Category Sách & Tri thức

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If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies review – how AI could kill us all

If machines become superintelligent we’re toast, say Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. Should we believe them?

What if I told you I could stop you worrying about climate change, and all you had to do was read one book? Great, you’d say, until I mentioned that the reason you’d stop worrying was because the book says our species only has a few years before it’s wiped out by superintelligent AI anyway.

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 kill us all, somehow.

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How modern life makes us sick – and what to do about it

From depression to obesity, the concept of ‘evolutionary mismatch’ can help foster self-compassion and point the way to a more rewarding existence

One of the fascinating things about working as a psychotherapist is the opportunity to observe how many of our problems involve us getting in the way of ourselves. The difficulties we encounter are frequently the result of self-sabotage, and managing them often requires wrestling with our own drives, doing our best not to give in to every impulse. This is easier said than done, of course. To lose weight and keep it off, to successfully climb out of debt, to find meaningful work, to maintain long-term, happy relationships: all demand postponing our immediate desires in the service of a longer-term goal.

Delaying gratification, as it’s called, has been a useful tactic for aeons. But at a certain point it becomes reasonable to ask: why does so much of modern life seem to involve swimming upstream? Why is it that following our instincts often seems to land us in so much trouble?

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Hilary Mantel championed emerging writers – a new prize in her memory will help them get published

Judged by Maggie O’Farrell, Ben Miles and Chigozie Obioma, the Hilary Mantel prize for fiction will recognise emerging talent, and pay tribute to the Wolf Hall author’s legacy

A few months after Hilary Mantel died in September 2022, the novelist Maggie O’Farrell was browsing in a bookshop. Stopping at a table of new novels, she noticed a couple with Mantel’s endorsement on the cover, which, she tells me, she generally regards as instantly justifying the book’s price. This time, though, “I suddenly thought there aren’t going to be many more of these. It was such a sad moment. We’re not going to get another Mantel book, and we’re also not going to get to know about the books that she read and loved.”

To many readers who gobbled up Mantel’s books – 17 of them, including the novel Beyond Black, and the Wolf Hall trilogy, which won two Booker prizes – it’s extraordinary that she found time or energy for anything beside the mammoth research that her vast historical enterprises entailed, not to mention her enthusiastic and detailed involvement in their various adaptations. But Mantel was an engaged and enthusiastic supporter of other writers, especially those in the crucial early stages of their careers. Perhaps she never forgot how long it took her to see the first novel she wrote, A Place of Greater Safety, finally emerge in print in 1992.

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Kiran Desai: ‘I never thought it would happen in the US’

Since winning the Booker prize, the Indian author has spent two decades writing a follow-up. She talks about being longlisted again — and the immigration raids creating fear in her New York neighbourhood

Not long after the novelist Kiran Desai published her second book, The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker prize in 2006, she began working on her third. The title, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, came to her quickly, and she knew she wanted to write a “modern-day romance that wasn’t necessarily romantic”, one as much concerned with the forces that keep us apart – class, race, nationality, family history – as those that bind us. Writing the book itself took almost two decades.

One problem with devoting so many years to one book is that people worry for your welfare, Desai says with a laugh. “People begin to wonder what’s wrong. Are you really working on something?” One neighbour – who observed how Desai would rise early each morning to write, eat her breakfast and lunch at her desk, take a short break to do her food shop or housework and then write until as late as she could manage in the evenings – attempted an intervention. “You need to come out of your house,” he told her. “You will go crazy writing a book! This is no way to live!” Her 90-year-old uncle observed, with affection, that she was starting to look “like a kind of derelict”, which she acknowledges was true. “It was becoming absurd!” And yet Desai says she loved living this way, in complete service to her writing.

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Nick Harkaway: ‘I loathed Charles Dickens – it nearly turned me off reading for ever’

The author on his secret theories about Tolkien, the most perfect and terrifying Moomin book, and how his father, John le Carré, inspired him

My earliest reading memory
I read The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien at seven, in my bedroom in the deep west of Cornwall. I secretly believed that Rivendell was based on that house, which it clearly wasn’t.

My favourite book growing up
Impossible. I’m inconstant, so it was whatever I was reading at the time. Let’s say Finn Family Moomintroll, which is the most perfect of Tove Jansson’s lovely (and occasionally frankly terrifying) Moomin books.

