Tag Archives: Books

Babel as a Luddite Fantasy Book

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I read Babel by R.F. Kuang about two months ago. It’s an interesting book, one which I’d argue is a Luddite book at it’s core. Now the author explicitly calls it a Revolutionary book, in the subtitle, but as I wrote in my post about AI and Ludditism the Luddites were revolutionary and they were in a civil war.

Just so you know, there are spoilers in this discussion. Somewhat obviously.

The book is something of an alternative of our own Earth, based at Oxford University. Which, R.F. Kuang did study at. So she actually does have significant experience at the university and in the surrounding city. In her first series, The Poppy Wars, she has shown her excellent historical research skills. She dug into the Rape of Nanking or Nanjing Massacre as it is called today.

In this version of Oxford there is a specific type of magic, which is an offshoot of the language arts. The source of magic is the tension and distance between the definition of a word in one language and the “same” word in another language. An example would be the difference between Gezelig or Hegge, Dutch/Danish, and Cozy in English. Cozy is the closest word we have in English to these similar words in other language. These other words includes the love of family in a comfortable warm environment often during winter.

The distance between the two words drives some sort of associated magical power. Perhaps it would create a warm comfortable space where people were happy and more likely to fall in love. In other cases, such as the difference in English run and Chinese characters representing a running human, could power a train.

There’s another material required to enable this, a specific type of Silver. This Silver was mined all over the world, but like historical artifacts, much of it found itself in Britain. Similarly to how raw materials have moved from the edge of empire to the core of empire. Both during the height of the British empire and during our own time of the US domination.

The creation of the magic is created by the translation group in Oxford students and researchers in “Babel” which of course is based off the Biblical name. The students were nearly all international students with significant competence in English and one or more languages. Generally the more distant the language is from English, the more significant the power of the magic.

The blocks of silver basically replace steam power in this world. There are power plants, cars powered by the silver, and machines powered by silver. This is the industrial revolution in this world. Instead of steam, it’s silver. Either way, it requires significant extraction from physical locations around the world to power the technology.

The silver and the power of the words gradually reduces, which continually requires more silver and the domination of new languages. Peoples and Languages are related. To exploit the language means you are exploiting the people. Those languages are made subservient to English.

Where this becomes a Luddite and revolutionary work, is that the foreigners that perform the work, revolt. They decide to share the power of the silver. First skimming material and stealing large amounts of silver to support liberation efforts elsewhere in the world.

The academics form a coalition with the workers that are being pushed to the edge because of silver power. This is the same struggle Luddites found themselves in. They fought against the use of steam power that dehumanize the people using the tools. Silver does the same. Silver enables child labor. Silver, like steam, crops up empire.

In fact, the response of the crown is strikingly similar to what Merchant describes in the Blood in the Machine. The crown decided to respond with force, sending significant number of troops. Using military might to force the academics back to work.

The workers they actually teach the academics how to protect themselves. They create barricades. They bring weapons. They drive strategy for fighting the military. This is truly a revolution.

However, like the Luddite revolution, the academic revolution in this book fails. The Crown does win.

I truly think this book does a great job explaining alignment between white collar workers and blue collar workers. It’s obvious that today, which has a lot of analogues to the 1870s in the UK, that engineers, developers, tech workers generally, should create coalition with union organizers for service workers and blue collar workers. We have more similarly with each other than we do with the owners of capital.

I think this is even more true with the backlash we’re seeing today in tech leadership. Zuckerberg just rolled back a lot of benefits/support for LGBTQ employees and users of his products. He’s claimed that companies have been neutered and need more masculine energy.

I think this ant-employee behavior. It is anti-user behavior. Claiming that a company needs more aggression is not a healthy way to manage a team. Yes, you want competition between companies themselves, but you do not want competition between employees. It breeds distrust and anxiety in the company.

The problem is that based on donations to Trump and general alignment between people like Musk, Bezo, and Zuckerberg the technology leaders aren’t interested in competing with each other. Instead they are dividing up the digital space and punch down by attacking their employees.

Babel, Blood in the Machine, and similar books highlight the solidarity we need with fellow workers. Tech white collar workers need to drop the solidarity with tech leadership. They do not care about engineers. They will drop you as soon as they can. They play on your emotions to stay working for them, because you’ll be hurting your coworkers.

Anything that negatively impacts your coworker long term is their choice. Leadership dictating the number of promotions and how to promote is a choice. Their hands are only tied by their own greed. If you have to wait another year for a promotion, fire your boss. You earned that promotion. With the sheer volume of layoffs, it should be clear to all tech workers that you only matter as long as they can exploit you for their gain.

You can figure out how to exploit your employers.

What Books Have Meant to Me

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I have been a voracious reader most of my life. However, it didn’t come easy to me at first. In First Grade, where we really started to learn to read, I struggled a great deal. I always feared reading out loud because I would jumble words. They would swim in my vision and make it really difficult to read. I still switch words and I feel like when I’m reading out loud, I’m staring at the whole page rather than a specific line. It’s very difficult. However, I liked the stories that I was plunged into and it definitely made things feel worth it. In 3rd grade I really started to read ahead, but started to get major headaches while reading, so I had to get glasses just for reading. It eventually turned into requiring glasses all the time.

In 5th grade I really jumped into the world of Fantasy. When i’d get in trouble with the parents, we’d get sent to corners and one of the corners was next to my parent’s “nice” book shelf. In there was a really old version of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I was super interested by the book spines, as there was this crazy eye in the center of a ring. I decided to read this book when I got an assignment for doing a diorama about a specific book. Most of my classmates selected much shorter books, but I was super proud of selecting that book.

