Science

George Forster (1754-94), the German-Polish polymath, was in every sense a late Enlightenment prodigy. He was just ten years old when he accompanied his father, Johann Reinhold, on a scientific expedition to Russia and still in his teens when he sailed with him on Captain Cook’s epic three-year voyage to Antarctica and the Pacific islands. The ensuing book, A Voyage Round the World (1777), largely written by George, became a classic. It established him as one of the most significant naturalists and travel writers of the age, leading to him being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society aged just 22. He was also a very young polyglot, having learnt German, French, English and Russian by the age of 12. (He later added Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Swedish, as well as Latin.

This book begins strangely. Kathryn Paige Harden and her man Travis go off into the Texas desert to take some LSD in the hope that it will provide a ‘hard serotonergic reboot’. They have not so far had sex, but Travis has plans. ‘You’ll come back with your third eye,’ he says, ‘and then we’ll fuck. You’ll be glad we waited.’ At this point you may be tempted to hurl the book across the room. The self-centredness is oppressive. But persist. It rapidly becomes a very powerful read. Harden is a psychologist and behavioural geneticist, and the primary theme of Original Sin is the way in which science raises questions about morality and the law. For example, is a psychotic man who murders his wife less guilty than a sane man who does so with a clear head?

In the summer of 1992, the Times sent me to Orkney to interview the poet George Mackay Brown. He was notoriously wary of media interest – perhaps the only author ever to have asked his doctor for anti-depressants when shortlisted for the Booker prize – and I could hardly get a word out of him. His council flat didn’t yield much either: a sofa, a table – a Formica surface which Brown cleared of crumbs after breakfast and then wrote on till lunchtime. But behind his rocking chair, a huge banner, embroidered in bright wools, blazed out across an otherwise monochrome room: O let them be left, wildness and wet Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Can artificial intelligence become godlike? Can such technology unravel the world’s great mysteries? Can everything, from love and intuition to consciousness and wonder, be replicated by computers and reduced to simply knowing the right algorithm? These are the big questions running through Sebastian Mallaby’s engaging book The Infinity Machine, which charts the rise of DeepMind, the London-based AI research firm owned by Google, and its exceptionally clever co-founder and chief executive, Demis Hassabis. The book’s narrative is centred on Hassabis’s hope to make DeepMind the first company to create AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) in which computers can match or surpass humans at virtually all cognitive tasks, and the morality of such an achievement.

In the not-too-distant future, if your T-shirt starts giving fashion advice or we’re all enslaved by a race of disease-resistant metahumans, then blame Martin Amis. More precisely, blame his obsession with Space Invaders. With a foreword by Steven Spielberg, Amis’s 1982 Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines gave intellectual heft to a pursuit – videogaming – that had hitherto been the preserve of glassy-eyed youths. His advocacy proved prescient. Over the next couple of decades, the best minds of a generation dedicated their lives to making pixellated worlds as compelling and realistic as possible.

Edward FitzGerald had a good story about rowing across Lake Windermere at the end of May 1835 with his old friend Alfred Tennyson. As they rested on their oars and gazed into the clear, still water, Tennyson recited some lines from his work in progress, ‘Morte d’Arthur’, describing how the Lady of the Lake fashioned Excalibur out of sight: ‘Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps/ Upon the hidden bases of the hills.’ Then he gave himself a little pat on the back: ‘Not bad that, Fitz, is it?’ The lines are better than not bad, as they imagine an invisible process of creation by incorporating several fragments of earlier writing.

Every doctor can remember a time when bacterial infection laid waste to their patient with hair-raising speed and virulence. The most indelible for me occurred a decade ago during surgical night shifts. Again and again I was called to the bedside of a young woman with the ‘flesh-eating bug’, or necrotising fasciitis. By the time she’d presented to A&E, a recent graze to her leg was causing such disproportionate pain that her family had been forced to carry her. When the surgeons opened up the limb, they found carnage. Group A streptococcus – a bacterium that benignly colonises the throats and skin of millions of us – had burrowed from the graze into the deepest tissues, where it dissolved flesh with the ease of battery acid.

What is your p(doom)? This is the pseudo-scientific manner in which some people express the strength of their belief that an artificial superintelligence running on computers will, in the coming decades, kill all humans. If your p(doom) is 0.1, you think it 10 per cent likely. If your p(doom) is 0.9, you’re very confident it will happen. Well, maybe ‘confident’ isn’t the word. Those who have a high p(doom) and seem otherwise intelligent argue that there’s no point in having children or planning much for the future because we are all going to die. One of the most prominent doomers, a combative autodidact and the author of Harry Potter fan-fiction named Eliezer Yudkowsky, was recently asked what advice he would give to young people. He replied: ‘Don’t expect a long life.

Ettore Majorana vanished in March 1938. According to Frank Close in Destroyer of Worlds, the 31-year-old Sicilian physicist ‘probably understood more nuclear physics theory than anyone in the world’, and was hailed by Enrico Fermi as a ‘magician’, in the elevated company of Newton and Galileo. Majorana was also an ardent fascist; yet he was haunted by the destructive potential of his work on mapping the nucleus. His disappearance – perhaps a suicide; more likely a new, incognito life in South America – has been related to an anguished remark he made to a colleague: ‘Physics has taken a bad turn. We have all taken a bad turn.

In 1941, as it entered the second world war, the US Army barely bested Bulgaria’s for size and combat readiness. Nor did US forces have very much idea of what conditions were like in their new theatres of operation. In the winter of 1942, hot-weather gear and lightweight machinery landed in the deserts of North Africa where hot and dry conditions were assumed to persist throughout the year. Men froze half to death, even as their digging equipment foundered in winter mud. Sand, Snow and Stardust is the story of how the US military shed its ignorance and, by harnessing logistical intelligence and environmental knowledge, turned America into a global superpower. Before the second world war the US operated just 14 overseas military bases.

In 1997 the world chess champion Garry Kasparov was beaten by an IBM computer system called Deep Blue. It had defied all expectations, exploring some 300 million possible moves in one second. The most that skilled chess players can contemplate is about 110 moves at any given time. It was a seminal moment in the advance of artificial intelligence – even if not fully understood, writes Richard Susskind in How to Think About AI. People did not wholly grasp the impact of the exponential power of computers, nor that new ways would be found to develop systems that could achieve human expert-level performance. Fast forward to 2016 and to AlphaGo, a machine designed to play the complex game Go, which has more possible moves than atoms in the observable universe.