The diagram above, from Ray Kurzweil’s work on what he dubs the impending Singularity (a concept that he dates back at least to the work of John von Neumann in the 1950s), is on an exponential scale (the vertical axis) and shows writing turning up relatively late in the story. Thank heavens it did. My appetite for books, magazines and newspapers remains virtually unquenchable.
During the last couple of months the piles of books I have bought have also risen near-exponentially, whereas my ability to read them has been compromised by the pace of work, except those I could take on planes. Happily, however, the holiday period has broken the logjam.
The first book I roared through was Jonathan Dimbleby’s extraordinary The Battle of the Atlantic. One of the most memorably storylines was the pursuit of FDR by winston Churchill, with Dimbleby describing FDR as playing the role of the “artful dodger” when it came to involving the United States directly in the war.
But on the same page there was a footnote mentioning that there Atlantic Charter that the two statesmen signed aboard the Prince of Wales in Placentia Bay in 1941 would become the blueprint for 1945’s UN founding Charter. Given our impending work with the UN Global Compact, I found this particularly interesting.
Shortly afterwards, I read Carlo Rovelli’s beautifully written Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. The book’s ‘In Closing’ section is remarkable for its brief consideration of whether our species will long survive the consequences of its environmental depredations.
“I believe that our species will not last long,” says Rovelli, chiming with Lord Martin Rees, who kindly gave me a signed copy of his 2003 book Our Final Century earlier in the year when we met in Bristol.
Interestingly, though, Rovelli concludes that “There are frontiers where we are learning, and our desire for knowledge burns.” They are, he says, “in the most minute reaches of the fabric of space, at the origins of the cosmos, in the nature of time, in the phenomenon of black holes, and in the workings of our own thought processes.”
And it is around the last of these that much of my recent reading has revolved. A couple of days back a couple of Amazon packages arrived, one containing Ray Kurzweil’s wonderfully provocative book The Singularity Is Near, which I have now read much of.
An earlier package had disgorged a new copy of Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail (to replace the copy I left on a plane and the Kindle version which I found virtually unreadable), A History of the Future in 100 Objects by Adrian Hon, Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation by Tony Seba, and James Barrat’s Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era.
All of this is building towards our 2016-17 work theme, of which more later.
In between times, I have also been churning through faster books, because they are page turners (like Simon Scarrow’s Britannia), because I can flip through the images (the 2-volume Taschen collection of Salvador Dalí’s work which I bought in Ely earlier in the year, or because they are shorter (as are the short stories in The Book of Gaza, published by the wonderfully named Comma Press).
In any event, I seem to have got back my reading mojo.
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