archytas's reviews
1677 reviews

This book focuses more on the influence of games than the games themselves, and does include rather a lot of ranting about game theory and why it shouldn’t be used to model anything in the real world. Also a reasonable amount of ranting about AI, and some interesting insights into the evolution of game-playing machines like AlphaGo (Clancy was a researcher for Deepmind at one point).
It is an engaging read - lots of interesting insights into a range of topics, from how randomised decision making (corresponding with the invention of dice) is a uniquely human trait, that underpinned lots of social evolutions, through to the way that curiosity and dopamine interact (Clancy contends that dopamine encourages us to explore and stretch boundaries, behaviours which can underpin compulsive gambling or video game addiction, where exploration and pursuit are endless, hampering our capacity to actually do things - this sounds dumb in my summary but is much better put in the book). Clancy views games as an inevitable part of being human (but not exclusively so), but also raises warning bells about how anything we like can be designed to make it difficult to disengage, exploiting rather than enhancing, our biology.
I would have appreciated more on actual games, and the diffuse focus makes it a bit of everything, but it is a good read that will provide plenty of conversation topics, not just for gamers

“Tonight, out means acknowledging that, for a sound to resonate, for us to hear it, it has to make physical contact with us, which is perhaps why the deep rumble of a bassline moves us so. Tonight, I might slap an open palm against the wall, might let my body bend to the bassline, like prostrating to something Godlike, something honest. Tonight, I might find my faith again, I might believe. And if it’s going to happen, it will be where I know myself best: in the moments just before a beat drops, having been teased slowly for what feels like hours, beautiful chords sneaking through the mud of percussion, anticipation at its height, my eyes closed in reverence of this moment, gratitude that I could be taken that high, that I might scrape heaven with my outstretched hands. And it’s not just me; catching another in the same motion, we might be drawn together, drawing so close our heads might touch, two Black crowns in the dim light of this ecstasy. Tonight, out means I’m content to stay in that space, just before the drums drop, in that moment where anything might be possible. So when Nam asks me if I’m coming out tonight, the answer can only be, ‘Of course.’.”
Occasionally there are writers where it feels like the most useful review is just a cluster of quotes, because surely, surely, anyone reading this prose will just want to go and read a whole book of it. Nelson writes with such life and rhythm he stops your breath as you read. Many of his best lines are repeated like a chorus, so that the feeling of the reading has that comfort and release of dancing to a familiar beat, moving in sync with yourself, in a community of others.
It isn’t just dancing that Nelson resurrects on the page. The Small Worlds of the title refers to the communities that we create, the small worlds of friends and family that, Nelson implies, are the stages that matter to our lives. And he starts with the glorious world of teenage love, the dizzying intensity of connection played out against summers of beaches, drinking nights and music. Over three years, he charts the nervous descent into adulthood for a generation who feel the burden of parental expectations that can’t be met, and the impossibility of explaining it is the bigger worlds, not the smaller ones, which have changed in ways that make these expectations impossible. This isn’t just any story of youth, he charts the impacts of colonialism and racism, the lost worlds and those regained, and the ways in which joy becomes defiant in the face of systemic barricades. Nelson writes youth so well, and smartly here, uses stories within stories, to make the older characters own youth sing to us, shading the worlds of their children.
Nelson’s stories richly explore family, what it is to be British-Ghanaian, love and music in ways that are thought-provoking and yes, to be twee, wise. But it is the language, and the ways that he makes that dance, which will pull me back to anything at all he writes. Because it is simply such joy to read, and to be reminded of what a thing it can be to be young.

I know I should be talking about the sharp political commentary here, and I'll get to it. But there is a part of one of these essays where Coates describes the awkwardness, fear and anticipation of deciding to sit in a foreign cafe that felt so exquisitely, sharply true that I heard myself do one of those bracing gasps. Coates is one of those writers I always feel intensely connected to, as if we are in some kind of dialogue based things others don't get. I am experienced enough to know that this is the way those writers feel to, if not most people, then at least many of them. They have some capacity to conjure intimacy, which makes the political writing ever that much more powerful (and must make dealing with fans a real pain).
But this collection is less directly personal that Coates other non-fiction. Here he tackles book bans and the polarisation of the USA, slavery and Africa and, in an essay comprising half the text, Palestine. The latter is based on his ten-day visit, in which he struggles to reconcile what he sees with his previously more positive view of Israel. It is thoughtful, and angry, and worth a read, like the rest of the collection.

