Book Reviews: Proof in the code & Fall of the Human Empire!

Finished reading two books in quick succession. They had one common area that linked the two together. 

The Proof in the Code - How a Truth Machine is Transforming Math and AI by Kevin Hartnett is a book my cousin Sundar Narasimhan pointed me to few weeks ago. Since my son had also mentioned it earlier, borrowed a copy from the local public library. Since it came with a 2 week loan window, started reding it right away. Book chronicles the birth and growth of interactive theorem provers (ITP) in the world of Math & Computer Science, with most of the focus spent on the Lean project. Whatever shortcomings one can point out, I am truly glad to see such books being written and sold as popular science books for general audience, instead of being limited to Math and CS techies, written in arcane language. So, props and kudos to journalists like Hartnett for writing such books. 

Author talks about Leo de Moura, an engineer working for Microsoft, starting a project in the early 'twenteens' to automate testing the correctness of software. Initially started as Z3 in the mid 2000's as a non-interactive version, it then evolved distinctly into LEAN (to mean keeping it simple). On the math side, it had predecessors such as Coq, and Automath. Though de Moura started the project as a software verification initiative that will help Microsoft, Lean was adopted first by mathematicians outside the company. Hartnett starting out the book with the story of mathematician Tom Hales solving the Kepler conjecture (that dates back to 17th century) in the late 90's helps readers understand the need for Lean like theorem provers. This is because his proof, submitted as a traditional math journal paper for peer review, struggled for a decade to find ink. The traditional peer review process didn't work well for that paper, since the math & the proof were too new that reviewers couldn't understand. 

When Lean came into the scene, famous mathematicians started different projects leveraging the automated tool. For example, Hales gave up on the review process, used a theorem prover that existed then, called HOL to get the proof properly verified. Having realized the value computers can bring in to speed up theorem proving, he subsequently became a prominent advocate for Lean. Since the Lean project was handled solely by de Moura, who did all the coding, support, evangelizing, responding to bug tickets, Hartnett spends time explaining how annoyed de Moura was about the math world, endlessly complaining about features that didn't work well (as they were still under development by just one person) and asking for many new features. But later he understands their enthusiasm, supports them and releases versions 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. Latest version is 4.0, used by thousands around the world. Since the product wasn't being used inside Microsoft or outside for software testing, it wasn't generating revenue.  Hence de Moura was perpetually on tender hooks, quite worried about his performance reviews, whether MS will continue to support his pet project, and will he ever be able to put it to use for SW verification. While such struggles are unfortunate and certainly stressful for him, it is so nice to hear about mathematicians starting new projects in subsequent years, with PhD students and post-docs around the world, jumping into collectively contribute to get projects to completion quickly. This helps setup working models that are new to the world of math, where multiple people geographically spread across the world work together! Usually such chronicling will be done decades after the projects were completed, and so the meeting of the minds discussed will all be in the distant past. Since Lean development is all fairly recent, meetings and conferences being described are just an year or two ago, to at most 20 years ago. This aspect was amusing while we go through the initiative's milestones!

One complaint about the book I heard is that it makes a Demigod out of Leo de Moura, without acknowledging all the help/work the community provided. I didn't feel that while reading the book as many mathematicians (Terry Tao, Jeremy Avigad, Kevin Buzzard, and Peter Scholze, to name a few), CS professionals, grad students from multiple countries around the world are all being talked about enough. I am reminded of a HBO documentary about the Chernobyl disaster, that combined 100s of engineers who worked on containing the damage into one female engineer to make story telling easier. While it works well for movie making, it does leave out the credit due to all those engineers, limiting it to a footnote at the end of the 4 hour long documentary. I can't say Hartnett uses that troupe at all. I can keep writing more, but will stop here, encouraging all the CS friends receiving this email to check out the book and try out the LEAN ITP, as it is a free open source software. If you are already using Lean, let me know how/where are you using it. 

The bridge to the second book comes via AI, as much of today's ITP work is being integrated into AI systems like DeepMind’s  AlphaProof that continue to evolve. The second book, The Fall of the Human Empire by Charles-Édouard Bouée, focuses on the broader history and future of AI. My friend Madhu Parthasarathy gave me a copy during my last visit to India. It is a slim volume (just 114 pages) written from the perspective of a robot named Lucy speaking to us from the year 2040.

