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fictionfromafar · 3 years

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The Measure of Time by Gianrico Carofiglio

The Measure of Time by Gianrico Carofiglio

Translated by Howard Curtis

Bitter Lemon Press

#RandomTTours #BookTour

The Guido Guerrieri Series #6

Having explored a wide range of Bitter Lemon’s translated crime fiction novels and also developed a taste for Italian novels, I was keen to delve into the works of Gianrico Carofiglio. His newest title “The Measure Of Time” was released on 18 March and is the sixth in the Guido Guerrieri series, eighth in total for the London based publisher. Guerrieri is a defence barrister in his early fifties based in Bari.

I must admit I did pick up this book with a slight trepidation wondering how well I would follow a novel that focuses on the Italian legal system. Gianrico Carofiglio was an anti-Mafia prosecutor in Southern Italy who has since turned to writing. He has sold over six million copies of his books worldwide. While I have read some John Grisham in the past and found myself a little perplexed, my concerns over “The Measure Of Time” were thankfully unfounded. Not only is Guido Guerrieri an intriguing and likeable character, but his legal functions were explained in a very clear and absorbing manner. Also no backstory was required and I enjoyed this as a standalone novel – although I will definitely be looking at his back catalogue when time allows.

When advised by his legal secretary Pasquale that he has had a request for an appointment by a lady named Delle Foglie, Guerrieri is prompted to think back to the period before he was a fully practicing lawyer when he dated a girl of the same name. While he convinces himself this cannot be the same person. This and a chance meeting with a younger lawyer who had recently lost his mother to a slow and painful death lead him to stop his work and ponder the passage of time.

“I’d often thought that thanks to what I had earned in my profession, of which I had spent a very small part, I could quit, sell the practice and devote myself to something else… Anything just to escape the grip of time. Time that keeps passing, never changing. Near motionless in its daily repletion but fading fast”.

Melancholy perhaps, but something many of us can relate to. Likewise, there is a thought provoking reflection on how it is extremely hard I it is to imagine a world after our own death. While this might seem like a mournful way to commence the first ten pages of a novel, it really sets the tone for a reflective and considered individual.

Having gained our empathy, we obtain his interest when Lorenza Delle Foglie walks into his office. It is revealed that she is the lady he knew years before. We begin to learn the relevance of the preceeding passages as the years have not been kind to her. Having vanished from his life 27 years earlier she has now come to him in need of his help as her son is in prison for murder. With his appeal due she requires a defense lawyer. When he hears her story, Guerrieri is far from convinced about the innocence of Delle Foglie’s son yet agrees to take on the case. His initial queries do not present him with any optimism that he can overturn his sentence but he does find a few aspects of the defence that were not correctly portrayed at the original trial.

We return through Guerrieri’s thoughts to the times he spent with Delle Foglie, how they met and how she inspired him. Several years older than him and persuing a bohemian lifestyle, she encouraged the studious trainee lawyer to take an interest in literature, films and culture thus enrichening his life. While their short liaison was locked firmly in his memory without common friends to recall it, he does appreciate that she had been a mentor to him. It is this realisation rather than any lingering flame which encourages him to pursue some leads provided by her son.

There are some interesting characteristics to Guerrieri. He has continued to surround himself with strong minded females, in both his personal and professional life. Despite being settled with a partner, he is quite a solitary individual. He also finds time to confess his guilt to the faded punch bag which he no longer uses.

The final third of the novel is largely focused on the appeal trial. This is where Carofiglio’s legal background provided us with realistic insights into the barrister's methodology. The author cleverly explains the thought processes through the statements and question that Guerrieri makes. Some are intended for the benefit of the accused, some designed to plant doubt in witnesses, to raise ambiguities with the judge and jury; and to press the relentless prosecution lawyer into avenues that discredit their own case. Through Howard Curtis’ interpretation of Carofiglio’s prose, I truly felt I could visibly see the characters, hear their testimonies and visualize their expressions within the court room just as well as I could through any televised drama.