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Night People by Mark Ronson review – a superstar DJ’s coming of age

Nerdery triumphs over gossip in this earnest but compelling memoir of the 90s New York club scene

It is bizarre to learn that, despite a career spent desperately trying to fill the dancefloor, reading the room night after night to predict how he might make it pop off, Mark Ronson never dances – “unless you count standing around, bobbing my head, and reciting rap lyrics as dancing”.

Night People is intended as Ronson’s memoir but is as much an attempt to immortalise the people and scenes he came up in as it is a reflection on a childhood shaped by the late-night parties hosted by his parents – first in London, where a distant memory of Robin Williams tucking him in to bed with “Nanu nanu” floats through, then later in Manhattan, when his mother marries Mick Jones from Foreigner.

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Sally Rooney unable to collect award over Palestine Action arrest threat

The Normal People author can no longer safely enter the UK without potentially facing arrest, according to a statement read out by her publisher at the prize ceremony

Irish author Sally Rooney could not travel to collect a literary prize this week over concerns that she may be arrested if she enters the UK, given her support of banned group Palestine Action.

Rooney won the Sky Arts award for literature for her fourth novel, Intermezzo. At a ceremony on Tuesday, audiences were told that Rooney “couldn’t be here”, before her editor, Faber publisher Alex Bowler, collected the award on her behalf.

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Clown Town by Mick Herron review – more fun and games with the Slow Horses

The ninth novel in the Slough House series, this tale of IRA infiltration is a perfect mix of one-liners, plot twists and real-world-tinged intrigue

Trigger warning: the new Slough House novel shares its name, I assume accidentally, with a particularly bleak soft-play centre on London’s North Circular Road in which sticky under-fives circulate through an infernal apparatus wailing and stabbing each other with plastic forks while the grownups sit at plastic tables drinking horrible coffee and waiting for death. Just a glimpse at the dust jacket sent me back a decade to that environment of grubbiness, boredom and mild peril. It’s not that big a leap, mind. There’s something of the knockabout quality of a soft-play centre in Mick Herron’s fictional world: all fun and games until someone loses an eye.

That said, as far as I know, none of the injuries in the real-world Clown Town will have been occasioned by the victim being held down so the front wheel of a Land Rover Defender can be driven over their head – which is the attention-grabbing scene with which Herron opens this latest instalment. As often, Herron’s plot takes off from real-world events: the Stakeknife scandal – in which it turned out that MI5 had been protecting a murderously vicious IRA enforcer as an intelligence asset – appears here in the story of Pitchfork, whose signature “nutting” technique of killing during the Troubles was running over people’s heads.

What you see when you see a blank page is much what you hear when you hear white noise; it’s the early shifting into gear of something not ready to happen – an echo of what you feel when you walk past sights the eyes are blind to; bus queues, whitewashed shopfronts, adverts pasted to lamp-posts, or a four-storey block on Aldersgate Street in the London borough of Finsbury, where the premises gracing the pavement include a Chinese restaurant with ever-lowered shutters and a faded menu taped to its window; a down-at-heel newsagent’s where pallets of off-brand cola cans block the aisle; and, between the two, a weathered black door with a dusty milk bottle welded to its step, and an air of neglect suggesting that it never opens, never closes.

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Review: The Academy by Elin Hilderbrand – Spoilers

The Academy by Elin Hilderbrand & Shelby Cunningham is an interesting read about an school which has just skyrocketed in the rankings but the students are in a state of amaze. Why? Is something wrong? Let’s find out…. “It’s a normal day at Tiffin Academy and amidst the happiness of friends reuniting, taking pics and […]

Sally Rooney and Annie Ernaux among authors urging Macron to reinstate Gaza writers programme

20 authors, including Viet Thanh Nguyen and Abdulrazak Gurnah, call on the French president to restart scheme to help creatives evacuate

Sally Rooney, Deborah Levy, Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux and Pulitzer winner Viet Thanh Nguyen are among 20 authors urging French president Emmanuel Macron to resume a “lifeline” programme for evacuating Palestinian writers, scholars and artists from Gaza.

The Pause programme for writers and artists in emergency situations, as well as a student evacuation programme, were abruptly suspended by the French government at the beginning of August over a Palestinian student’s allegedly antisemitic online remarks, a decision that the letter-writing authors said amounted to a “collective punishment”.

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