The Book of Form and Emptiness

The name Ruth Ozeki as somehow vaguely at the intersection of fiction and dharma floated through my mind for several years before I happened upon a used copy of this novel.  The connection between those terms is now a lot less vague.  Ozeki writes what we might call 'dharma fiction' -- something halfway between a simple story and a dreaded self-help book.  In lesser hands, I expect this would be a terrible combination prone to tumbling either toward the insipid or the preachy.  However, Ozeki somehow makes this feel like the most natural genre in the world, a story that doesn't shy away from overt message and teaching, without ceasing to be an inventive and page-turning piece of speculative fiction.

One of the great joys of the novel is the way it portrays ordinary, flawed characters with such a combination of clarity and compassion.  Aside from the memory of the mythologized husband killed on the first page, there really isn't a character who gets treated as a paragon of virtue.  Real people come in many shapes and sizes, but perfect is not one of them.  Every character here frustrates us with their mistakes, and some even tickle us with a tingle of dislike, but all of them, without exception, also naturally arouse our compassion as well.  I can't remember the last novel I read where even minor characters seem to feel completely real and whole, despite the fact that they are only lightly sketched and tangential.  

The other remarkable aspect of the novel is the canny way it shows us how we're creating a world that's driving us nuts.  Normally, one might illustrate this sort of observation through satire Infinite Jest or dark prophecy Brave New World both of which extrapolate our world into a near duplicate of itself that allows us to reflect on it.  Ozeki instead chooses to make her point by dividing it into the completely different, even 'deranged', world of Benny -- a world where our things themselves yammer at us incessantly -- and the absolutely mundane world of Annabelle -- a world of hoarded dreams and twenty-four hour incessant news apocalypse.  Both worlds are ultimately the same materialist samsara we live in.  But where the first sees it **too** clearly, as intolerably close and loud and chaotic, the latter doesn't see it at all, or only through the hazy veil of ignorance about what swimming in this water does to us.  Surely, there must be some Middle Way?

The Coming Wave

I don't feel entirely comfortable writing a review of Mustafa Suleyman's book about the future of AI and other disruptive new technologies because I mostly just skimmed it.  In my defense, it's one of those books that was essentially written to skim, the sort of long-winded business book that rehashes historical anecdotes you've heard countless times and speaks in vague but eminently digestible abstractions.  In a functioning market, all of these books would be reduced to the longish magazine article that comprises their core.  But how do you make a living on magazine articles?  So I will forge ahead with some comments despite my reservations since I did go through the whole book and I think I managed to extract the essential gist.

Sulyeman, as the founder of DeepMind, is certainly qualified to opine on the technology of AI.  This is not a guy you can dismiss as not understanding how the stuff actually works.  As you might expect from such a guy in our current moment, he is wildly optimistic about the technical possibilities.  He thinks AI will facilitate revolutionary new developments in many areas, particularly in biology.  To his credit, his technical optimism is based in concrete thinking about extensions of what these technologies can already do, not some pie in the sky thinking about what happens when a magical AGI appears on the scene.  

One thought he had in particular has stuck with me as a summary of this optimism -- his off-handed certainty that very soon, you will simply be able to prompt an AI to start a business for you selling things on Amazon that turns $100,000 in seed capital into $1,000,000 in profit.  This agent would then go out there and do some consumer research, incorporate itself, create a product design, arrange for some manufacturing, and list this new must-have item on Amazon.  Shocking as the example sounds at first, in a way, this optimism strikes me as entirely plausible.  After all, it would be great for Amazon if this existed, and we all know who is really running the show these days.  In fact, the description is pretty close to what already passes for "innovation" in entrepreneurial circles circa 2025, with the possible caveat that the things sold should really be software, rather than a physical product, because it scales better and has higher margins.  In other words, we've already created all the conditions that would require an agent like this to thrive.  All that remains is to automate a well known process.

What makes Suleyman's book more interesting than other breathless celebrations of the potential of AI is that he spends quite a bit of time taking the next step and examining the world such tools would create.  While you will have to consult other sources for a description of what might happen in the particular example cited, Suleyman discusses many ways in which AI tools could be used to undermine state authority, exacerbate misinformation, and entrench inequality.  So the book is mostly meant as a warning about how we need to adapt to the current moment and pro-actively consider some of these consequences.  Unfortunately, most of the solutions he suggests would require a highly functioning government or very broad minded technologists such as himself, and even then they would be difficult to implement.  And since he rightly feels that both of these are long shots, his technical optimism is the cause of his profound social pessimism.  Fundamentally, Suleyman sees these technologies changing society in highly disruptive and unpredictable ways, and he feels, based on our historical experience with technology, that we simply won't be able to control the impacts.  To many parts of our social structure will see every incentive to barrel ahead regardless of the consequences.  Businesses will see better profits.  Governments  will see better control.  Malicious actors will see better weapons.  And the rest of us will see what we have by now gotten pretty used -- enshittification wrapped up as shiny progress porn, an endless scroll of exploitation.