There is so much I enjoyed about this novel. I recognised the theme of the novel’s title, that time can pass us by quickly. I was drawn to Guerrieri as a character and loved the setting of Bari. On sleepless nights he visits an all-night bookshop in the centre of Bari where he discusses Aristotle with fellow unsettled souls. The entrapped holiday maker within me would also love to take the two-hour boat trip to the Greek island of Othonoi referred to. One aspect that I particularly liked about this book is that it reinforced my beliefs that some people may not remain in our lives for a long time, yet their influence can have a profound lasting effect. This is an exceptionally crafted legal fiction which captivates the reader with processes explained in full clarity while contemplating subjects that are rarely considered. In short, it’s a real gem of a book.

Thanks to Alex Hippisley-Cox for the review copy, and to Anne Cater for the blog tour invitation.

Bonus review

This is not the first book I had read translated by Howard Curtis. Read on for a short bonus review that I wrote before I started blogging:

A Florentine Death

By Michele Giuttari

Translated by Howard Curtis

Abacus

Recently I enjoyed this book by Michele Giuttari. The author is former head of the Florence Police Force (1995-2003), where he was responsible for re-opening the Monster of Florence case and jailing several key Mafia figures.

A Florentine Death features Chief Superintendent Michele Ferrara (who does the role that Giuttari had). Don't assume lots of technical police details as other than conflicts with the prosecutor, there is nothing overly procedural about Ferrara.

There are a series of random murders which originally appear to be unrelated until Ferrara gets some mystery messages. The book features the city of Florence. I really liked some of the descriptions in it, such as when Ferrara visits a prisoner and also the climax in a remote and snow covered setting. There are another 6 or 7 books in the series and I will return to them sometime. It is quite a straight forward read and is translated well by Howard Curtis.

Slightly dated now, the Italian edition dates back from 2004 - does the suspect have a mobile phone someone asks, but overall it holds up well.

#crime fiction #crimeintranslation #european literature #Italian legal drama

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antifra · 3 years

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an unfounded ode to emptiness

I've mentioned that there have been times I've mastered mindfulness and truly paid attention to all that there is apart from podcasts, music, media in general. In introducing myself for online classes by recapping 2020, I've been experiencing euphoric recall. Having not just talked about, but been about self-optimization apart from the visibility of the internet, and to the delight of those few in my physical world, I can't say that it felt perfect.

Balancing mind, body, and soul is an act that doesn't have a beginning, middle, or end, and the very flux of this has been frustrating. Unlearning that at some point and truly not seeking results or gratification was not easy. As eating-disordered as it seems, the moment I spotted high-fiber lavashes in my fridge last summer after not having eaten processed food for months, I knew sinking my teeth into that fortified simple carb would put me right back in the rat race of sugar addiction. The personal-responsibility project I'd undertaken involved beating it, and it could very well be a deluded idea that this piece of bread made it a wrap, but it speaks to the all-around inoculation driven by dopamine we've experienced.

We've been placated, plugged up and plugged in to the extent that anything other than stimulation can feel insufferable. I speak only for myself and those from whom I've heard, like a friend the other night who rarely ever expresses sincere personal feelings. He said, "Life is so empty." Out of nowhere. In short, he feels uninspired and as if life is only about making money and procreation, not much else. My ecology class shifted my framing of these ideas into the simply, the means of survival. Life is about life? No kidding. It's the "much else" that is a matter of human intervention and problem-creating as a means of problem-solving. In a sense, there wouldn't be this thing that's missing without it having been invented in the first place.

Intellectual technology, as Nicholas G. Carr puts it in the eye-opening The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, is anything that has been created to further our understanding of life. Antiquated tools like clocks, maps, typewriters all the way to the highest tech qualify as such, and its proliferation has begged the question (put into memetic terms): is it really that deep? Do we need to know why life happens the way it does if it will anyway? I'm in the habit of surrounding myself with intellectuals who are keen on investigating the mysteries of life by utilizing these devices, so it can be easy to feel as if my view is surface and primitive, or that I'm suggesting innovation is simply "bad"--an elementary conclusion--but this is not the case.

This leads to a matter that may be emotivist, though I can't be sure. There are conclusions I've drawn from thin air, it seems, about how humans are "meant" to live. I'll make it clear that this is entirely out of personal experience. I've been grappling with the idea of anything (to be hyperbolic) being "true" without having been observed firsthand or existing solely as a metaphysical phenomena. One of these aforementioned intellectuals has explained his writings about the internet giving way to dogmatic behavior serving as an invitation to investigate this further rather than a call to action for change. In the same way, I invite you to examine what could very well be unfounded reasoning for renouncing many of our creature comforts.

