Nature Magazine (March 15, 2024):

Verbose robots, and why some people love Bach: Books in Brief

Vision Impairment

Michael Crossland UCL Press (2024)

On a typical day in his clinic, London-based optometrist Michael Crossland assesses both young children and centenarians with low vision. Severe vision impairment affects 350 million people around the world, many of whom in poorer countries lack access to any eye care. His fascinating, sometimes moving, account — mixing ophthalmology with the stories of his patients and many others — reveals that life with vision impairment can be “just as rich and rewarding as life with 20/20 vision”.

Literary Theory for Robots

Dennis Yi Tenen W. W. Norton (2024)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rooted in the humanities, argues Dennis Yi Tenen, a comparative-literature professor and former Microsoft engineer. Chatbots are trained using electronic versions of tools such as “dictionaries, style guides, schemas, story plotters [and] thesauruses” that were historically part of the collective activity of writing. Indeed, a statistical model called the Markov chain, crucial to AI, arose from an analysis of vowel distribution in poems by Alexander Pushkin. Tenen’s cogitation is a witty, if challenging, read.

The Last of Its Kind

Gísli Pálsson Princeton Univ. Press (2024)

Living species could never become extinct, thought naturalist Carl Linnaeus. Charles Darwin disagreed, saying extinction was a natural process. Then ornithologists John Wolley and Alfred Newton began studying great auks, flightless birds living on remote islands in the North Atlantic Ocean. They visited Iceland in 1858 to see great auks, but instead met locals who described killing off the birds — revealing how humans could extinguish a species. Anthropologist Gísli Pálsson tells the engaging story of this “key intellectual leap”.

All Mapped Out

Mike Duggan Reaktion (2024)

Cultural geographer Mike Duggan works in partnership with the UK national mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, to study everyday digital-mapping practices. Important as it is, digital mapping is not superseding analogue maps, he observes in his global history of cartography, which begins with Palaeolithic carvings. Sales of Ordnance Survey paper maps are rising, perhaps because of their convenience. “Although digital maps are improving constantly in accuracy and design, they do not always live up to those promises.”

The Neuroscience of Bach’s Music

Eric Altschuler Academic (2024)

Physician and neuroscientist Eric Altschuler regards J. S. Bach as the greatest composer ever, as do many others. Altschuler’s pioneering study — illustrated with numerous musical examples — aims to show how Bach-centred neuroscience “can help us better appreciate perceptual and cognitive affects in Bach” and create better performances of the composer’s work. It also teaches us how music perception is not localized to one region of the brain but occurs throughout it, and varies from person to person.

Nature Magazine (December 15, 2023):

The AI Dilemma

Juliette Powell & Art Kleiner Berrett-Koehler (2023)

The benefits and harms of social media are intimately tied to the ongoing debate about artificial intelligence (AI). Will AI systems trained partly on social media benefit or harm humanity? In their excellent, sometimes alarming, analysis of engineering, social justice, commerce and government, entrepreneur and technologist Juliette Powell and writer and educator Art Kleiner compare humans developing AI tools to first-time parents. They recommend guiding AI systems “as we would a child towards full adulthood”.

Consciousness

John Parrington Icon (2023)

“The material basis of human consciousness is one of the biggest unsolved issues in science,” admits cellular and molecular pharmacologist John Parrington in his pithy addition to a vast literature dating from the time of ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. He considers many theories and proposes his own. Humans, he argues, are distinguished by conceptual thought and language, along with skills in designing tools and technologies. The evolution of these powers transformed our brains, creating meaning and consciousness.

Democracy in a Hotter Time

Ed. David W. Orr MIT Press (2023)

Environmentalist David Orr writes in the introduction to this timely collection that the planet faces two interlinked crises: “rapid climate change and potentially lethal threats to democracy”. The US Constitution rigorously protects private property but does not mention ecological systems, he observes. Contributors — almost all US-based — from a wide range of fields examine the need for political reform. The book is in four parts: the nature of democracy; roadblocks to change; policy and law; and education, including academic culture.

Extinctions

Michael J. Benton Thames & Hudson (2023)

When palaeontologist Michael Benton learnt about dinosaurs as a boy, he “loved the fact they were extinct”. They were like real science fiction. Perhaps he also intuited that their extinction permitted his existence. As his deeply informed and readable book reveals, the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago allowed a new cohort of creatures — including mammals — to “inherit the Earth”, as did four earlier extinction events. Living species represent less than 1% of all the species that have existed.

A Guess at the Riddle

David Z. Albert Harvard Univ. Press (2023)

The physical interpretation of quantum mechanics has been a controversial riddle since the 1920s, when Niels Bohr argued that the atom’s inner workings could not be described in physical terms. Today, many philosophers and physicists disagree, but there’s no consensus on an alternative. Philosopher David Albert’s provocative book argues, in three essays, that Bohr’s quantum-measurement problem starts to make sense if the wave function is understood as the fundamental physical ‘stuff’ of the Universe.