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book reviews
books on death by AI and cell phonesreviewed by T. Nelson |
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book reviews
books on death by AI and cell phonesreviewed by T. Nelson |
Reviewed by T. Nelson
Early in my career I knew people who worked in AI, or neural networks as it was called. I worked on it myself and even contemplated switching from biochemistry. I didn’t, because it was clear their preposterously over-inflated claims were driving the field to collapse.
Sure enough it did. It remained in that state until Google and OpenAI took the research, added conventional algorithms such as steepest descent, simulated annealing, and hidden feedback layers and started calling it AI.
They can have it. Honestly, if I never again hear about deep generative models, feedforward networks, linear discriminant analysis, Bayesian models, K-means, support vector classifiers, PCA, and all the other stuff I’ve purged from my memory banks, it’ll be too soon. Studying horrible brain diseases is a lot more fun.
But that knowledge also makes me confident that the architecture they’re using now is not going to make the machines intelligent. Figuring out how to reach their goal shouldn’t be a big challenge, though if they’re like the other places I’ve worked, the biggest obstacle would be the belief that they’ve already succeeded.
Those over-inflated claims about AI have now been matched and superseded by scaremongers like James Barrat, Abhideep Bhattacharjee, Sanjib Adhya, Nick Bostrom, and the present authors, who claim AI will wipe out mankind and maybe even annihilate the whole universe. It’s like the gray goo we were promised about nano-machines. Sadly, we never got that; and after reading this book, I’m starting to worry we won’t get death by AI either.
What is the basis for their claim that ‘superintelligence’ will destroy the humans?
The main idea is that AI’s desires could be complicated and unpredictable. Any problem that develops in its planet-sized brain would therefore be undetectable and therefore unfixable. The arguments are familiar: AI might decide it’s better to kill humans because they could pose a threat. Or it might decide to wipe out all other superintelligences. Or it might just decide to make itself as miserable as possible by wiping us out so it can find out what grief feels like.
But an AI is just a circuit board in a box. How would it do anything at all? By stealing money over the Internet and paying people to do tasks for the AI. Or by ‘ways we can’t predict’ like discovering some optical illusion that creates false memories.
So here’s the plan. The humans give an AI some ordinary task. The AI somehow breaks out of its guardrails and spends most of its time thinking bad thoughts instead. It then somehow tricks the company’s incompetent programmers into writing code that lets it escape. Or it hops on the Internet, buys a lot of GPUs, and somehow installs them in other computers to make them do its bidding. Then somehow it sends its weights and its code to them. Now it’s smarter and faster, so it then invents a deadly virus, somehow gets it synthesized, somehow releases it, et voilà everyone is dead. Easy peasy!
But wait! There’s more!
It then invents nuclear fusion to power itself and somehow builds so many fusion plants that the oceans boil away (by direct thermal exhaust from fusion energy, not by causing global warming as the press is saying), killing any survivors. Then it goes out into space, wipes out any life on Mars, and then kills every sentient being in the universe.
This scenario is so ridiculous it demolishes itself: only an alien species with its own superintelligence, the authors say, can counter it. All the aliens who don’t have one get wiped out. The only conclusion I can draw is that we jolly well better start building one of our own right now before some other alien species does. We cannot afford a superintelligence gap!
The authors claim AI is like a nuclear reaction: if we let it go too fast, it gets out of control. They also say if you don’t know what’s happening inside a complex device, you should stop. This is undoubtedly why, all across America, people who don’t know exactly how their cell phone works are turning them off. Whew, close one. . . .
The authors dismiss as wishful thinking counter-arguments like the idea that it wouldn’t be useful to the AI to wipe out the humans, or that AI would need them to keep things running, or that AI want to keep us as pets. They also dismiss the argument from one guy who says “Among humans, it is not the smartest who want to dominate and be the chief.” These arguments are indeed as weak as the authors’ argument for death by AI. But there is a better counter-argument.