Last January/February I stopped consuming news, lessened my "ScreenTime" to an average of 15 minutes per day, kept impeccable sleep hygiene, ate exclusively plant foods without packaging and eggs from chickens raised by a lady whom I knew, didn't listen to music or podcasts, and sat with my thoughts, completely uninterrupted by stimuli. I'd even closed my eyes at the gym and entertained acquiring noise cancelling headphones intended for autistic children (I own a pair now.) This opened an emptiness and echochamber of self-hatred that stemmed from that eating disorder, but I've never felt more in touch with myself.

There was very little superficial interaction and my heart opened up to all that was there and then--the endless possibilities that emerge when what is in the metaphysical realm cannot be pinned down to definitive ideas, especially because of the limitations of language. Embracing that things exist whether we have words for them or not, and that anything is possible oddly alienated me from others in the sense that my openness was off-putting to some who kept a headphone in one ear. Most were receptive to my positive attitude, though, and I maintain that withholding judgment from the manifestation of overstimulation in others helps in appealing to our chemical commonalities.

The perpetual headphones-in/on-world-out back-and-forth of not hearing or being reluctant to approach one another is the alienating factor that does not perplex me the most, but speaks to how distractions seemingly keep us depressed and alone. After my experiment, when I'd broken my single-wire headphones and invested in a new pair just prior to being let go from my job last March ahead of the return to sugar addiction, a similar feeling of regression came over me. I used the headphones to listen to a conference call about the precautions to take at the beginning of the public health crisis while sitting in Union Square Park, surrounded by maskless, jovial people engaging in real synthesis, instead of the one-sided schizo listening I'd been accustomed and subsequently grew averse to in favor of face-to-face conversation.

This is straying so far into stream-of-consciousness, but the big idea is that apart from external entities, distractions, technology that either peaks our intellectual curiosity or placates our desire for intermittent rushes of dopamine, we are human. We have basic biological needs that have been met long before the advent of all that divides us, or keeps us linked together on a superficial level (yes, even FaceTime.) I am referencing earlier eras, but make no mistake--our instincts transcend time, and my point is simply that ripping ourselves away from all of the unnecessary conditioning, consumerism, and purposeful manipulation of cognition can be helpful in understanding this. I have a deep, legitimate desire to pursue the ultimate separation, but that'll be for another post.

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stephanielipsey-blog · 7 years

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Helping Others.

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thinkgloriathink · 7 years

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Why I stopped doing Pre-med (my lengthy and candid explanation)

If you know me personally, you might be surprised to hear that I’m not doing pre-med anymore. In fact, this massive pivot happened so quickly and dramatically that I, too, am trying to figure out how my seemingly robust pledge to pursuing a career in medicine toppled like a tower of toothpicks the literal instant I entered college. Surely enough, I dove head first into some intensely angsty rumination sessions to wrangle apart this ugly mystery, and I scraped together a semi-coherent analysis of how this happened to me. Here’s the best explanation I can come up with:

Any good scientist knows that to properly appraise the strength of a scientific theory, you shouldn’t just be scouring for examples to confirm it, but rather scouring for cases to disconfirm it. Looking back into my past, I’ve discovered that I did a whole lot of confirming, and very little disconfirming. All my life, since showing an early propensity for biology, the life sciences, then medicine, I’ve gotten puff after puff of ego boosting encouragements. At a dinner party, people are always asking you what you want to be when you grow up. I’d say medicine, people would nod their heads with recognition, no further questions asked. As a result, I’ve lived my whole life full of self-assurance without self-examination, enjoying the cushiness of people’s approval. Once I established that I was going to be a doctor, everything I saw and all the ways I behaved seemed to fall into place, conveniently fitting the narrative. I’m not squeamish around blood? Pure doctor material! I’m skilled at memorizing anatomy terms? You’re on the right track, Dr. Feng! Soon, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, where I’d purposely act in ways that would be in character, because future-doctor-Gloria was my identity. When I started having my first doubts about pre-med during the first few months of college, I surprised myself by how flimsy I became when I was confronted by the question: Why do you want to be a doctor? Up until then, I've been going at it with 110% confidence because I liked it, and my liking it made sense to other people. Chemistry class sucked, but I was able to make it through the semester because I told myself that it’s all part of the process. “I want to be a doctor” became a mantra that I’d remind myself time and time again through times of intense stress, but the more I said it, the more unfounded it felt. I reached a point in the year where I would tell myself repeatedly that I was in it for the long haul, but feeling less confident every time I said it. God forbid, if someone asked me “Why?” during those anxious times, I would’ve imploded under the weight of all my existential angst because I literally felt as though I had no good answer. “I want to help people.” Nothing felt more fabricated to me than that weak ass reason, which alone is hardly a justification unique to a career in medicine.