It is often hard to tell, when essays are first published, what lasting impact words will have. This collection is a timely reminder that essays can matter - with a powerhouse collections of words that shifted something in how Australians see themselves, or that opened or accelerated existing national conversations. The collection reads a little like glimpses into Australia's past, with passionately argued essays on the sexism of house design, or the role of the suburb as showing how our sense of ourselves has evolved. All of them are engaging, even if not all seem to hold the test of time (Thea Astley on the Boomers as young folk is a reminder that we were all young once! On the other hand Tim Rowse's afterward moderating his views felt confessional in a human, if unnecessary, way).
The collection has a hefty set of recent contributions - six of the twenty essays were published int he last four years (the only decade not represented here is the naughties, interestingly, possibly a dead conversation for cultural conversation). The impact of some of these essays - Chelsea Watego's Always bet on Black (power) and Michael Mohammed Ahmad's It's shit to be White have had the widely cited, entered immediate conversation impact (and that both deal with racism is reflective of our current national conversations) but it did seem a heavy weighting overall.
But this is a delight to read, and a worthy reminder that what we write about culture matters.

Sometimes the most useful histories are those that keep a tight focus, and here Valasco keeps a very tight focus on the high rise housing developments that shaped Venezuelan politics for decades.  I was drawn to this by the current situation in that country, in which many hopes have been betrayed. The book helps to understand the tangled nature of politics in Venezuela, the long history of both populism and betrayal, and the highly politicised culture. It is jammed with great anecdotes drawn from oral histories - one of my favourites is of student radicals organising out of the buildings, whose support from the locals comes more from parental concern than strong ideological agreement, being told to "leave the bombs at the door" as they are brought in for shelter.
I don't know what lies ahead for this country, but the book is a timely reminder of what has been survived and what the people, in the right conditions, can build.

Pandemic-set novels are on the increase now the requisite time to write has passed, and unsurprisingly, they tend towards the sombre and thoughtful. In Burrow, Cheng gives us a family who've throughly dug themselves in to paralysing grief, so that the lockdown comes as a relief that the world has moved closer to their state. But while parents Jin and Amy are caught into a cycle of avoidance and numbness after the accidental death of their second child, their tween Lucie is pushing forward, as children do, into change. And so, they get a pet.
Given this description, you've probably guessed, correctly, that the pet (and another unexpected arrival) kicks off some kind of healing process for the family. And you are also probably assuming it is slightly mawkish, which would be wrong. The trick here is not in an unexpected destination but in the journey. Cheng maintains a subdued gentle tone throughout, revelling in the moments. It might not be explicable, the book shows, that a bunny jumping can make us feel joy, and it may be fleeting, but it matters. This family don't wrap all their issues up in neat bows - and in changing perspectives, Cheng uses changes of perspective to show how rarely our attempts to connect land as expected. But this is a testament to how we connect at all, in the face of how hard that can be.
(I found parts of this book quite difficult at times. I have a beloved child of the same age in my life, and found it surprisingly difficult to read scenes where her parents were unable to give her what she needed. I found myself googling afterwards to try to reassure myself that Cheng was not writing auto-fiction (in interviews, Cheng says the idea came from imagining her worst fears, not experiencing them).)
I found Cheng's debut collection a little uneven, and skipped her first novel. But here is a powerful voice telling an immersive story in a slight premise. Her caustic wit remains - Jin describes the experience of living in the inner-city when he is from western suburbs as feeling like "the newest guest at a never-ending dinner party". Honestly, there is nothing it feels like Cheng couldn't take on and make it interesting - I'll be grabbing that first novel now.

*There are times in this book when it may seem as if eggs have desires, wants or needs: that eggs wanted to move from the sea to the land; that eggs sought safety in the mammal uterus or hid themselves in crystalline bird eggshells. Nevertheless, eggs – devoid of a brain and incapable of an instructive thought – can clearly do very little else than simply be an egg. Eggs are not capable of knowing their journey. I give them agency at particular moments only to better tell an engaging story.*

Howard has a knack with imaginative prose, and would make for a great introduction to writing about evolution. He conjures up vivid images of the worlds in which eggs evolved, and populates them with creatures just started to swim, crawl, and, yes, lay eggs. The explanations of why the egg has mattered so much are well done, and you may never look at an egg white again quite the same way. However, it did lag at times and, strangely, also lack compelling detail in parts.

Simpson's prose is as lyrical as expected, with rhythms that move you through (and bonus for actual poetry).  The book also beautifully evokes Gadigal and Cammeraygal country and waterways. However, the plot and split structure of this one didn't really work for me, and I struggled to stay in Ginny's thread in particular. 

"Hassabis believed so fervently in the transformative effects of AGI that he told DeepMind’s staff they wouldn’t have to worry about making money in about five years, because AGI would make the economy obsolete, former employees say. That eventually became mainstream thinking among the senior managers.."