A few years later, my friends and I had a falling out. I ended up falling back into that series again. I read everything i could get my hands on. I was so depressed, but didn’t really understand what depression was. I was alone, but couldn’t really articulate to my parents and nor could my parents help me with my depression and loneliness because they didn’t have the emotional tools to help me with my depression. My dad specifically, because he was struggling with his own depression so he just wasn’t there.

As a result, I end up spending a great deal of time with Middle Earth. Since this was around when Metallica Load came out, I deeply associated that album with the Lord of the Rings. To the point where I was really disappointed with the video of “Hero of the Day” because I kept associating the narrator of that song with Frodo. It’s not the worst video, but it definitely didn’t fit with what I was expecting given how many times I heard that album while reading those books.

Over the years I’ve escaped into books to deal with the depression rooted in my parents fighting. Dealing with my girlfriend in HS. The divorce of my parents. Books were always my escape from these difficult times. Lately, I’ve been depressed to the point where it was a struggle to read.

I plan to start a small series on here for when the fancy strikes to write about a book that meant something to me and why it meant something to me. Something in more detail than what I wrote, here, about Lord of the Rings. This idea came from the Movies with Mikey episode about what Animation Taught Us. For me though, since I was limited in what I could watch on TV, including Movies, I think that Books are more appropriate. I’m not sure exactly how this will play out, so we’ll see.

Review of Oathbringer by Brand Sanderson

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Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive, #3)Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was definitely ok. It was a good way to pass time, but I don’t think this book is nearly as good as some of Sanderson’s other writing. I find these books to be bloated, take an overly long time for events to happen, and for there to be a general lack of emotional depth for many of the characters. The story progresses along a somewhat predictable path with a few minor twists and turns that feel like they come out of no where, but it doesn’t really matter. The twists don’t really feel like they materially change the general direction of the story.

The author tried to add a great deal of tension throughout the story, but I never felt that the important characters were really ever at a real threat to being killed. I also didn’t feel like there was a threat to them being removed from the real important battle in a meaningful way. This was basically accurate throughout the story.

I also felt that many of the characters still seemed two dimensional even though we’ve now been with them for three books. This was simply confounded by the fact that no one truly grieved when an important (but not a main) character was killed. I couldn’t help but compare the death of this character to my reactions to characters that were significanly more minor or insignificant generally to the story, but we learned more about them in series like Malazan Book of the Fallen.

This was a good entertaining book, it’s not the best fantasy out there. It’s good enough to get you through to a better series though.

View all my reviews

The known unknowns and the unknown unknowns of AI

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I’m reading a book called “Robot Uprisings” which is quite obviously about robots and how they could attack and take over the world. I think the most interesting thing about this collection of short stories isn’t the fact that there are uprisings, but the many different routes that AI could decide to revolt. There’s a broad range from robots debating if they should revolt or not, to an AI that we never figure out what to do with and only revolts when we try to kill it.

I think that these difference scenarios really encapsulate the limitations of our imagination with what could happen with robots. I think the most terrifying thing is what we really don’t understand about robots or AI in general. What is being built without our knowledge in government labs, in universities, and in hacker labs. We’re debating the ethics of the NSA and GCHQ espionage of their own citizens and the limits of rights in the digital space. We’re using rudimentary “AI” in terms of heuristics and algorithms. We as end users or that are impacted by these algorithms or if their very assumptions are even ethical, without bias, or anything along those lines. danah boyd argues that the Oculus Rift is sexist because the algorithms that control the 3D functionality are all designed by men for men. Agree with her or not, but women get sick using the Rift.

If we can’t agree on the ethics of programs that are in use and the risks posed by the solutionism of the internet, then we’re in serious trouble when we actually create a thinking machine. Stephen Hawking argues that we would not sit and wait for an alien species to come and visit earth if we have advanced warning, but that is exactly what we’re doing with AI. We know it’s coming, we know that there will be something similar to a “Singularity” in the future. Our internet optimists are waiting breathlessly for it, but we don’t truly know the long term impact of this technology on how it shapes our own society.

It’s not just the risk of AI destroying our world and all of humanity. It’s also the lack of understanding of how our current algorithms are shaping our conversations in the media and social media. For instance, it’s fairly commonly known now that a lot of pretty major news outlets are using Reddit as a source to identify upcoming stories. TMZ, the Chive, and tons of other content sites mine it for memes and stories, while more serious news sources find interesting comments and use those to drive more interesting stories.

I believe the tweet below really does a good job showing how lowly we think of ethics in our society. This will really negatively impact our ability to understand the risks of AI. AI is going to really transform our culture and we don’t know what we don’t understand about the risks of the technology.

Looking for feedback on the new look

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I just decided to go bigger with my writing. I’m planning on writing at least 3 or 4 times a week on here. My goal is to write on a consistent basis so I can begin working on a book. I’m not entirely sure what I’d like to write about. I’ve had some friends over the past two years suggest writing a book with them. The first book I wrote several chapters, but my co-author became too busy to continue. Which was fine, it was a great learning experience for me and I’d love to collaborate with her again. My more recent request hasn’t really gone anywhere beyond the first phase of planning, so I figure I might as well just try to come up with an idea on my own.

So, I’d like to get some feedback from all my loyal readers on a few things.

First, how’s the new layout and color scheme. I’m not really the best with design like this, so please provide some feedback!

Second, any topics you think I’d be able to provide insight into that you’d like to see me write about either in my blog or in a longer format of a book.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to engaging more on this new platform with you all.