Here are the few pivotal moments and thought trains that poked holes in my confidence for being a doctor. Note: these are explanations, not justifications. If you’re reading this and are still on the track to doctorhood, I will root for you like the aggressive soccer mom you never had. All I ask is that you check in with yourself every once in a while, honestly, so that you know for sure your life is heading in the direction you -- and only you-- truly want.

I tried and failed to get accepted into any of the combined medical programs I’ve applied to last year. Of course, considering the incredibly low acceptance rates to these prestigious programs, the odds were not in my favor, and it’d be foolish to expect acceptances to roll in easily. But this did plant the first seed of doubt in the back of my head that all these admissions officers who turned me down were seeing something in me that I might not have been aware of at the time. I felt as though I’ve poured my heart and soul into the “Why Medicine?” essays, writing with as much candor as I thought was possible. When you’ve laid out all your cards like that and you still get the thumbs down, it’s hard not to think that, just maybe, I’m not as equipped or compatible to be a doctor as I had thought. Maybe this was some kind of sign. This was a fleeting thought that didn’t initially shake my resolve at the time, but it reemerged with a different effect on me once my doubt train started to pick up speed this past year.

All my friends were getting their asses kicked by their computer science classes, but the challenge seemed to make them like it even more. Meanwhile, I was getting my ass beat by my pre-med classes, but my motivation seemed to be way more fragile. I was performing, for the first time, average in my class. While this sounds pretty unremarkable and expected at an elite institution where you’re no longer the big fish in your tiny little pond, it was a major source of frustration and disappointment for me. The fact that this rank-consciousness mattered so much to me, and the fact that so much enjoyment in the subject seemed to evaporate once I realized that I wasn’t the highest performer anymore indicated that I might’ve only enjoyed my pre-med classes in high school because I was good at them. I sat down in my virology class one day after having one of these revelations, looking at the powerpoint slides with almost a different pair of eyes. I have to memorize all the types of RNA and DNA polymerases and the different ways they could stack together DNA crumbs to build a new strand? Why and how is this knowledge important to me? Oh yeah, I need to shove this down my brain so I can regurgitate it onto a sheet of paper next week for a grade. I don’t actually find any of this interesting. What am I even doing here? Something I found even more curious is the fact that I've survived my statistics class second semester, which I thought beat me to a pulp at least as bad as chemistry did, but I liked it even more because of it. In fact, that class even managed to restore in me a modicum of confidence in math, an area I was sure I was going to avoid like the plague in college. In fact, I'm really glad that I took it, as I actually feel like I've learned something valuable and enriching if not directly applicable to my life. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for Neuro and Chem.

I was totally getting high off of the youthful optimism and individualistic spirit of Carpe Diem of the college students around me. After being immersed in all these big-picture-thinking communities at school, or reading 21st century lifestyle design books like the 4-hour workweek or Nassim Taleb’s books, all I could think about was seizing the day and making the most out of the present. I lost some faith in the idea of super-delayed gratification— the idea of enduring a dreary and soul-sucking life now so that you can live a happier and more comfortable future down the line. When I was down in my depths of existential gloom, all I felt I had going for me was the good faith that the future me— Doctor me— would enjoy my life, even though the current me did not. But what a waste of your livelihood would it be, I'd think, to spend the most important decades of your life jumping through hoops while stressed and broke, when you can technically engineer your life such that you can work hard, ride its ups and downs, AND enjoy its fruits now. After all, your life is really just a massive sum of today’s. If you keep living for brighter tomorrows, you’d go through life squandering all the today’s, which are actually all we’ve got, and all we’ll ever get.

