Book review: World on the Brink

Sinea deterrendae sunt – China must be deterred. That is the maxim of World on the Brink: How America can beat China in the race for the Twenty-First Century by Dmitri Alperovitch (and Garrett M. Graff). The title is self-revelatory, because the book is mainly about China, the United States and Taiwan.

Book review: The Alignment Problem

Probably you’ve heard about reinforcement learning in conversations on AI. It originates from psychology and animal behaviourism, like so many other parts of the field of AI (neural networks and temporal differences are two others), while others touch philosophical issues and conundrums humans have pondered on for centuries. Brian Christian, like Johan Harri, travels the world to interview lots of people about how to get machines to understand and obey humans.