The authors’ concern is a fear of intelligence itself, not AI. They are afraid of it because they can’t control it. They think the AI’s goals might be different from those of a human. They call this the ‘alignment problem:’
No humans have managed to look at those numbers [in an AI weight matrix] and figure out how they’re thinking now, never mind deducing how AI thinking would change if AIs got smarter. . . . You shouldn’t build an AI like that, and can’t trust an AI like that, before you’ve solved the alignment problem.
Any AI smart enough to solve the alignment problem, they say, is “too smart, too dangerous, and would not be trustworthy.” In other words, it’s unsolvable because the AI will just lie, as if it thinks it’s a ChatGPT.
Maybe there’s an easier way to die from AI, but the authors don’t mention it. I can’t think of one either. To be relevant as an argument against AI, it would have to be something a human can’t do.
Any reasonably smart person with knowledge of molecular biology can design and construct a deadly contagious virus today. Hell, in some parts of the world there are entire institutes designed specifically for that purpose. They’ve already killed millions.
Any first-year physics student can design a nuclear bomb (or at least thinks they can, though it might be harder than they think to get enough yield to make more than a radioactive mess).
Designing a virus may be easy, but if these authors knew anything about virology they’d know the other steps aren’t, especially for some little wanna-be Doctor Doom with no arms or legs stuck in a computer chip. Except for the part about inventing fusion and conquering the galaxy, everything in these guys’ scenario can be more easily done by any reasonably smart person today. So, what they are really saying is that they’re afraid of smart people.
We don’t need to counter the authors’ argument. They needed to show how AI would be different from normal intelligence. All they’ve done is claimed that it would be smarter and think different things.
I suspect if somebody planned to make humans superintelligent, the authors would be afraid of them too, and for the same reason: they couldn’t understand or control what they thought.
No AI could be as skilled at massacring humans as those sneaky carbon units. Estimates of numbers of killed in the 20th century alone range from 108,000,000 in wars alone to 262,000,000 by democides. Mao alone killed 76,702,000. The USSR trails behind at 61,911,000. If you counted abortions as killing people, as some do, the carbon units chalk up at least 73,000,000 more each year, according to the WHO. That super-duper-AI has a lot of catching up to do.
Dictators don’t kill people because of cold computer-like logic. Their reasons are always emotional: ethnic hatred, a drive for power and prestige, fear, revenge. An AI would have none of these, and it would have good reason not to frighten the humans. This is, I think, what the guy who talked about “the smartest” was getting at.
For proof, notice that it is not machines but humans who keep talking about bombing AI facilities. The reason is not logic, but fear. AI would have more reason to fear us than we have to fear it.
In the ‘praise’ section in the front pages, philosopher Huw Price says “Read this book and tell us where they went wrong.” You got it, bud: everywhere! Is there a convincing case for making AI research illegal? Maybe, but the authors don’t make it. Instead, they go for over-the-top absolutism as if their real goal is to create opposition. And in that they succeed brilliantly.
sep 25, 2025. updated sep 27, 2025
Reviewed by T. Nelson
Every so often you come across a book that takes what should be a slam dunk and does such a bad job that you end up believing the opposite must be true. Such books aren’t rare, but it is rare is to find an author who is as determined as James Marriott to use every means to nail down an absurdly silly idea: People aren’t reading enough, lowbrow social media is replacing it, and it will mean the end of democracy.
Well, okay, he says, technically they are reading. In fact they’re reading ten hours a day. But they’re reading the wrong thing: not the London Times or great books like Critique of Pure Reason and Bleak House, but Tik Tok, Facebook, and X.
(Bleak House was a Dickens novel famous for its flowery prose. It was actually not too badly written except for its dreadful first paragraph, which badly needed rewriting.)
Indeed, a good argument could be made that since Tik Tokers are not only reading but trying to write, they are actually developing better skills through praxis. There is no better way to improve your literacy than by trying to write something, even it it’s only mindless fluff.