I remember just hanging up from a video call with my sister while I was sitting on a couch in the lobby of the Sciences Library, when I entertained this train of thought. I had just won a Hackathon at MIT by randomly deciding to take a leap of faith and flex my creative muscle, and had one of the most novel and eye-opening experiences of my life. I came into touch with (cw: intense self-flattery) the fact that I was an adaptable person with many talents, a person with a creative eye, a knack for playful intellectual thought, a slightly unconventional character, with visions and ambitions that seem a little larger than life sometimes. All of these parts of myself, which I didn’t think fit the qualities of the prototypical pre-med student, felt more to me like diversions and hindrances than assets… which made me sad. Somehow, I thought the competitive straitjacket of pre-medicine and the highly standardized structure of pre-professional training was forcing me into a mold that missed so much of what I liked about myself. Sure, I knew I had characteristics that would make me a good doctor--that hasn't changed about me. But at the time, when I felt like college was just starting to set me off on my personal renaissance, sticking doggedly to the competitive-as-hell premed plan that I no longer felt super passionate about felt pretty damn stifling.

I've begun to realize recently that I actually might also enjoy doing other things besides medicine (whaaaat?). Before college, I'd always choose classes or study the things that aligned with the pre-med path. When selecting my courses for Columbia SHP, for example, I'd only choose to enroll in physiology or biology classes. I had the choice to take other things at the time, but my a priori assumptions were that I simply won’t like what isn’t pre-med related, so I didn’t try them. Before second semester I shrugged and said “what the heck” and enrolled in an economics class, and I also said “what the heck” for applying to work at Kinvolved; my expectations for both were initially quite low, as I was secretly hoping that these would dispel my what-if questions from first semester, as an obvious distaste for them would reassure me that medicine was the way to go. Lo and behold, I was taken off guard by how much I actually enjoyed these experiences. All my life, I’ve never had to make any hard choices between medicine and other appealing alternatives, because I've never given myself one. In essence, closing doors on the other things was a lot easier back when I didn’t have a clue about what was behind those doors. Pre-med has been all I knew, and everything I thought I liked, until college showed me otherwise.

Lastly, the difficulty of my pre-med classes did (and still does) intimidate me. This reason does fall secondary to the first five I’ve just stated, as, I think, if I were really 100% set on being a doctor, I’d be resourceful enough to find ways to tolerate the workload. But having to shoulder a very taxing course load throughout my first semester, while feeling isolated and unsure the entire time, even in the presence of the hundreds of other pre-med students, was not a great feeling. I guess I blame this unsavory experience (and I forgive myself, of course) on the rocky adjustment period of first semester freshman year, and my underestimation of the importance of forming supportive study groups. Can this problem be remedied easily in the future with a little initiative? Of course. But did this nevertheless paint my first semester experience with an extra shiny layer of demotivation and disillusionment, and propel my I-don’t-wanna-do-medical-school-anymore spiral? You betcha.

#pre-med #note to self

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thepreseedblog · 7 years

Link

I am just quoting some of the statements from the whole article to make for a shorter read for my readers of the future.

1. Hassabis replied that, in fact, he was working on the most important project in the world: developing artificial super-intelligence. Musk countered that this was one reason we needed to colonize Mars—so that we’ll have a bolt-hole if A.I. goes rogue and turns on humanity. Amused, Hassabis said that A.I. would simply follow humans to Mars.

2. An unassuming but competitive 40-year-old, Hassabis is regarded as the Merlin who will likely help conjure our A.I. children.

3. With a neural lace inside your skull you would flash data from your brain, wirelessly, to your digital devices or to virtually unlimited computing power in the cloud. “For a meaningful partial-brain interface, I think we’re roughly four or five years away.”

4. Elon Musk smiled when I mentioned to him that he comes across as something of an Ayn Rand-ian hero. “I have heard that before,” he said in his slight South African accent. “She obviously has a fairly extreme set of views, but she has some good points in there.”

