An important book in which the author sets out a path for the future based on his experience and expertise.
A clear examination of a “transitional moment in the story of life on Earth, a new Cambrian explosion with a new biological driver—us.”
Managing one technological revolution would be hard enough, but our society is now facing three at once, writes Metzl, a well-known futurist and the author of Hacking Darwin. Genome sequencing and editing, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence have all moved out of the theoretical stage and into practical reality, and navigating the mechanics and possibilities of these new technologies is a massive challenge. Metzl capably describes recent developments in genetics and biotech and looks at how AI is providing an analytical engine of unprecedented power. It is easy to get swept away by the promise of these technologies in everything from medicine to industrial productivity, but there are also great risks. Several agreements and protocols aim to regulate the emerging tech, but they are limited in scope. The author proposes a new international agency operating through the UN to provide a framework for coordinated regulation and information exchange around the world. Its role would extend to conducting exercises to test the world’s ability to respond to crises. Metzl understands that this would be difficult to create, especially when one of the major players, China, has announced that domination of these areas is a national goal—and is already charging ahead with little apparent regard for the wider consequences. Nevertheless, Metzl believes that the rest of the world should take a cooperative approach. As he notes, we must “speed up our pace of social organization to better match the speed of our technological innovation....All of this is a task greater than each of us but not greater than all of us.”
An important book in which the author sets out a path for the future based on his experience and expertise.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781643263007
Page Count: 434
Publisher: Timber
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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