[book_info title=”Picnic Comma Lightning: In search of a new reality” author=”Laurence Scott” publisher=”William Heinemann” title_link=”https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1113384/picnic-comma-lightning/”]
BUZZ ALDRIN takes a robust approach to those who deny that he visited the moon. On Twitter, ; in person, . All the hard facts, and the weight of opinion, are on Aldrin’s side, but still his challengers come at him. What makes them so committed to their own, non-consensus reality?
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Many might put it down to straightforward ignorance or idiocy. Laurence Scott isn’t content to leave it at that. He reckons Aldrin’s unenviable position is due not to his status as one of the first to walk on the moon, but as one of the first to be photographed there. We aren’t sure if cameras, and their operators, reveal reality or distance us from it, he suggests, particularly as fakery has become ever harder to detect – and we all take and manipulate photos now.
In Picnic Comma Lightning, Scott argues that our interactions with “stories” and “things” have become ambiguous, too: social media forces us to write our lives as a narrative, while the line between animate and inanimate objects has blurred. The ways we communicate are also changing. Our feeds are becoming ever more incoherent, our language visual, our emotions commoditised. Reality is captured through words, images and data – and yet remains multiform and elusive.
To decipher these changes, Scott uses concepts from philosophy and semiotics to dissect case studies that run from the esoteric to the everyday: Aldrin keeps company with Winnie the Pooh, George Clooney, Andy Murray and Euripedes. Sections on metaphor, bathos and the original meaning of obscenity (“off-stage”) might sound forbiddingly abstruse, but don’t be deterred. Scott has a knack for making comparisons that initially seem outrageous but turn out to be entirely apposite, such as likening the jarring effects of product placement by social media influencers to the distracting distorted skull in Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors.
“Reality is captured through words, images and data – and yet remains multiform and elusive”
Bringing highfalutin critical theory to bear on the causes of Flat-Earthism (and much else) might seem like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. But the roots of today’s rampant unreason are buried deep in the cultural and psychological bedrock of our societies; simplistic explanations don’t reveal the seismic faults being opened up by technology. In its willingness to dig deeper, Picnic Comma Lightning provides a bravura investigation of our turbulent times.
The book is shot through with a thread of autobiography – topped and tailed as it is by Scott’s experiences of bereavement – which won’t be to everyone’s taste. But it does mean that for all its postmodern stylings, his book remains mindful of the unignorable reality beyond our hyper-mediated perceptions of it – which might one day wake us from our solipsistic reveries with a smack in the face. Sumit Paul-Choudhury
[book_info title=”Now You’re Talking: Human conversation from the Neanderthals to artificial Intelligence” author=”Trevor Cox” publisher=”Bodley Head” title_link=”https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1111924/now-you-re-talking/”]
A MACHINE at Fake, a recent show at the Science Gallery Dublin in Ireland, let you manipulate your fake laugh until it sounded real. Next to it, audio files of former US president Barack Obama speaking were being used to generate mouth shapes, enabling him to deliver speeches he never made.
Trevor Cox, professor of acoustic engineering at the University of Salford, UK, puts such uncanny novelties into context towards the end of his history of the human voice – an epic and multi-stranded tale that is necessarily as much about technology and psychology as it is about biology. There is also a healthy dose of sociology here, as Cox ably and entertainingly explores the political and cultural dimensions of how we speak, from beatboxing to stammering to sounding all “poshy”. Simon Ings
[book_info title=”The Art of Logic: How to make sense in a world that doesn’t” author=”Eugenia Cheng” publisher=”Profile Books” title_link=”https://profilebooks.com/the-art-of-logic.html”]
HOW do we thread a path through snarky, post-truth times to any sort of consensus let alone truth – scientific or otherwise? Mathematician Eugenia Cheng thinks the answer is to invite us all into the powerful world of mathematics and logic.
To succeed, she needs to show what their abstract world has to offer a messy, “real” world of people and objects that fail, reliably, to behave according to logic. And she does, with an old-fashioned, rather noble project. Here she aims to blend logic and emotion to create a “helpfully, persuasively, powerfully rational person. Not just a person who can use logic, but one who can use logic to illuminate the world of emotional humans.”
For her, it is about creating a path to a better world, where nuance replaces the crude black and white logic of political division, where we can build bridges to people who disagree with us – and even to those who don’t want bridges building. Clearly there is no idealism like that of a mathematician. All power to her. Liz Else
[book_info title=”Artifictional Intelligence: Against humanity’s surrender to computers” author=”Harry Collins” publisher=”Polity” title_link=”https://www.wiley.com/en-ag/Artifictional+Intelligence%3A+Against+Humanity%27s+Surrender+to+Computers-p-9781509504114″]
ACHIEVING true artificial intelligence is easy. All we have to do is lower our expectations of what intelligence really is. Call your interaction with a care robot a “conversation”, call the endorphin release that accompanies cuddling a robot seal a “relationship” and you are halfway there.
If we constantly underestimate the difference between ourselves and our machines, we will become no better than robots, reduced to what philosopher Soren Kierkegaard marvellously dubbed “immediate men”. Who will stem the tide of AI boosterism? Stand up Harry Collins, a sociologist of science.
In a book that piquantly demonstrates his premise that “Criticising AI is not the same as the self-affirming practice of worrying about the dangers of AI”, Collins spots a real danger: by losing sight of the very real limitations of artificial intelligence, we readily enslave ourselves to stupid computers. SI
[book_info title=”The Feather Thief: Beauty, obsession and the natural history heist of the century” author=”Kirk Wallace Johnson” publisher=”Hutchinson” title_link=”https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/534655/the-feather-thief-by-kirk-wallace-johnson/9781101981610/”]
FOR Alfred Russel Wallace, the feathers of the 39 species of birds of paradise were the clues he needed to formulate his theory of evolution by natural selection. For the thief Edwin Rist in 2009, as told in The Feather Thief, they were his passport to a criminal underworld obsessed with the Victorian “art” of fly-tying for salmon fishing.
In truth, Victorian fly-tiers were simply muscling in on a pre-existing market in rare feathers. They were suckered in by pseudoscientific tomes like William Blacker’s 1842 Art of Fly Making, which recommended using the feathers of 37 different exotic birds to catch a fish that we now know is colour-blind.
That this absurdity should persist into the present day ignites the ire of Richard Prum at Yale’s Peabody Museum, whose visceral contempt for the fly-tying subculture is a highlight in this fascinating investigation of a seriously ridiculous crime. SI
[book_info title=”Light of the Stars: Alien worlds and the fate of the Earth” author=”Adam Frank” publisher=”W W Norton” title_link=”http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Light-of-the-Stars/”]
WE MAY have no proof that aliens exist, but US astrophysicist Adam Frank is pretty convinced. He reckons it is wrong to claim that no civilisation has ever emerged on any of the 10 billion trillion planets in the universe apart from ours. Alien civilisations must have existed many times before, he says, because “the sheer size” of that number is enough to make it seem like humans are not the first civilisation-building types nature has ever created.
Mind you, if he is right, his other argument is a bit of a downer: in the process of building global civilisations, they are as likely as us to have driven their worlds to the brink of dangerous change. If they did exist, did any make it to the nirvana of sustainability? Who knows, says Frank, but it is time for us to take our place as children of the stars as well as of Earth, to grow up, accept the Anthropocene we created – and learn how to work with it. LE
This article appeared in print under the headline “Read and relax”
Article amended on 13 August 2018
We removed an erroneous reference to Wallace’s woes
