Superintelligence details how we might reach intelligence levels of multiple order of magnitudes above where we are standing today.

Although reaching such levels might feel exciting at first, Bostrom explains how things could catastrophically derail if a non-controlled intelligence explosion were to occur.

He then lays out how societies would change in a world where an intelligence with a 6000 IQ would, in the best of worlds, do everything we tell it to do - an "aligned" super intelligence.

Bostrom's research effort is astonishing. This book illustrates how much he handles quite different domains, spanning from machine learning to human biology and political science. His ability to divide and conquer (really) complex questions is a delight for the reader - for instance, see box. 7 "how big is the cosmic endowment".

But the detail level that is reached eventually hurts Bostrom's message. At one point, his writing resembles more scifiesque descriptions rather than plausible accounts of what a superintelligence could look like. Bostrom hypotheses end up looking like huge conditional statements: adding details eventually drives the probability of what he describes to zero. In fact, that makes Bostrom's writing style quite boring - though I understand this is more about science. As someone already noted it, some of superintelligence's chapters read like endless if-else statements. I had to skip pages at one point. The book could have benefitted from simply linking to papers or other resources.

In conclusion, superintelligence is a hard, sometimes boring but rewarding must-read introduction for someone interested in AI risk.

Although good at that, this book is not only about how to build your startup. It also is an essay in micro-economics, competition law and capitalism. In terms of depth, having the perspective of a billionaire founder on those topics is rare. Hence, this collection of small essays is not only precious to figure out how to build a product but also to understand the kind of world we live in.

I have been disappointed by this book. Reading reviews of Guns, Germs and Steel, I expected a lot from Jared Diamond. It happens that Upheaval was available at my local bookstore, so I decided to buy it.

First, Upheaval reads as a constant hesitation between a bachelor's degree course in global history, a bedtime story and an open-access conference. Yes, this book has well-documented accounts of countries histories. I liked a lot the chapter recollecting how many legal, economic and social changes modern Japan had to through. But I think this is a pre-requirement to any case-study based research. What Jared Diamond missed is the crux of any valuable social science book: a counter-intuitive thesis backed by convincing arguments.

I think the author made the thesis that comparing personal crises with what nations go through was original. It's not. If I were to read the news today, I'm pretty sure I would stumble on some piece assigning personality traits (if not anthropomorphizing) to some country to explain its reluctance to change or its ability to overcome a conflict - I indeed checked.

Actually, if a comparison had to be done, it would be much more productive to do it the other way around: to explain in what ways those crises differ from personal ones. From my understanding, they are inherently multi-variate non-linear conflicts, which confront large-scale stakeholders with diverging personal interests, yet under the necessity to find a positive sum-game to play. This is quite different from personal crises.

Also, why would you ditch international relations, history, sociology, economy, political philosophy for your friends opinions? J. Diamond literally quotes "close friends" and acquaintances. I absolutely do not care about what your friends think happened during or after Pinochet's Chile. I care about how social sciences has helped us make sense of history and how to use those tools to understand our present world and where its headed.

In 400 BC, when Thucydides had to report what witnesses had to say about a particular battle, he would hold an objective stance with respect to it. This is often (mistakenly) thought as the birth of modern scientific history. In that vein, if this book was devised to be a scientific comparative historic review, then J. Diamond has made a huge (rookie) mistake: you can not bring your or your friends inherently flawed subjective viewpoint to the table.

Le lecteur a un peu de travail a faire, mais le monde que propose Damasio vaut le coup! L'écriture est certes parfois prétentieuse, ce livre demeure néanmoins excellent. L'histoire, les personnages et la langue forment un tout d'une cohérence rare dans la science-fiction.

Well written and distills quite a bit of wisdom. The book's repetive and contradictory statements make it playful, sometimes boring though. Still, I will keep it close since I might read it twice.

Discovered Emmanuel Carrère with "D'autres vies que la mienne". I simply cannot understand how this book did not get more awards. I have read quite a few from Carrère since and this one remains my favorite. It feats what I enjoy the most from Emmanuel Carrère's writing, namely his ability for dissecting how fragile we are, coupled with a deep understanding of human pain and grief.
5 stars without a doubt.

Ted Chiang is really good at making a great plot in a few pages. He has very interesting insights and takes on a variety of topics, making him able to write relevant and engaging scifi stories that we wish would last longer. I wished I discovered him earlier.

