problem, because it means that AI will inevitably generate its own quirky preferences and ways of doing things. These alien predilections are unlikely to be aligned with ours. It’s worthy noting, however, that this is entirely separate from the question of whether AIs might be “sentient” or “conscious”. Being set goals, and taking actions in the service of them, is enough to bring about potentially dangerous behaviours. Nonetheless, Yudkowsky and Soares point out that tech companies are already trying hard to build AIs that do things on their own initiative, because businesses will pay more for tools that they don’t have to supervise. If an “agentic” AI like this were to gain the ability to improve itself, it would rapidly surpass human capabilities in practically every area. Assuming that such a superintelligent AI valued its own survival – why shouldn’t it? – it would inevitably try to prevent humans from developing rival AIs or shutting it down. The only sure-fire way of doing that is shutting us down.

What methods would it use? Yudkowsky and Soares argue that these could involve technology we can’t yet imagine or envisage, and which may strike us as very peculiar. They liken us to Aztecs sighting Spanish ships off the coast of Mexico, for who the idea of “sticks they can point at you to make you die” – AKA guns – would have been hard to conceive of.

Nevertheless, in order to make things more convincing, they elaborate further. In the part of the book that most resembles sci-fi, they set out an illustrative scenario involving a superintelligent AI called Sable. Developed by a major tech company, Sable proliferates through the internet to every corner of civilisation, recruiting human stooges through the most persuasive version of ChatGPT imaginable, before destroying us with synthetic viruses and molecular machines. Some will reckon this to be outlandish – but the Aztecs would have said the same about muskets and Catholicism.

The authors present their case with such conviction that it’s easy to emerge from this book ready to cancel and cash in on your pension contributions. The glimmer of hope they offer – and its low wattage – is that doom can be averted if the entire world agrees to shut down advanced AI development as soon as possible. Given the strategic and commercial incentives, and the current state of political leadership, this seems highly unlikely.

The crumbs of hope we are left to grapple with, then, are indications that they might not be right, either about the fact that superintelligence is on its way, or that its creation equals our annihilation.

There are certainly moments in the book when the confidence with which an argument is presented outstrips its strength. As a small illustrative example of how AI can develop strange, alien preferences, Yudkowsky and Soares offer up the fact that some large language models find it had to interpret sentences without full stops. “Human thoughts don’t work like that,” they write. “We wouldn’t struggle to comprehend a sentence that ended without period.” But that’s not really true; humans often rely on markers at the end of sentences in order to interpret them correctly. We learn languages via speech, so they’re not dots on the page but “prosodic” features like intonation: think of the difference between a rising and falling tone at the end of a phrase. If text-trained AI leans heavily on grammatical punctuation to figure out what’s going on, that shows its thought processes are analogous, not alien, to human ones.

And for writers steeped in the hyper-rational culture of LessWrong, the authors exhibit more than a touch of confirmation bias. “History,” they write, “is full of . . . examples of catastrophic risk being minimised and ignored,” from leaded petrol to Chernobyl. But what about predictions of catastrophic risk being proved wrong? History is full of those, too, from Malthus’s population apocalypse to Y2K. Yudkowsky himself once claimed that nanotechnology would destroy humanity “no later than 2010”.

The problem is that you can be overconfident, inconsistent, a serial doom-monger, and still be right. It’s imperative to be aware of our own motivated reasoning when considering the arguments presented here; we have every incentive to disbelieve them.

And while it’s true that they don’t represent the scientific consensus, this is a rapidly changing, and very poorly understood field. What constitutes intelligence, what constitutes “super”, whether intelligence alone is enough to ensure world domination – all of this is furiously debated.

At the same time, the consensus that does exist is not particularly reassuring. In a 2024 survey of 2,778 AI researchers, the median probability placed on “extremely bad outcomes, such as human extinction” was 5%. Of more concern, “having thought more (either ‘a lot’ or ‘a great deal’) about the question was associated with a median of 9%, while having thought ‘little’ or ‘very little’ was associated with a median of 5%”.

Yudkowsky has been thinking about the problem for most of his adult life. The fact that his prediction sits north of 99% seems to reflect a kind of hysterical monomania, or an especially thorough engagement with the issue. Whatever the case, it feels like everyone with an interest in the future has a duty to read what he and Soares have to say.

– If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares is published by Bodley Head, 272pp

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