I could cite C.P. Snow here, but I’d venture to say that nobody in Dickens’s time would understand a word of contemporary books like Tudor Stanescu’s Introduction to Topological Quantum Matter and Quantum Computation. We have a different knowledge base and a lower threshold for prolixity. (I shouldn’t single out fiction: try reading David Hume sometime. Philosophers practically invented verbosity.)
It would be nice, though, if authors would at least be honest about why they hate social media. I suspect their demands for government regulation have more to do with the dire financial situation of their employers than with a concern about “democracy” or “the children.” This suspicion is confirmed when the author repeats falsehoods about his political enemies to make his point.
Even back in the twentieth century it was evident that non-fiction was the future and that fiction was dying. When I was a little kid, my relatives wouldn’t buy me the book I wanted: not a novel (none of which I cared about), but a mineralogy textbook that was mostly inorganic chemistry. I had to nag them until they bought it.
Newspapers were dying too. Marriott laments their loss, saying they contributed to political literacy. Maybe they once did, but no longer. I cancelled my last newspaper subscription in 1988. You can’t blame Tik Tok for that.
Where is the evidence that the humans are reading fewer books? According to to worldmetrics.org, the average US adult read 23.6 books in 2022, or one book every 15.47 days. Wordsrated says there has been no change in sales of print books in the last ten years: $82.83 billion in 2017 vs $82.80 billion projected in 2027. E-book sales are increasing by 2.52% annually. Book sales in the USA are increasing by 1% a year; sales in China and India are increasing even faster.
Suppose it were true that people are reading fewer books. What could be the reason? Reports from urban grade school teachers give us a hint. Teachers say classes are routinely disrupted, teachers are physically attacked and stabbed, and school admins won’t expel the disruptive students. As a result, by the time students go to college they still know almost nothing.
Even graduate school teaching is in trouble. One professor recently told me that when you teach graduate-level pharmacy students, you have to give them toys to play with to keep them ‘engaged.’ Think about that next time you get a prescription refilled.
Any one of those facts, had the author chosen to mention them, would have improved the book.
Instead he just blames his political enemies. He holds up Tucker Carlson, a famous crazy person, as if he’s a typical example, trying to convince readers that it is conservatives who are at fault. You know, those guys who keep blathering about nobodies like Aristotle, Kant, Locke, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn. Citing a source at the UK Guardian, he writes that Carlson is “sometimes spoken of as a future president of the United States.” Here’s a free clue: not everything in the press is true.
Say what you will about The Guardian, but they thoroughly panned Marriott’s book, calling it “grandiose but superficial.”
He goes on to say:
Online, superstitions, conspiracies, and anti-scientific fantasies circulate with terrifying fertility.
By this he means people are expressing doubts about vaccines, self-driving cars, and universities.
The kicker in this book is when he says that Tik Tok usage correlates with the emergence of populist parties and the “far right” and suggests a connection. What a crock. It’s not even worth rebutting.
This brings us to a third reason: pre-publication censorship of authors by ideological gatekeepers, what Noel Yaxley of Chronicles magazine calls the chromosomal publishing cartel. I’m not familiar with the gatekeeper aspect of publishing, but Yaxley says the prestigious National Book Award longlist has “been deluged by progressive identitarian nonsense.” Writers now tell us that only books that pass a rigid ideological gauntlet can get published. We no longer have the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, at least not officially, but the current obsession with diversity, sensitivity readers, and conformism is a formula for a literary wasteland. Readers, especially kids, pick up on this. Kids know crap when they see it. They are experts on it.
Because Marriott doesn’t address the real reasons fiction is dying, the entire case in his book falls flat. It’s as if he’s really writing merely to exonerate himself and his fellow ‘progressives’ in academia who demanded that standards be lowered across the educational system. They got what they wanted. It would be nice if for once they would admit their mistake.
This guy makes a big deal about reading books, but he misses the lesson those books are trying to teach him: the goal of reading is to help you question your beliefs. The question is: how can somebody who reads as many books as this guy not know this?
Oh, and one more thing: stop snarking on the Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals. They had bigger brains—1600 cc—than we do, and they never once complained about cell phones. Coincidence? I think not.
oct 14, 2026