I think I have been hyped way too much for Kitchen Confidential. Cocaine, rock and roll, blood and sex done in a kitchen are great materials for witty stories and under the belly accounts of the food world. Although it was written 10 years earlier, there definitely is a Vice vibe to this book. But like the magazine, the book ends up being quite repetitive. Some chapters are really good. What he writes on Japan's food culture ("Mission to Tokyo") is fun, filled with tiny details that make the read pleasant. The tone is similar to what we could hear while dining with this good friend, kind enough to test things out for us, and who always has the wildest experiences. I ended up liking the first chapters a lot, cuisine is a topic I know nothing about. But once the novelty effect faded off, I got bored, mostly due to the material's repetitiveness. I felt like the book gets really good again towards the final chapters. So, giving it 3/5 - sad that I can't put this a 3.5 rating.

I was surprisingly disappointed with this book. The french edition is simply an absolute pain to read. Sentences feel broken, making the book lack style overall. It eventually harms the storyline. I ended up bored and didn't even take time to finish it.

Still, 2 stars for how the book's plot is set up (trying to avoid spoilers here).

One of the greatest french contemporary books I had to read in the last ten years. Nicolas Mathieu has an attention to details and an ability to make characters evolve through the plot that I have not witnessed anywhere else. This book reads like a movie, I wouldn't be surprised it were to be adapted one day.

Not the best Liu Cixin book I have read. Still, this is a solid 3.5. Among others, this book has:

- A compelling story structure with lots of unexpected plot twists - Liu Cixin is good at that.
- A poetic ending.
- A chinese perspective on international relations. The story is infused with a variety of takes on today's world order and politics in general.

What I missed was the "hard" sci-fi component. The science here plays the role of a useful excuse to why humans above thirteen years old to go extinct. Liu Cixin is also sometimes a bit too prone to cultural manichaeism.

I really like Ted Chiang. There is a bunch of traps that scifi books can end up in. On top of having to do their scientific due diligence, scifi writers also have to write characters with convincing psyches, relevant dilemmas on how tech can conflict morals and engaging dialogues. Ted Chiang manages to do all of these things.

I'm always amazed with how much originality he introduces each of his short stories. I found the idea of composing a story on a museum prospectus to be brilliant. Also, witnessing how much research Ted Chiang has done before writing is easy. And the thing is that he not only deeply understands what he writes about, he also builds worlds of unparalleled creativity around it.

His novels are filled with poetry. This is one of the distinguishing feature of Ted Chiang. Actually, his way with stories is one of the best I know among *all* literary genres.

Although poetic, his novels are tightly packed and dense stories. Echoing with his software engineering background, each of the words he writes fills a function. His texts can feel like some artifact of precision engineering. Ted Chiang takes us where he wants to and does it in the most direct, efficient way; reaching the maximum possible poetry level with as few words as possible. It might feel frustrating. We could be longing for some lengthy descriptions scattered with arty story details. But I think this is what makes him one of scifi's finest artisan.

All are excellent pieces. This is a hard thing to do and I can't say for sure that my alt in another timeline would have the same exact ranking, but here it goes:

1. The great silence
2. Exhalation
3. The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate
4. Omphalos
5. The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
6. Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom
7. What’s Expected of Us
8. The Lifecycle of Software Objects

Good plot, ended up caught in the story and swiftly finished the book.

There isn't any hard sci-fi elements though. I would have liked to know more about what's going on in general: what program are they part of? Why now, why them? Who was in charge and how was the AI programmed? What specific technology and energy sources do settlers have at their disposal?

So this is a good book, which feels unfinished!

As often with sci-fi, the french edition is not great but ok.

3.5/5

Why we're polarized is well researched. Klein does a good job at articulating different dimensions, fluidly alternating between micro and macro factors of polarization: psychology and institutions.

His thesis is that polarization is ok. It is a feature of sane democracies, where parties compete for executive power and negotiate for keeping legislative influence. However, a mix of psychological biaises and misaligned institutional incentives can quickly make polarization a threat to the effective functioning of a political system where policy-making involves transactional politics.

Klein's book was written before the January 6 Capitol attack. My edition came with an interesting afterword going over what happened during Trump's presidency and how much it resonated (or not) with what he wrote.

Surprisingly, there is no mention of a possible materialist cause to polarization. This is very much at odds with the current state of inequalities and absurd concentration of wealth that we are knowing as of today. It would have been interesting to check whether the arrow of causality holds here and in what ways. Additionally, in the context of analysing solutions, mentioning how direct democracy could (or not) fit the bill would have been pertinent.