It’s an interesting gimmick: the book moves from a historical overview of AI into speculative sci-fi about how unconstrained AI might evolve. The historical recap (from the 1956 Dartmouth Conference, Marvin Minsky to various AI winters) felt a bit repetitive to me, as I've read about those milestones enough along the decades. But I think for youngsters who may not know about these developments, this might be a quick and easy primer. Since the book was published in 2020, the author’s near-fanboy enthusiasm for Elon Musk stands out on almost every page. I wonder if he would tone down the eulogy a bit if he were publishing it today!

Some logical projections author makes into the near future are neat. For example, if AI can accurately predict our daily needs and order items in advance, it could eliminate so many things that shape our zeitgeist, such as retail storefronts, marketing campaigns, most advertisements, and eye-catching product packaging (since an AI buyer cares nothing about colorful boxes). After titling the book as The Fall of the Human Empire, you'd think the author would describe the 2040 future as one in which machines fully subjugate humanity. Instead, the book concludes with humans ultimately pulling the plug on AI, relegating Lucy to a museum artifact that narrates the history of AI’s rise and containment to visitors. That makes the title feel like marketing bait-and-switch. Perhaps the author wasn't quite ready to take the dystopian premise to its logical extreme, choosing instead to acquiesce to the idea of human being continuing to reign supreme!

Oil & Water: How Energy Shapes Our Lives, Nations, and the Future

 

My second book, titled Oil & Water: How Energy Shapes Our Lives, Nations, and the Future, is finally out! I have been working on this project for years, pouring a tremendous amount of personal effort not just into writing the manuscript, but also creating all the illustrations, designing the cover image, setting up a companion website, seeking reviews, fact-checking, and more. So, I am excited to announce the publication, and would deeply appreciate your support in buying, reading, reviewing, commenting on, and recommending this labor of love to your family and friends! Part memoir, part ode to the magnificence of engineering, and filled with fascinating stories and insightful energy policies, all wrapped in accessible language, it should appeal to everyone.

Where to Buy

Amazon: Hardcover, paperback, eBook, and audio editions are ready to ship.  

Google Play: eBook and audio editions are available. 

India (Book Central):

Hardcover edition: https://www.bookscentral.in/productdetails?bookid=580

Paperback edition: https://www.bookscentral.in/productdetails?bookid=581

If you have any issue accessing these links, simply search for the author & book title. I am sure it will show up in your appropriate local site. Please do post comments, indicating any issues or how well things worked, so that I can address/improve anything I can.

Explore More

Companion Website: Visit https://svedantham.wixsite.com/oilandwater has a lot of additional information/links, and features short audio introductions to the book in multiple languages. Please check it out. You can also use the site to invite me to join your book club discussions!

YouTube Lectures: Visit my lecture channel at https://bit.ly/SVLectures, where you will find a Pecha Kucha presentation titled "Adventures on the high seas!" discussing why I had to fire a pistol towards the platform while balancing myself on the deck of a ship! Should be engaging & entertaining.

A Note on Royalties and Pricing

Every penny of profit generated from this book will be donated to Doctors Without Borders: https://www.msf.org 

If you are wondering why the Amazon hardcover edition appears expensive, it is because that edition is printed on premium-quality paper in full color. This ensures that all 75 images in the book remain crisp and clear to aid comprehension. Paperback edition images are also printed in color, while using regular paper. I ordered an author's proof copy of each, and I can confirm that they look gorgeous!

Since we have priced the book as low as possible, in the end, our donation to Doctors Without Borders amounts to only one or two dollars per copy. Our goal is knowledge sharing, not profit seeking. So, please consider buying multiple copies to gift to your friends. Both your friends and Doctors Without Borders will thank you, and so will I!

This is a link to the LinkedIn post announcing the book: https://lnkd.in/p/eeFJeKTF 

Please repost/share either this blogpost of LinkedIn post or email you may have received to help spread the word. 

Book Review: Poison Squad by Deborah Blum

A while ago, I heard an interview with author Deborah Blum on NPR, where she talked about her book The Poison Squad. Though it was six-seven  (meme intended ) years back, it left an impression on me, so I picked it up when I was browsing the aisles of Barnes & Noble last month. The book chronicles the life's work of Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley to ensure food safety in the US. This is an easy but scary read, especially since we mostly take food safety for granted compared to what was going on in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

As the author narrates, the US population was booming at the time. As a result, the need for more food was also rising, with production getting industrialized wherever possible. But since this was before the formation of the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), there were no laws or rules against food adulteration, no restrictions on additives, and no requirements to maintain sanitary conditions on factory floors, or track shipments for quality, or label what was actually contained in the products being sold. Manufacturers would do anything to make a product cheaper while making it look more attractive and appetizing, paying minimal attention to quality or purity, while advertising it as wholesome and pure.

