Empuzjon

Empuzjon by Olga Tokarczuk
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Young student of engineering comes to a tuberculosis sanatorium in Gorbersdorf.
Year 1913.
Similarity with The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann is obvious.
For me it was a disadvantage for the book.
Hans Castorp comes to Davos for 3 weeks, to visit his cousin. After few days he gets so enchanted with the athmosphere on the mountain, that he stays there 7 years.
It justifies the title - The Magic Mountain.
Mieczysław Wojnicz comes to Gorbersdorf for a short, 3 months, stay and everything goes according to the plan.
So, where is the story?
It requires some magic, nasty female demons - empusa - to add some nerve and tension.
Otherwise there would be no story.
The story as it is told left me with distaste.


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Machines behaving badly

Machines Behaving Badly: The Morality of AI by Toby Walsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was quite suspicious about the title of this book.
Are machines really behaving? Can they be judged by human standards?
In my opinion, the author very early gives a negative answers to these questions.
Machines behave as they were programmed by the people.
Here is the heart of the matter.
What people stand behind the machines?
Author introduces them as geeks from the Crazy Valley.
Here most phantastic ideas are conceived, some of them are noticed.
Noticed by whom?
The answer is even more disturbing than for the first question - biggest and most influential companies in the world - Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook.
Each of them has a long record of tax avoidance and abuse of privacy.
Do we have any other option, any choice?
Answer is No.
One important point - author mentions some basic human behaviours and reactions , the most obvious is pain.
The point is that pain is biology and chemistry while the machines react only to physics. Therefor the logical conclusion is that AI should be translated as ALIEN Intelligence - fully agree.

From this point the book contains a long list of problems we can encounter when using SI and many attempts of National and International organisations to set up some uniform rules and standards. Looks like all of them are destinied for failure.

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