This book is terrifying. It is also the recent read I have become most evangelical about - I might buy copies and give them out. That's not because it particularly well written, Olson has an incline towards the schtick which irritates me slightly, but because the world of Silicon Valley Meglomaniacs (my words, not hers) she writes about has so very, very much power.
It was upon reading this book that I realised Musk is not as singular as you would assume. Even in a cohort of delusional billionaires, he stands out as unstable, but you can see that he is marinating in a world in which nuance, accountability and well, reality, have long disappeared in the rear-view mirror. It would funny except that the impact of their actions is very, very real.
Unlike the others in the crop of new books about AI, Supremacy doesn't seek to explain or focus on the technology. It focuses on the people in charge of it - specifically Sam Altman from-ish Open AI and Demis Hassabis from (Google) DeepMind. Both of whom are shown as passionately driven by their beliefs that AI technology could save or destroy the world. Their relative arcs are fascinating. Altman starts out in the free-market start up culture, morphs into a doom-predictor with AI, determined to develop it in a 'safe' way, and lands as a nascent billionaire willing to abandon all controls in service of megaprofits for Microsoft. Hassabis starts in the idealistic British games industry, morphs into a research-driven messiah of AI, convinced it will create a utopia on Earth by, y'know, the middle of this century tops, and then lands as a nascent billionaire willing to abandon all controls in service of megaprofits for Google. So much to think about here.
Now to be clear, I am not terrified because I think HAL is coming for us all. There is irony in that what these men have built are machines so far most successful at bland-ifying human life, and yes, automating some tedious or previously impossible tasks. We are not close to the singularity. But to build those machines has involved staggering amounts of climate damage, billions of hours of criminally underpaid labour, and thats not talking about the child miners of the minerals necessary. And deploying that technology has led to a new era of embedded racist, sexist and classist bias in government and private systems, which threatens to drastically widen existing inequalities just as our social, environmental cohesion fractures.
But to Altman and Hassabis, and their ilk - Musk, Bezos, Page, Theil regular appearances, as well as Mustafa Suleyman and many others - these issues are like specks of dust on the window. It isn't even that they dismiss them - they simply don't see them, so insignificant do they seem in the grand world quest of achieving utopia. This is a world where debating whether you are Oppenheimer or Einstein is normal (yes, it did make me feel very differently about that film, these people have an Oppenheimer *thing*) but checking what impact your actual technology is having actually today is not. And it is not so surprising that in the end, the world's largest tech firms, who care for nothing but making money, are able to swoop in and tie all the idealism up into a mega-disruption-profit-generating machine.
The most cogent section of the book is where Olson explains the ethical framework most of these bros belong to. "Effective altruism" is an ideology with a tagline of "shut up and multiply". It offers a "simple, rational" pathway to decision making based on math. Work out how many lives you can save, more lives, better person. And the way to get the highest numbers is to save humanity from extinction because that is like, trillions of lives. Nothing else competes. You would think this might motivate at least climate change as a priority and for some, including at least for a while, Musk, it does. But others see climate change as too specific (yes, really). Saving us from rogue AI? closer. Perfecting utopia? Bingo! Which is probably why, Olson tells us, the Future of Life Institute's single biggest grant - $25million from a crypto magnate - is more than the combined annual budget of all other AI ethics charities (the European Digital Rights initiative that focuses on bias in algorithms gets #2.2 m a year). The Future of Life's mission is to stop sentient AI-controlling weapons.
There are, I should say, some heroes who emerge from this narrative. All of them (I can remember) are women, with Timnit Gebru leading the pack, and the Open AI board members probably in the rear. That they are ultimately only effective once outside the various institutions and clubs indicates how uniformly terrible this world is.
But is a glorious study of capitalism. In the end, it is the motivation to make money - to sell people stuff they don't need; and to sell other companies stuff they think will make other people buy stuff they don't need, and yes, to sell companies stuff that they think will cut their costs. Which it probably will - and we'll all be living with robotic voices and robotic art and terrible information even if that is presented in more naturalistic version than we usually identify with robots. And that isn't starting on the potential to isolate us from each other. (I might be coming across like I think the technology is evil - I really don't. I have advocated early adoption for things that will bring joy and knowledge. But I do think if subject to the current model, bland and inaccurate is what will generate the most profit, and that it therefore what we will get). The megalomania makes these billionaires more pliable to the dynamics of profit-making, which is its own kind of AI - a dynamic that guides the people caught in its web. The sky high salaries of Silicon Valley aren't just competitive - they work to create an elite so removed from daily life that they lose any sense of how much suffering exists now, nevermind how much if it is caused by their software. When you are the most powerful person in your daily interactions, you lose the feedback loop that generates accountability. You also lose connection, and you lose community. In many ways, these are tragic figures, but not in the evil-genius way they fear.

When I finished this novella, I found myself flipping back and starting again. Partly that is because of the way that Sjon unravels the story, so you to go back and see how it feels knowing the end. But also, it is a hard mood and world to just wrench yourself out of, so hypnotic is the imagery, even in translation (kudos to Cribb here).
I do find it hilarious that this was recommended as Icelandic literature that wasn't bleak or dark, because well, it isn't exactly lighthearted or warm. But it is a tad spellbinding, and full of quiet ode to people who care for each other (balanced by a note of vengeance-induced-madness and a deserved avalanche for those who don't).