To give just one example, adding water to milk to increase volume is a well-known trick around the world. But back then, milk vendors would add whatever water they could find, including random pond water, resulting in families finding live worms in their milk! And that was just the beginning. Since adding water thinned the milk, they added things like chalk, formaldehyde, and plaster to thicken it back up. This would turn the product grayish, so to give it a yellowish, creamy look and feel, adding liquefied calf brain on top was apparently a common practice. Because formaldehyde is a poisonous substance normally used in embalming, "embalmed milk" scandals frequently broke out when people, especially children, got sick or died.

The exact same practices were in play whether the product was canned beef, bleached flour, whiskey, cough syrup, or soda. The end goal was always to hide the foul smells emanating from often-rotting food, make it visually attractive with colorful chemical additives, and sell it off. For instance, copper sulfate—a toxic chemical used as a fungicide and pesticide—was added to old, rotting peas during canning just to make them appear bright green. If anyone ever complained about getting sick, manufacturers could always claim it was because of something else the person ate or was exposed to, and there was no formal way to prove otherwise. Even if they did get caught, there was no law against adding these substances to food, so they were legally in the clear. While it might be easy to say 'no preservatives', simple things like salt did serve as preservative and so what to allow and what to ban was not clear. 

Wiley entered this world as the Chief Chemist in the Department of Agriculture, armed with a single-minded obsession to address this issue. For four decades, he fought manufacturers to force them to label products and explicitly list their ingredients. He battled to ban toxic substances from being used as additives/preservatives and finally managed to help get the "Pure Food and Drug Act" passed in 1906 under President Theodore Roosevelt, which ever so slowly started moving things in the right direction.

To get to that point, he did something that would be impossible to do today. He recruited young men from his department as volunteers. They were fed three nice, chef-prepared meals a day, including water and drinks, but they had to agree that half of them would secretly be fed food additives and preservatives in the form of pills, substances that could be toxic. They were not allowed to eat or drink anything outside so that what effects these chemicals had on them could be assessed via regular medical checkups. When the press got wind of it, they dubbed the team the "Poison Squad," which provided the title for this book, strap lined: One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.

Wiley became quite famous during his tenure because the public recognized his tenacity. He spoke directly with sitting US Presidents, fought often with his boss who is the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture, and was regularly eulogized in newspapers. While this might sound all positive and we might think any substance proven by the poison squad to be bad for human beings will naturally be banned, that really wasn't the case. Food manufacturers fought him tooth and nail at every step. They convinced the Secretary to set up another "industry-friendly" board to override Wiley's recommendations, and they went to court and won cases because judges didn't want businesses encumbered by "unnecessary" regulations. The book is full of stories of backstabbing, Presidents siding one way or the other to make final rulings, and senators trying to sneak lines into bills stating that specific items should not be regulated to protect corrupt food manufacturers (often because those companies provided campaign contributions or local factory jobs).

At times, the detailed quotes from multiple letters and newspaper articles used to make just one point feel a bit excessive, but that doesn't happen too often in the narrative. The initial few pages talking about how bad the meat delivered to the US military and general public was also felt a bit long and slow. But once Upton Sinclair enters the narrative with his book The Jungle, the pace picks up. It is intriguing how much Sinclair's book, originally written to push for better working conditions for Chicago meatpacking district workers, ended up pushing the cause for safe food instead. As Sinclair famously quipped, he aimed for the public's heart but hit them in the stomach instead.

When you read books like this, many surprising little factoids roll out. The chapter on ketchup talks about how its origin story is an ancient mystery. While there are competing claims that it originated in China, Fiji, the West Indies, or Vietnam, one ancient Chinese recipe went like this: Take the intestine, stomach, and bladder of the yellow fish, shark, and mullet; wash them well, mix them with salt, seal them into a jar, and let it sit in the sun for up to one hundred days! Over a few centuries, this fish sauce morphed into various iterations made of mushrooms, oysters, and walnuts before finally settling on tomatoes (which was mistakenly thought of as poisonous once). The Heinz company actually worked with Wiley to eliminate harmful substances from their ketchup, creating a preservative-free, high-quality product using tomatoes, and marketed the hell out of it—to such an extent that we now all assume ketchup is naturally a thick, bright red, syrupy liquid derived from tomatoes.

