"How many books have you ordered?" asks my wife as she she looks at the blurb on another pickup from our post office box.... followed closely by, "This looks interesting..." as she places it on her pile of books on her side of the bed!
ARRRGH... Anyway, the first of the two new orders (I think I have a couple more in the pipeline...) is a book about how cities (and everything else...) have transitioned from a messy chaos with lots of small scale and hidden complexity to slightly sterile and bland infrastructure that is vaguely displeasing to most people. Take for instance, the old organic cities... rabbit warrens of horrible intersecting roads and paths...that hide lots of character and charm in little alleys and laneways. These are the communities that have shaped and evolved the environment and vice versa...
In "Seeing Like a State", James Scott tries to make the point that the evolution of structures to the bland geometric shapes that we have today is through a long process of making things more visible to a state, in essence, to make things more easily "countable" and "accessible". It is an interesting thesis, and one that does seem to make sense... there are certain strucutres and incentives that make sense from a governing point of view that make little sense or have adverse/perverse consequences at a lower level. And before anyone yells "decentralise it all".... well, the reverse is also true... a balance is needed as always!
Cool cover too!
The second book, "The Alignment Problem", was the one that piqued my wife's interest. With AI being all the rage at the moment with ChatGPT and MidJourney, I thought that it would be interesting to revisit some of the ideas and efforts that are informing the problem of how we try to align the incentives of an AI to something that at least approximates the ethical norms of humans and humanity.
I think I had ordered the right one... I can't remember where I had heard of it. Anyway, there were a couple of different versions with different subtitles.... that made it sort of confusing as to whether or not they were the same book or not. I would assume not, but there doesn't seem to be any mention of different subtitles on the author's webpage!
In many ways, it is more of an ethical philosophy exploration rather than a prescription for solutions... meant to make you think and reflect about the potential pitfalls in the new technology. So, I'm going to have to get up to speed on this topic before my wife starts bringing it up at the dinner table!
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