5. Marc Mathieu, the chief marketing officer of Samsung USA, who has gone fly-fishing in Iceland with Musk, calls him “a cross between Steve Jobs and Jules Verne.”As they danced at their wedding reception, Justine later recalled, Musk informed her, “I am the alpha in this relationship.”

6. As he told me, “we are the first species capable of self-annihilation.”

7. 28 years away from the Rapture-like “Singularity”—the moment when the spiraling capabilities of self-improving artificial super-intelligence will far exceed human intelligence, and human beings will merge with A.I. to create the “god-like” hybrid beings of the future.

8. y, in another shock to the system, an A.I. program showed that it could bluff. Libratus, built by two Carnegie Mellon researchers, was able to crush top poker players at Texas Hold ‘Em.

9. “Sex robots? I think those are quite likely.”

10. Last June, a researcher at DeepMind co-authored a paper outlining a way to design a “big red button” that could be used as a kill switch to stop A.I. from inflicting harm.

11. Google executives say Larry Page’s view on A.I. is shaped by his frustration about how many systems are sub-optimal—from systems that book trips to systems that price crops. He believes that A.I. will improve people’s lives and has said that, when human needs are more easily met, people will “have more time with their family or to pursue their own interests.”

12. Some in Silicon Valley argue that Musk is interested less in saving the world than in buffing his brand, and that he is exploiting a deeply rooted conflict: the one between man and machine, and our fear that the creation will turn against us. They gripe that his epic good-versus-evil story line is about luring talent at discount rates and incubating his own A.I. software for cars and rockets. It’s certainly true that the Bay Area has always had a healthy respect for making a buck. As Sam Spade said in The Maltese Falcon, “Most things in San Francisco can be bought, or taken.”

13. Zuckerberg introduced his A.I. butler, Jarvis, right before Christmas. With the soothing voice of Morgan Freeman, it was able to help with music, lights, and even making toast. I asked the real-life Iron Man, Musk, about Zuckerberg’s Jarvis, when it was in its earliest stages. “I wouldn’t call it A.I. to have your household functions automated,” Musk said. “It’s really not A.I. to turn the lights on, set the temperature.”

14. “His wife, Talulah, told me they had late-night conversations about A.I. at home,” Vance noted. “Elon is brutally logical. The way he tackles everything is like moving chess pieces around. When he plays this scenario out in his head, it doesn’t end well for people.

15. on HBO’s Silicon Valley: “I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do.”

16. Zuckerberg replied. And clearly throwing shade at Musk, he continued: “Some people fear-monger about how A.I. is a huge danger, but that seems far-fetched to me and much less likely than disasters due to widespread disease, violence, etc.”

17. “If we slow down progress in deference to unfounded concerns, we stand in the way of real gains.” He compared A.I. jitters to early fears about airplanes, noting, “We didn’t rush to put rules in place about how airplanes should work before we figured out how they’d fly in the first place.”

18. Zuckerberg can be just as dismissive. Asked in Germany whether Musk’s apocalyptic forebodings were “hysterical” or “valid,” Zuckerberg replied “hysterical.”

19. “Do you own a house?,” Tegmark asked me. “Do you own fire insurance? The consensus in Puerto Rico was that we needed fire insurance. When we got fire and messed up with it, we invented the fire extinguisher. When we got cars and messed up, we invented the seat belt, air bag, and traffic light. But with nuclear weapons and A.I., we don’t want to learn from our mistakes. We want to plan ahead.” (Musk reminded Tegmark that a precaution as sensible as seat belts had provoked fierce opposition from the automobile industry.)

20. Meanwhile, the European Union has been looking into legal issues arising from the advent of robots and A.I.—such as whether robots have “personhood” or (as one Financial Times contributor wondered) should be considered more like slaves in Roman law.

21. Steve Wozniak has wondered publicly whether he is destined to be a family pet for robot overlords. “We started feeding our dog filet,” he told me about his own pet, over lunch with his wife, Janet, at the Original Hick’ry Pit, in Walnut Creek. “Once you start thinking you could be one, that’s how you want them treated.”

