Courtesy of striking French air traffic controllers, I had a longer journey back from Toulouse than I’d expected today, and managed to read the whole of Olivia Laing’s thought-provoking book [amazon_link id=”1782111239″ target=”_blank” ]The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”1782111239″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone[/amazon_image]

It wasn’t what I’d expected from the reviews, which made it seem like a kind of travelogue about her having some time alone in New York and reflecting on modern urban life; I’m a sucker for books about sitting in foreign cafes feeling a sense of anomie while writing in one’s notebook. Instead, [amazon_link id=”1782111239″ target=”_blank” ]The Lonely City[/amazon_link] is more a sort of successor to Susan Sontag’s [amazon_link id=”0141187123″ target=”_blank” ]Illness as Metaphor[/amazon_link] with a soupcon of Patti Smith’s [amazon_link id=”0747568766″ target=”_blank” ]Just Kids[/amazon_link]. Through her research into the work and lives of four artists who engaged with and battled with loneliness, but also with poverty, rejection, AIDS, Laing actually gives us a profound discussion of society’s inability to tolerate difference.

She also reflects on the role of our use of digital contact through social media and always being online – using it as a shield against human contact and at the same time a means of human contact. Laing notes the trajectory of Sherry Turkle’s assessment of digital tech through her trilogy, [amazon_link id=”0262701111″ target=”_blank” ]The Second Self[/amazon_link] (1984), [amazon_link id=”0684803534″ target=”_blank” ]Life on the Screen[/amazon_link] (1995) and the far more pessimistic [amazon_link id=”0465031463″ target=”_blank” ]Alone Together[/amazon_link] (2011).

Andy Warhol, one of the artists discussed by Laing, predates Twitter and Facebook. What would he have done with them, I wonder?

I’ve *loved* reading [amazon_link id=”1472918339″ target=”_blank” ]Electronic Dreams: How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer [/amazon_link]by Tom Lean. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable mix of business history and social observation, written with the enthusiasm and affection of somebody who got his first Commodore 64 at the age of 8 as a Christmas present.

[amazon_image id=”1472918339″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Electronic Dreams: How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer[/amazon_image]

The book starts with Britain’s pioneering role in computing, opening with Manchester’s ‘Baby’, the first electronic stored program computer, built on wartime expertise. It then skips straight to the late 1970s to explore why conditions then enabled the flourishing of a number of innovative computer manufacturers in the UK, and alongside this supply the expansion of mass market demand. Parts of the story are very familiar, including the competition between Sinclair and Acorn so well told in Micro Men. Other parts are less familiar. I for one didn’t know anything about Prestel, and why it failed where France’s Minitel succeeded so well. One key difference was that the French state gave business and home users free terminals at the rate of 10,000 a week by 1984. Impossible to envisage Mrs Thatcher ever thinking that a good idea.

The book has a very nice chapter on the origins and vitality of the UK games industry too. I love some of the early games: Dennis Through the Drinking Glass featured Dennis Thatcher hunting around 10 Downing Street for a G&T while trying to avoid Mrs T. There was a game based on the TV series Auf Wiedersehen Pet, which gave users the chance to play a Geordie brickie building a wall in Dusseldorf – the book doesn’t say how successful this was. The commercially unsuccessful Deus Ex Machina featured Dr Who actor Jon Pertwee, historian E.P.Thompson, rock star Ian Dury and comedian Frankie Howerd; astronomer Patrick Moore turned the gig down. Fabulous.

The book highlights the key role in the spread of computing and programming played by the famous BBC Micro, a complex but hugely successful initiative by the BBC. Many of the successful video games pioneers, including David Braben, started off with this machine, which was also familiar to many from school. The book’s epilogue features the Raspberry Pi – it was obviously written before the launch of the BBC’s MicroBit, now going free to all Year 7 high school students in Britain to prepare them to move on to the Raspberry Pi and other coding efforts.

The hope of course is that these tiny new computers will inspire another generation to innovate and create in the industry. But the history of the 1980s personal computer industry shows as well the importance of the scale and sophistication of American competitors. It is clearly right to try to familiarise and even excite all young people with the potential of the beautiful new machines, but achieving large-scale industrial success with them will need some strategic thinking by the government, of which there is disappointingly little sign at present.

I’ve long enjoyed the blog posts by Richard Jones on economic productivity and growth – his perspective from physics is always interesting. As I met him in real life for the first time this past week, I also downloaded his free e-book Against Transhumanism (download here) – a brief, compelling demolition of the idea that digital technology is hurtling us towards a ‘singularity’. The most famous transhumanist is Ray Kurzweil, I suppose, of [amazon_link id=”0715635611″ target=”_blank” ]The Singularity is Near[/amazon_link]. Prof Jones points out that:

a) exponential growth (as per Moore’s Law) cannot deliver a singularity, as the value of expnential functions is finite – unless the rate of technological improvement is constantly increasing without limit. Seems a stretch, looking at either current productivity figures or any history at all.

b) transhumanism is an apocalyptic religion, not a scientific theory.

c) To quote the e-book: “The idea that history is destiny has proved to be an extremely
bad one, and I don’t think the idea that technology is destiny will necessarily work out that well either. I do believe in progress, in the sense that I think it’s clear that the material conditions are much better now for a majority of people than they were two hundred years ago. But I don’t think the continuation of this trend is inevitable. I don’t think the progress we’ve achieved is irreversible, either, given the problems, like climate change and resource shortages, that we have been storing up for ourselves in the future. I think people who believe that further technological progress is inevitable actually make it less likely – why do
the hard work to make the world a better place, if you think that these bigger impersonal forces make your efforts futile?”

It’s well worth a read, along with the Soft Machines blog.There is a super-clear explanation of the implications of nano-technology,as you might expect from the author of the [amazon_link id=”0199226628″ target=”_blank” ]Soft Machines [/amazon_link]book.

[amazon_image id=”0198528558″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life[/amazon_image]

There’s also a chapter on why it’s unlikely you’ll ever be able to upload your brain to the cloud. Above all, though, the book explains why transhumanism is a Dangerous Idea. The idea of a Singularity has been described as the ‘Rapture of the Nerds’ (attributed to [amazon_link id=”1857238338″ target=”_blank” ]Ken McLeod[/amazon_link]), which makes it sound like the lunatic fringe. But as Prof Jones points out, the Silicon Valley crowd are seriously influential; and their view that technology has its own irresistible dynamic – the techno-determinism – elbows aside the truth that the results of technological discovery are socially determined: “Why would you want to think of technology, not as something that is shaped by human choices, but as an autonomous force with a logic and direction of its own? Although people who think this way may like to think of themselves as progressive and futuristic, it’s actually a rather conservative position, which finds it easy to assume that the way things will be in the future is inevitable and always for the best.”

Written by a physicist but like a true social scientist. The future is multiple, not singular.