Naturally, ensuring food safety, making sure labeling is correct, are all on going endeavors that need to continue with enough vigilance. Though we have quite far from where we were 100 years ago, food adulteration is a big problem not only in countries like India, but also in the US where chemical food coloring, various preservatives are all still in wide usage. This warrants worldwide implementation of rules and enforcement. On the whole, it is well worth reading. The material is fascinating, the prose is simple, and at less than 300 pages, it isn't a massive commitment. PBS also made a documentary out of the book for their American Experience series. If you don't want to read the book, you can check that out instead, as it is available for free on YouTube.

Though this book is focusing on food safety, I am particularly interested in higher level meta learnings. Because food safety and banning toxins in our food supply is the norm now, and every country has an organization equivalent to the FDA in the US, all of this might sound obvious to us today. But when there is no regulation in a newly identified domain (think of Artificial Intelligence today) how do you go about developing a new model, process, or set of rules to ensure the general public isn't harmed when there is no existing template or playbook?

Any attempt to monitor and control AI technology today is often criticized by its supporters in one of many ways: as unnecessary government interference in technological progress, OR that competing countries will get ahead of us, OR claim that regulations will prevent the virtues of the new tech from improving people's lives faster. Food manufacturers were making the exact same arguments a century ago. Balancing regulation to ensure progress isn't impeded while making sure the public isn't harmed is incredibly tricky in uncharted fields, whether it's AI or gene editing. Hats off to those who work in the trenches to create frameworks that can scale to support whole nations and can be sustained for decades. 

Book Review: Hacking Planet Earth by Thomas M. Kostigen

Over the years, we all have read several articles on geoengineering proposals to "save the planet". Simultaneously those ideas appear as audacious, phenomenally effective approaches to addressing massive problems, and as terrifying prospects that could go totally and irrevocably wrong, messing up our only home. Because Hacking Planet Earth: Technologies That Can Counteract Climate Change and Create a Better Future is a book discussing exactly these types of solutions, I picked it up during a recent visit to Barnes & Noble. After finishing it, I came away with mixed feelings—not so much about the technology itself, but about the book. 

As we all know, human activities have caused the planet to warm up year after year. The solutions proposed in decades past focused on reducing carbon emissions, which often meant slowing down economic activity and transitioning to renewable energy. However, these recommendations haven't had much of an impact. With a growing global population and more countries transitioning from abject poverty to the middle-income bracket, energy consumption has only increased in recent years, accelerating global warming. Since halting this trend is neither easy nor practical, scientists and governments have been looking at alternative options to cool the Earth more efficiently, which is exactly what geoengineering is all about. The book explores various proposals, such as reflecting sunlight back into space or blocking sunbeams from reaching the Earth. Given that we are failing phenomenally to meet our carbon reduction goals—and with major contributors like the US not pulling their weight but pulling out of international agreements like the Paris Accord—these "hacking" ideas are both timely and necessary, provided they don't mess things up further.

Written by Kostigen, a professional author experienced in this genre, the book is an easy read featuring simple, accessible prose. He doesn't get into anything deeply technical, as this is aimed at a popular audience. Although the author doesn't explicitly claim to have done so, it appears like he traveled the world and interviewed the people featured in the book to provide a strong narrative, which is admirable.

The first section, titled "Humans v. Sky & Space," is probably the best. It explores efforts to limit global warming by creating artificial lightning, deploying a massive "space parasol" covering a region the size of the United States, and installing large reflectors in the desert to reduce the impact of sun heating up the planet. It is a balanced discussion, analyzing both the pros and potential cons of each grand idea. However, the final chapter of this section feels less interesting, focusing merely on painting roofs and parking lots white to improve reflectivity and reduce heat absorption. While this should certainly be part of the overall solution, it is neither a stunning new concept nor a true "planet-hacking" solution. Just a passing mention in a paragraph or two would have been adequate.

Part two, "Humans v. Land & Oceans," discusses brightening clouds by spraying a fine mist of seawater from solar-powered, boat-like structures moving through the ocean. This is a neat concept that doesn't cost an astronomical amount or rely on chemicals—just seawater, mimicking a process that already occurs naturally. The subsequent chapter on ocean fertilization is also fascinating, exploring how we might artificially revive coral reefs and eliminate oxygen-depleted dead zones. But subsequent chapters in this section, discussing Dutch dikes, building living spaces underground (creating "earthscrapers" instead of skyscrapers), and trying to stop glaciers from melting, all feel like old, well-known ideas with limited impact. They simply don't fit the definition of "earth hacking."