So we should give the book credit for raising some inconvenient questions about technologies the author has had a considerable hand in creating.  And perhaps we should not go too hard on our brave entrepreneur turned Microsoft exec just because he overlooks the only plausible solution -- a collective reckoning with those aspects of our technology that have already been working against human flourishing, and which look set to use these new tools to further flourish at our expense.

The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise

I've had various Georges Perec books on my list for a while now, so when I discovered this long story at the library I jumped on the chance to check out his style.  It's a droll sixties take on 'computational literature' which narrates, in a single 50 page long sentence, all the possible paths through the satirical corporate flowchart associated with the titular question.  While the lack of any punctuation or capitalization is off-putting at first, I found myself quickly falling into the rhythm of the text.  In fact, at some point it become a strange sort of breathless page turner, despite the fact that it seems mathematically impossible to write a good story given the constraints.  While the text is very repetitious, Perec's comic wit and timing turn every repeated phrase into a new punchline. After such a masterful display of making something out of nothing I'll surely be reading more Perec in the near future.  

So It Was Said

As a result of SPUDS book club I discovered that you can order Sutta Central's new translations of all the Pali Cannon materials via the print on demand service Lulu.  This particular handsomely produced little volume is a translation of the Itivuttaka, which consists of 112 short sayings from the Buddha, each accompanied by a verse commentary.  It's not the most compelling part of the Pali Cannon that I've read, since it's frequently just a list of things that are not helpful and things that are helpful in practice.  But there are some interesting and puzzling moments thrown in there.  My favorite was number 49, which describes something that might sound either insipid or tautological, but turns out to be incredibly profound: "And how do those with vision see? It's when a mendicant sees what has come to be as having come to be."

The Rider

 I'm not sure where I discovered Tim Krabbé's wonderful little window into the world of high level amateur cycle racing.   I do remember it was suggested as a classic example of short fiction, and I can see why.  Krabbé, a journalist and former chess player in addition to a serious cyclist, narrates his ride in the Tour de Mount Aigoual.  It's a fairly short but incredibly hilly road race in Southern France that has occasionally featured in the Tour de France.  

This may not sound like a great setup for a story.  Just a bunch of fucking amateurs moving their feet in circles for hours.  But Krabbé manages to make it exciting and entertaining the whole way.  Of course it's a sports broadcast of sorts.  Who broke away from who and what the racer's strategies were.  This part alone is surprisingly entertaining, to the point where it almost makes you want to watch cycling on TV while eating a baguette and shouting allez!  But Krabbé's narration is also constantly interrupted with stories drawn from his own past and the history of professional cycling.  In other words, precisely the knowledgeable commentary you **wish** sports broadcasters provided.  

The really amazing thing, however, is the way the writing style captures the type of thoughts one has on a long ride.  I haven't raced a bicycle since I had one with streamers and the prize was bragging rights about who got to the end of the driveway.  But I have done some long riding and noticed how thoughts get incredibly short and repetitive when you're working hard, but then can sometimes take crazy flight into delirious daydream when the pace lets up a bit.  It's a real *tour de force* that you can read faster than he rode it.

The Gambler

This short novel was packaged alongside The Double in Pevear and Volokhonsky's new translation. Unlike The Double, this one was written smack in the middle of Dostoevsky's most creative period, which included classics like Notes from Underground, The Idiot, and Crime and Punishment. Unfortuantely, The Gambler is nowhere near as interesting as any of those.  It tells us the story of young Russian employed as a tutor by a wealthy family passing time in "Roulettenburg".  Alexi Ivanovich is tormented by his doomed love for one of the young ladies in this cortege, and, in an attempt to help her out of some monetary difficulties, takes to gambling.  Unfortunately, he wins.  This gets him a lot of money at first -- although not the girl he wants --and a lot less money later, as his beginner's luck inevitably turns on him.  In the end, it is a novel about addiction, though for the bulk of it that addiction is to unrequited love, and not specifically to gambling.  Apparently, Dostoevsky saw them as equally corrosive.

The Ministry of Time

A friend recommended this new sci-fi novel from an author I'd never heard of.  Its a breezy, entertaining, forgettable, and not really science fiction even.  In fact, it's more of a romance novel with some light time travel grafted onto it.  While the writer is perfectly competent at making the pages turn (no mean feat), there didn't seem to be much intellectual substance to the novel beyond some vague implications that the British Empire might not have been wholly a good and glorious thing.  

The plot centers around the way that 'expats' can fall in love with another one simply because they feel out of place in their new society.  The narrator is a really quite helpless and annoying first generation British woman whose mother is a Cambodian refugee.  She falls in love with a mid-19th-century British explorer who was plucked from arctic starvation by the titular Ministry's new time machine.  The past, it seems, is a foreign country.  But a sexy one!