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by qrendel
3571 days ago
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It's not a bad book, but imo it starts off very strong and then quickly goes downhill throughout. This was the general (and unsolicited) criticism from most everyone I've shared it with. The stuff from prehistory, up to the agricultural revolution, seems to cover a lot of recent discoveries and is both fascinating and informative. The rest is, as the parent comment states, a very simplified summary of the author's favorite topics, a few paragraphs spent on each one, and clearly showing certain cultural biases (it honestly felt optimized for appeal to a TED audience). A good assigned read for early high schoolers, less useful to many beyond that point. By the time you're at part four, on the current era and emerging technologies, it literally reads like a bunch of newspaper clippings from the Science section of the NYT. While I'm hoping his new book will fix those (perceived) problems, it seems unlikely to contain better or more profound commentary regarding trends in changing humanity and emerging technology than books like Superintelligence, Age of Em, etc. At best perhaps a "lite" version of the same concepts sanitized for a broader audience. Of course I look forward to, upon publication, hopefully having been mistaken about it. |
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Funny that you should say that because TED is extremely popular here in Israel (the book was originally published in Hebrew a couple of years before the English translation).
>While I'm hoping his new book will fix those (perceived) problems...
Don't get your hope up. It's basically:
- the singularity is near and that's not necessarily a good thing
- free will does not exist
- reiterating stuff from the previous book
That being said, it's a fun pop science read.