This was an enthralling read. Quantum physics, game theory, computing architectures, space probes; it has it all. The author strikes an excellent balance at simplifying some tricky topics and gets to the core ideas quite well. I learned a lot and got to contemplate how much von Neumann's work infuses today's scientific research agenda.

It feels like World War II increased by an order of magnitude the acceleration rate of scientific research. Von Neumann was at the forefront of this, relentlessly finding the sharpest ways for how to turn the latest of the latest research into a strategic advantage for the military. Those advancements would eventually trickle down to us mere citizens.

He also was at the forefront of how much ethics would be questioned and turned around. The author conveys Von Neumann's dilemmas and contradictions with care. Decisions are contextualised to a good extent. It makes readers more apt to grasp how and why ideas as pre-emptive nuclear war, engaging humanity's life and death, could be considered by Von Neumann.

It ends up being a biography, a history and at times almost a sci-fi book. I recommend!

Ball lightning was published before the Three Body Problems series.

Interestingly, there are a few corresponding themes between this book and the Dark Forest trilogy: hard sci-fi, simplistic but attaching characters endowed with their fair share of misogyny, a military setting. Funnily enough, Liu Cixin even lays out the premises of alien invasion at the end. I think the book was re-edited and corrected in 2004, I would be interested to know what was added in anticipation of his subsequent major literary work.

Cixin knows how to write a page turner. This is a really good sci-fi book, with some mind bending science pages - not to the level of dark forest though. The story is epic and engages a large proportion of humanity into some paroxysmic moments, which end up boiling down to decisions taken in split seconds, narrated over several pages.

This turns reading Ball Lightning into a very sympathetic moment - (3.5, rounded up to) 4 stars.

I think the writing style of 'Brave New World' has not aged well. I feared I would be bored after reading a fifth of it. I'm more interested in hard sci-fi, and this book does not fall into that category. You won't find extensive futuristic descriptions of advanced technology.

Here is my take on why is it considered a classic: the timelessness of 'Brave New World' lies in its numerous meta-layers and the range of topics it addresses. It definitely leans more into philosophy than sci-fi, exploring themes as:

- Eugenics and the societal structures it could lead to. It reminded me of Nick Bostrom's 'Super Intelligence', which (kinda naively) discusses the potential use of eugenics to create super-intelligent beings in its early chapters.
- Monogamy and its impact on male-female relationships. This is relevant to phenomena like today's Tinder culture and polyamory - though they are different, the extent to which these differ is unclear.
- The decline of religion. This echoes well with the current secularization of western countries, accompanied by a sharp rise of alternative spiritualities.
- Mass entertainment. An interesting parallel could be done with Debord's 'The Society of the Spectacle'.
- Widespread drug use.

This makes Aldous Huxley's book remarkable. Consider that the book was written in 1931, over 90 years ago. Visionaries like him must exist today, but where can they be found?

Another intriguing aspect is that I felt that 'Brave New World' could be interpreted as a conservative, moralistic critique, advocating for monogamy, religion, and techno-pessimism. Yet, this doesn't diminish the book's relevance to contemporary issues – or perhaps history is simply repeating itself?


Cool fact: Brave New World was written while Aldous Huxley was staying in Sanary-sur-Mer.

Cool book!

Plot is addictive. The science is well-documented and interesting. I liked my edition, which came with a Mars mini-map; it made following Mark's journey fun. French version might be a disservice though, hence my 4 stars.

Antifragile is quite a beast of a book that covers multiple topics yet serves a single idea: some things gain from randomness and thinking that we understand such things up to messing with them is what makes us vulnerable.

This book is quite punk and it’s refreshing. Taleb kicks out academia and places the experience of reality at the center. It’s ok if you can not understand something when you can cover yourself from it derailing. That’s an interesting worldview from which you end up considering innovation as a bottom-up process, a by-product of tinkering.

The last part on ethics is also bold. I haven’t seen many authors that deduce life principles from their takes. It also is a good way to give his readers practical advice on how to start acting accordingly.

Taleb’s writing style is not the clearest I have seen. However, the book is overall well structured. Each chapter follows another fluidly as we progress through building a mental model of why we shouldn’t try to look the smartest in a room filled up with pundits.

Sometimes takes are very spicy, if not borderline rude. I am not a fan of that. But it seems like Taleb had a lot on his chest and that’s understandable.

4/5