By the time the book reaches the final two sections, it feels as though the author ran out of planet-hacking concepts and began scraping the bottom of the ideas barrel. There is a chapter on transitioning from livestock farming to lab-grown meat, and another on recycling sewage water into drinking water (technologies already utilized in places like California and Israel). Earth hacking? Hardly.

The final section covers self-driving cars, discussing how they will reduce accidents and reshape urban life by eliminating the need for parking lots and garages. As an autonomous vehicle enthusiast, I appreciate the technology, but I can't view it as a novel earth-hacking concept. The last chapter highlights Masdar City, a UAE-funded development project, designed from the ground up to be a zero-carbon city supporting 1,500 businesses and 50,000 residents. Launched in 2005 with great intentions and interesting ideas, it was originally slated for completion by 2020. As is typical with such massive projects, delays hit, the goal shifted from "zero carbon" to "low carbon," and the book claims it would be completed by 2025. However, a quick look online (e.g. see this link) reveals that the new completion date has slipped to 2030, the scope has been further reduced, not many people & businesses are moving in, and the UAE organization behind it has shifted its primary focus to solar power, rendering the city a secondary project. It is a disappointing outcome, though the attempt remains laudable. Ultimately, because these are small, meaningful adjustments that all modern city plans should include, it again fails to feel like true earth hacking.

Books of this nature benefit immensely from illustrations to make complex concepts easier to grasp. This book does include a few hand-drawn, black-and-white pencil sketches, but the quality is quite poor, both literally and figuratively. Literally, because the annotations are written in handwriting that is barely legible; figuratively, because the drawings fail to clarify anything useful. Some illustrations are entirely pointless, such as a sketch of a self-driving car that looks just like a standard vehicle. Others are either too simple to add value or leave the reader confused about what they are even looking at. This was particularly jarring to me, as I have just spent the last year creating about 80 images for my own upcoming book. I sincerely hope my readers will find the illustrations genuinely valuable.

Despite these flaws, I would still recommend reading it. It is a quick, accessible read, and it is clear that the world is not moving fast enough to reduce carbon emissions. This reality may eventually force us to adopt these geoengineering ideas if we want to survive.

In the final pages, the author makes an emotional plea about the need to "save the planet" in distress. This line of thinking always amuses and puzzles me; the Earth will be perfectly fine, just as it was before humans arrived, and it will endure long after we are gone. We don't even need to anthropomorphize it to say it is caring for us or struggling to survive. TBH, earth doesn't care! What we are actually worried about is the planet's conditions becoming incompatible with, or at least highly uncomfortable for, human life. We aren't saving the Earth; we are trying to save ourselves. Since we show no signs of abandoning our carbon-spewing, global-warming lifestyles, it is high time we look into alternative "earth-hacking" options—while exercising strict due diligence to ensure we don't screw things up even further in pursuit of a magic bullet. 

Guns & Graduation!

My wife and I have been watching an eponymous TV show set in the Shetland Islands, off the coast of Scotland. It is a police procedural. With so much of American police shows that flood the airwaves around the world, it stands out since the DIs (Detective Inspector) or the uniformed cops approaching criminals don't have drawn guns in their hands, that almost looks odd! Possession and use of guns is such a part & part of the US culture, that saying, "Why do we need so many guns?", even in elementary school teacher introduction type settings, will elicit responses from parents who won't agree to any kind of limitation or restrictions. (This is from a personal experience, here in PA years ago.) 

I have been serving as a (volunteer) member of the Board of Trustees for a kindergarten to 12th grade Charter School here in Allentown. Out of the 1200 students in the school, 81% are Hispanic and more than 10% are Black students and so it is predominantly a minority school. In case if you are not familiar with the US charter school system, they are publicly funded (i.e. using tax dollars) and privately run schools, that usually try to focus on some unmet need in the school district. 

On May 15th the school held a cultural function (a school dance) that was attended by students. After the event, many kids were in a nearby McDonalds hanging out to be picked up by parents. Around 9pm, somebody drove by, shot at the restaurant and one student from our school died, capitulating to the gun shot wound! He is just 18 and is a graduating student of the high school this year! 

