Some titles tell you nothing about the book itself - but The AI Mirror puts Shannon Vallor's central argument front and centre: that artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI such as ChatGPT, is not intelligence at all, but rather holds a mirror up to our own intelligence. As Vallor points out, your reflection in a mirror certainly looks and acts like you - but it is not a person. This is a metaphor that works impressively well. It reflects (get it?) the total lack of understanding in systems that are simply reflecting back data from a vast amount of human output. That's not to say t ..read more

It's not often you start reading a book and within a few pages are thinking 'this is something special.' Peter Lamont writes with a distinctive style, in places verging on poetry or liturgy in the way he uses repeated sentences for emphasis. There's also something of the dance of the seven veils about the whole thing - he glides around a subject, letting the reader catch a glimpse of something interesting, but taking his time to coyly reveal things. That can be a touch irritating at times, but it certainly catches the attention. What this book isn't despite the subtitle, is a 'how to' guide, e ..read more

This is one of the strangest sort-of popular science (or philosophy, or something or other) books I've ever read. If you can picture the impact of a cross between Douglas Hofstadter's  Gödel Escher Bach and Gaileo's Two New Sciences  (at least, its conversational structure), then thrown in a touch of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest , and you can get a feel for what the experience of reading it is like - bewildering with the feeling that there is something deep that you can never quite extract from it. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom is probably best known in popular science for ..read more

It might seem a bit odd to review a popular philosophy book here, but Philip Goff's content overlaps sufficiently with cosmology that it's appropriate, and that content is fascinating, even though chances are you won't agree with Goff all the way. The point of this book is to suggest that there is purpose behind the cosmos. The main evidence for this that Goff uses is the fine tuning of our universe that makes it suitable for life. Most cosmologists agree that this is odd, but many try to explain it using the idea of the multiverse. With some nifty mathematic-less probability (though he does i ..read more

Updated for paperback Things start well with this latest title from Brian Greene: after a bit of introductory woffle we get into an interesting introduction to entropy. As always with Greene's writing, this is readable, chatty and full of little side facts and stories. Unfortunately, for me, the book then suffers something of an increase in entropy itself as on the whole it then veers more into philosophy and the soft sciences than Greene's usual physics and cosmology. So, we get chapters on consciousness, language, belief and religion, instinct and creativity, duration and impermanence ..read more

Anyone who has friends in the US probably has at least one who could be described as a science denier. Lee McIntyre offers us the intriguing promise of delivering 'Conservations with flat earthers, climate deniers and others who defy reason.'  There are certainly elements of this present, which is when the book really comes alive, but the problem for the reader is that (not entirely the author's fault) it doesn't deliver on that promise. The majority of the book, which doesn't involve such conversations, but rather McIntyre's pondering on the matter, seems often to go round and round in c ..read more

Thanks to major IT companies putting a lot of time and effort into it (not to mention changing their company names), virtual reality is rarely out of the news at the moment. So it's timely that David Chalmers should attempt an exploration of the nature of virtual reality. What he sets out to persuade us is that 'virtual reality is genuine reality'. That virtual worlds don't have to be illusory, the objects within virtual worlds are real, life can be good and meaningful in a virtual world and that the simulation hypothesis - the idea that what we usually think of as reality could itself be virt ..read more

This slim book is unusual in taking us through the story of a single scientific study - and it's very informative in the way that it does it. The book makes slightly strange reading, as I was one of the participants in the study - but that's not surprising. According to Jean-François Bonnefon, by the time the book was published, around 100 million people worldwide had taken part in the Moral Machine experiment. The idea behind the study was to see how the public felt self-driving cars should make what are effectively moral decisions. Specifically, in a dilemma where there was a choice to ..read more

If I had six stars to give this book, I'd do it. Sabine Hossenfelder's first book for the general public, Lost in Math , showed just how much some aspects of theoretical physics were based on maths-driven speculation. That was arguably one for the science buffs only - but in Existential Physics she takes on questions that really matter to all of us. Many of these questions hover on the boundary between science and philosophy - but this is no repeat of a book like Hawking and Mlodinow's unimpressive  The Grand Design , which attempted to show that we no longer needed philosophy or religion ..read more

The first seventy-odd pages of this book are absolutely phenomenal (pun intended, though still true). We start with a near-stream of consciousness prologue - very appropriate for a book on sentience - and then go on to have a description of the early part of Nicholas Humphrey's career in a wonderfully approachable fashion with a writing style somewhere between a deep conversation and a thought process. I particularly loved Humphrey's description of his heading off to Elba to investigate the paranormal claims of the eccentric Hugh Sartorius Whitaker and his experiences with Dian Fossey (not alw ..read more