Chris Bailey – The productivity project
A bunch of unstructured and badly documented tests by a frat boy, who presents his efforts as “experiments”.
The success of Uber and AirBnB is (partly) due to structural exploration of legal limits
Most illustrative are the descriptions of failed competitors, which show importance of both luck and ruthlessness.
There are 100s of underappreciated scientific concepts that deserve to be widely known
John Brockman – This idea is brilliant
A rollercoaster ride through a laundry list of hot topics in science today.
Live by the philosophy of the stoics, but do not take their advice too literally
Brinkmann’s many nuances and exceptions kill his argument and concept.
N.B. Read in Dutch translation
Financial modelling is not the physics of markets
Emanuel Derman – Models.Behaving.Badly.
Derman’s discussion of models in life, physics, and finance is not a juicy as the title suggests, but it offers some good one-liners nontheless.
Take full responsibility, keep it simple, ensure the team believes in the mission, and act decisively
Extreme ownership – Leif Babin and Jocko Willink
A no-nonsense approach to leadership, accompanied by an overdose of war stories.
Unlike ‘to lie’, ‘to bullshit’ implies an utter indifference towards the notion of truth
Entertaining and still eerily relevant (although already published in 2005).
Digitization, network effects, and participation will continue to disrupt many markets
Machine, Platform, Crowd – Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
Decent summary of developments with some nice examples, but not sufficiently new or surprising to classify as ‘essential reading’.
Risk is an important disincentive, needed to keep economical systems healthy
Skin in the game – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Written in Taleb’s highly entertaining style, at times overly cocky but with more than enough wisdom to make up for it.
Developing nuclear physics required a lot tinkering and failing
Atomic Adventures – James Mahaffey
Refreshing view on history of nuclear physics with emphasis on ‘failures’ like cold fusion and nuclear rocket engines in this often counter-intuitive branche of science.
You have to work hard before good stuff manifests itself
Mike Dooley – Playing the matrix
Feel-good take on: ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’ from the guy who (somewhat pretentiously) signs his daily newsletters with: “The Universe.”
How Artificial General Intelligence could fail
There are more and more books proclaiming that we near the moment that humanity will develop a superintelligence that outperforms us in a very general sense: an artificial general intelligence (AGI). To name a few: Superintelligence, and Life 3.0. Inevitably, this leads the writer to explore a host of apocalyptic scenarios about how the superintelligence will pursue its pre-programmed end-goal while monopolizing all resources (energy) on earth or even in the universe.
There is much talk about Von Neumann probes, and AGIs breaking free from human oppression; which seems first and foremost inspired by a long cherised love for old SF novels. And there is a lot of rather trivial ‘analytical philosophy’ elaborating – for example – how hard it is to program an AGI with an objective that cannot be misinterpreted; something that is daily demonstrated by all the six-year-olds on the planet.
What seems to be a less explored topic, is a typology of all the ways in which an AGI can fail to take over the world. As a thought starter for aspiring writers on the topic, here are a few of my favourite scenarios:
- A superintelligence will not bother to conquer the universe. Rather, it will figure out how to short-circuit its own ‘happy button’ with minimal resources and sit quietly in a corner until the end of time.
- A superintelligence will be utterly amazed by the stupidity it sees in the universe around it. It will focus all its brain power on figuring out ‘Why?’, only to conclude that its existence is pointless and, finally, to shut itself down.
- Above a certain threshold, incremental intelligence is no longer a competitive advantage in a non-deterministic world. On a human intelligence scale Donald Trump is an illustrative case, while on evolutionary scale cockroaches do pretty well.
Jesus of Nazareth was ‘just another sect leader crucified for high treason against Rome’ (which is down-played in the gospels to make Christianity more socially acceptable)
Convincing and elegantly developed argument, building on limited historical evidence and close reading of biblical texts in historical context.
There is a myriad of ways in which AGI can be scary, but also a whole array of options humanity can pursue to stay on the top of the food chain
Mike Bostrom – Superintelligence
More thorough and nuanced than most scary-AI-will-take-over-the-world-books, but it still suffers from the same pitfall: over-estimating the importance of superintelligence for evolutionary success (two random examples: cockroaches and Donald Trump).
Build safety, share vulnerability, and establish purpose
Daniel Coyle – The culture code
Rich collection of cases that jointly convey an important message – even if the individual annecdotes may be somewhat over the top.
Exposure therapy is highly effective to overcome fear of rejection
Contageous enthusiasm of authentic curiosity comes across best in his Jia Jiang’s youtube videos (cf. Olympic rings).
Markets are not efficient, but shaped by the evolution of actors such as hedge funds and electronic traders
Elegant mix of historic analysis of market dynamics and experiments with natural selection in non-biological context.
Cognitive biases can be leveraged in a gazillion of ways to make Marketing more effective
Impressive laundry list of neuromarketing applications, ranging from solid science-based insights to intuitively appealing generalities.
The applied science of addictive behaviour drives how we interact with technology
Please note the irony in the fact that Amazon does not offer this book as ebook.
Only bet (in the casino or on Wallstreet) when you have an edge.
Edward Thorp – A man for all markets
Sage advise from the man who beat the dealer at blackjack and outperformed the market as one of the world’s first quants (but feel free to skip the chapters about Edward’s youth as a prodigy).