22. When I went to Peter Thiel’s elegant San Francisco office, dominated by two giant chessboards, Thiel, one of the original donors to OpenAI and a committed contrarian, said he worried that Musk’s resistance could actually be accelerating A.I. research because his end-of-the-world warnings are increasing interest in the field.

23. He went on: “There’s some sense in which the A.I. question encapsulates all of people’s hopes and fears about the computer age. I think people’s intuitions do just really break down when they’re pushed to these limits because we’ve never dealt with entities that are smarter than humans on this planet.”

24. Kurzweil has a keen interest in cats and keeps a collection of 300 cat figurines in his Northern California home. At the restaurant, he asked for almond milk but couldn’t get any. The 69-year-old eats strange health concoctions and takes 90 pills a day, eager to achieve immortality—or “indefinite extensions to the existence of our mind file”—which means merging with machines. He has such an urge to merge that he sometimes uses the word “we” when talking about super-intelligent future beings—a far cry from Musk’s more ominous “they.”

25. “That’s just not true. I’m the one who articulated the dangers,” Kurzweil said. “The promise and peril are deeply intertwined,” he continued. “Fire kept us warm and cooked our food and also burned down our houses . . . . Furthermore, there are strategies to control the peril, as there have been with biotechnology guidelines.” He summarized the three stages of the human response to new technology as Wow!, Uh-Oh, and What Other Choice Do We Have but to Move Forward? “The list of things humans can do better than computers is getting smaller and smaller,” he said. “But we create these tools to extend our long reach.” 26. Just as, two hundred million years ago, mammalian brains developed a neocortex that eventually enabled humans to “invent language and science and art and technology,” by the 2030s, Kurzweil predicts, we will be cyborgs, with nanobots the size of blood cells connecting us to synthetic neocortices in the cloud, giving us access to virtual reality and augmented reality from within our own nervous systems. “We will be funnier; we will be more musical; we will increase our wisdom,” he said, ultimately, as I understand it, producing a herd of Beethovens and Einsteins. Nanobots in our veins and arteries will cure diseases and heal our bodies from the inside.He allows that Musk’s bête noire could come true. He notes that our A.I. progeny “may be friendly and may not be” and that “if it’s not friendly, we may have to fight it.” And perhaps the only way to fight it would be “to get an A.I. on your side that’s even smarter.” 27. Russell doesn’t give a fig whether A.I. might enable more Einsteins and Beethovens. One more Ludwig doesn’t balance the risk of destroying humanity. “As if somehow intelligence was the thing that mattered and not the quality of human experience,” he said, with exasperation. “I think if we replaced ourselves with machines that as far as we know would have no conscious existence, no matter how many amazing things they invented, I think that would be the biggest possible tragedy.” Nick Bostrom has called the idea of a society of technological awesomeness with no human beings a “Disneyland without children.” 28. ‘Well, we’ll upload ourselves into the machines, so we’ll still have consciousness but we’ll be machines.’ Which I would find, well, completely implausible.”

29. “Yann LeCun keeps saying that there’s no reason why machines would have any self-preservation instinct,” Russell said. “And it’s simply and mathematically false. I mean, it’s so obvious that a machine will have self-preservation even if you don’t program it in because if you say, ‘Fetch the coffee,’ it can’t fetch the coffee if it’s dead. So if you give it any goal whatsoever, it has a reason to preserve its own existence to achieve that goal. And if you threaten it on your way to getting coffee, it’s going to kill you because any risk to the coffee has to be countered. People have explained this to LeCun in very simple terms.”

30. Russell debunked the two most common arguments for why we shouldn’t worry: “One is: It’ll never happen, which is like saying we are driving towards the cliff but we’re bound to run out of gas before we get there. And that doesn’t seem like a good way to manage the affairs of the human race. And the other is: Not to worry—we will just build robots that collaborate with us and we’ll be in human-robot teams. Which begs the question: If your robot doesn’t agree with your objectives, how do you form a team with it?”

31. “If you want a picture of A.I. gone wrong, don’t imagine marching humanoid robots with glowing red eyes. Imagine tiny invisible synthetic bacteria made of diamond, with tiny onboard computers, hiding inside your bloodstream and everyone else’s. And then, simultaneously, they release one microgram of botulinum toxin. Everyone just falls over dead. 32. “From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.”

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