One of the few things I wanted to do while in college was read as much as I can about everything there is to read about. Unfortunately, Assignments, Extracurricular Activities, Impromptu trips leave little time for casual reading. Now that college is about to end, I don’t think there’ll be a better time for me to get up to speed on the already very long list of To-Read books that I just keep adding to. Here is my New Year Target for 2019-20! I hope putting this up online will induce some fear of public-lynching, and help me do this right. I’ll also try to explain why I choose that particular book in particular. So, in no particular order, Here goes:
Superintelligence : Paths, Dangers, Strategies
By Nick Bostrom
Superintelligence asks what will happen once we manage to build computers that are smarter than us, including what we need to do, how it’s going to work, and why it has to be done the exact right way to make sure the human race doesn’t go extinct. Source: Four Minute Books
Why this book?
There has been a huge amount of debate regarding the ethics of Artificial Intelligence, how it’ll impact society as a whole, and what we must do about it. While most of the talk floating around has been hype backed up by clickbait articles, there are some very valid points that both sides have made around the use of AI and Machine Learning techniques in real life applications like Healthcare, education, etc. While some of these fears may seem far-fetched now, applications like Deep Fakes, Open AI’s Text Generator GPT have shown us the importance of being pro-active in making sure we think about the ethics of large scale AI systems before we actually put them to use.
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Fermat’s Last Theorem
By Simon Singh
“I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition (demonstrationem mirabilem) which this margin is too narrow to contain.” –Pierre de Fermat
Why this book?
I first read about Fermat’s last theorem in the book The Girl Who Played with Fire where the protagonist discovers the theorem in a book she was reading and tries to derive a proof for the same. While I wasn’t sold on the book’s depiction of mathematical research as a puzzle which could be solved in a few hours without putting in the necessary work to study and practice, which is something that is a misconception that fiction writers have propagated throughout history, what intrigued me was the theorem itself. I’m excited to see how people have combated the problem, what challenges they faced, and what the thought process is behind such problems. ***
Spook Country
By William Gibson
“Secrets…are the very root of cool.” – William Gibson
Why this book?
The first William Gibson book that I read was Neuromancer, and I’ve been hooked ever since. Known as the father of Cyber Punk Fiction, Willaim Gibson has churned out books that take you to a world that is psychedelic, unforgiving, and much like our own. His books contains satire on Music, the government, and many issues that conventional authors continue to ignore, smartly disguised in Utopia. Spook country is the second book in a trilogy followed by Pattern Recognition, a book which revolves around an agency called Blue Ant, headed by the anti hero Hubertus Bigend.
She’s here on Blue Ant’s ticket. Relatively tiny in terms of permanent staff, globally distributed, more post-geographic than multinational, the agency has from the beginning billed itself as a high-speed, low-drag life-form in an advertising ecology of lumbering herbivores. Or perhaps as some non-carbon based life-form, entirely sprung from the smooth and ironic brow of its founder, Hubertus Bigend, a nominal Belgian who looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins’ blood and truffled chocolates. – William Gibson
Really Looking forward to this one. ***
While i’m reading these, I’m also considering doing live-commentary on the books while I read these. This will aid my as well your [The reader] understanding of the books, along with motivating me to do thorough research about different aspects and sometimes complex bits of the book. Cheers and Happy Reading!