Funeral for this student named Tymell Millan Mason, Jr. was held on June 5th. I attended the viewing and celebration of life service held in a church. Though black is the color people wear here for funerals, this family asked us to wear white and so we all did. It was so sad to see so many of his school friends in the service, crying, with his parents, younger sister, uncle and pastor paying tributes. Really depressing to see young 18 year old kid, attending a school dance, then waiting in a nearby McDs with friends, to be picked up by parents, passing away this way! So far police haven't caught the perpetrators or found any motive. 

https://www.vanderburgfh.com/obituaries/tymell-millan-mason-jr

Couple of more pictures and a short video: https://photos.app.goo.gl/gh2JWdX3ui8V5Q1V9

Local TV news report about the incident. 

In a sad coincidence, in an unrelated incident, another board member's granddaughter, who is just 18, was shot in the head by her ex-boyfriend (who is in prison now) just couple of days before! Luckily that girl is recovering ever so slowly, with years of physiotherapy ahead of her. Even before we recovered from that news, this one hit us! Sad months that will hopefully get better going forward. 

These incidences reminded me of another gun violence incidence from the 90's I was following closely, since it happened in Baton Rouge, LA where I was living as a fairly new graduate student at LSU. You can read about it on this Wikipedia page. I still remember those days vividly since it was hard for me to accept then the perpetrator getting acquitted!

Turning towards more positive updates, the high school graduation for our school (Lincoln Leadership Academy Charter School) was held last Friday (June 5th). I attended as a board member, robed and sitting on the stage! About 66 kids graduated, including Tymell Millan-Mason, Jr., the 18-year-old kid who died last month. Tributes to him were moving, with his mother & younger sister accepting the diploma. 

The overall graduation vibe was similar to our daughter's high school graduation last year, full of cheers & tears. But this being a smaller inner city school (about 1200 students across 12 grades, compared to 3200 students in across just 9-12 grades in Parkland High School) with predominantly Latina and Black students, where students were heading next was markedly different. Majority of the kids are heading to local community colleges, beauty schools, etc. with just a few heading outside the state to 4-year colleges. 

I still remember the school principal Dr. Michael Evans talking to me couple of months ago, when I visited the school. He pointed out to a young kid who had turned 18 and so was out of foster care system, and so the school was trying hard to make sure he still feels cared for and will graduate high school properly. Evans was saying, while test scores are no doubt important, he is not sure how to put a value on what the school staff is doing to help that kid graduate! That kid did graduate last Friday!

It is important for us to get out of our bubbles, mingle with citizenry across the spectrum, while keeping our values & outlook grounded, prioritizing the right things in life! I look forward to learning and contributing to help this school & kids grow in the forthcoming years!

Few more pictures from the graduation ceremony, showing me, another board member, Tymell on the big screen, a short video: https://photos.app.goo.gl/pi74VtuxhRcU9akc7 to let you soak in the event!

Book Review - Nexus by Harari

When I left Intel more than a year ago, my team gave me Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI as one of my send-off gifts. Since I had other books ahead in the queue, it sat on my shelf for a while, but I finally got around to reading it.

Similar to his Sapiens, this book feels like a collection of historical facts and observations that are mostly easy to agree with, while lacking any truly novel thesis or groundbreaking insight. To be fair, my perspective is likely biased: As you may know, I have been delivering a lecture titled "Ethics & Emerging Technologies," for many years now, which covers the same grounds Harari treads here. Because I regularly read/watch/absorb material to incorporate into that talk, I found myself intimately familiar with a lot of material found in the book. But if you haven't looked into these areas closely, this is an easy read. Material & prose are very accessible, with nothing too complex to grok.  

The book is structured into three parts. The first section defines human networks, exploring how information was gathered and shared over past millennia. Harari repeatedly draws a contrast between religious scriptures and foundational legal texts like the US Constitution. While both are human constructs, religious texts are traditionally framed as infallible. Conversely, a constitution is living prose that can be amended as societal morals evolve, a prime example being how both the Bible and the original US Constitution treated slavery.

The second part, titled "The Inorganic Network," shifts the focus to computer networks. Harari emphasizes that because these networks are "always on" and frequently propagate misinformation, they require robust, built-in self-correcting mechanisms, that are currently missing. The final section, "Computer Politics," dives into algorithmic bias, facial recognition surveillance, and the tech-driven US-China rivalry, topics that dominate our daily headlines these days.

The book is peppered with amusing historical tidbits. For instance, Copernicus’s seminal 1543 work, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, failed to sell out its initial print run of just 400 copies, earning it the historical title of a "worst-seller." Similarly, the discussion of how the Bible was canonized, and how the initial formation of the Torah subsequently required the Mishnah, which later demanded the interpretations of the Talmud, was equally amusing. However, some other broader contrarian claims feel like a stretch. One such example is the assertion that the invention of the printing press wasn't entirely a net positive because it accelerated the spread of early "fake news" (like witch-hunt manuals). Thought this is an overengineered attempt to offer a provocative counter-narrative.

That said, the dilemmas raised in the final chapters are deeply concerning. Harari highlights COMPAS, a proprietary software sold to the US justice system that judges use to predict recidivism and determine prison sentencing. While the company selling the software claims it standardizes punishments, the underlying algorithm remains a black box protected as a trade secret. If the algorithm errs and recommends a ten-year sentence instead of one, the defendant has no data on which to base an appeal. This is just one example. This lack of transparency is a pervasive existential threat in the AI era. Even if we legislate "explainable AI," that Intel Corp and other companies were promoting, the sheer volume of data and the complexity of neural networks mean that human beings may soon lose the ability to untangle the decision-making trail. He also talks about how competing interests & nations (e.g. US Vs. China Vs. Europe) may render the idea of "web" irrelevant leading us towards "cocoons" instead, where different networks & systems become siloed, refusing to interwork.

Ultimately, since these ideas are not that new, not a lot of fresh learnings for me. But this could be a good book for those who are not well versed in these topics and are looking to understand how the information networks evolved over the centuries and are getting shaped now by algorithms that require close attention to ensure they don't blow up the societies.  

Digital Hygiene - Part 3 of 3

Darknet Diaries is a podcast I listen to, that talks about all the shady shenanigans that go on in the web. Recently heard this particular episode that should be worth your time: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/172/. It talks about Set Top Boxes (STB) that people buy and connect to TV, to watch any program for free!

Note that using such streaming service boxes can make you an unknowing participant in DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks! While we should avoid using such STBs altogether, the proliferation of IoT (Internet of Things) devices like fridges and washing machines that get added to our home WiFi network, make our home network vulnerable. This is especially true since most of those devices don't get regular security patches (unlike our computers). So, thought will suggest making at least one simple change to your home network, hardening the architecture for safety. 

Instead of keeping your home WiFi as just one network, create three VLANs (Virtual Local Area Network) for your home.  

- First VLAN is for all your PCs, Laptops, Printers, phones and tablets. These are devices that get regular security updates and should be trustworthy.

- Second VLAN is for all your IoT devices such as TVs, STBs, thermostats, washing machines, fridge, security cameras, smart speakers, doorbells, etc. These are equipment that have started connecting to our home network in the last decade, shall we say unnecessarily?  While it may be convenient to get a notification that your dryer has finished drying clothes, it opens up one more, usually low security, window into your home network. Perhaps it is worth questioning the zeitgeist to limit the number of such devices we add.

- Third VLAN is for visiting guests. You can even have a QR code for the guest network posted somewhere inside the house for people to scan & connect their phones or laptops while they are in your home, so that you don't need to give out your main WiFi network's login credentials. 

If you are not a techie, don't let the terms like VLAN worry you. This doesn't involve buying new equipment or asking your ISP (Internet Service Provider) to do anything. It is a fairly simple reconfiguration of your home WiFi router you can do it yourself following the instructions found in the WiFi router user manual. 

Most modern WiFi routers come with this option that get setup as three different SSIDs (Service Set Identifier, which is the name of your home WiFi network). Thus, if your home network is called SundarHome, it may suggest adding SundarHome_IoT and SundarHome_Guest as two additional SSIDs that automatically create the two additional VLANs to keep the traffic separated. 

Once they are up, you can reconnect all your IoT devices to the second network and you are done. Let us say one or more of your IoT devices or your guest's phone or laptop are compromised. While they attempt to scan your home network and access available devices, they will only be able to see other devices in the same VLAN. They can't see computers/devices connected to the other two VLANs. This separation improves security considerably. 

If you want to be even more secure while using your PCs, you can consider getting a VPN service subscription and use it consistently. But that is for another day!

If you are already doing this, or have better ideas that are easy to implement, PLMK.