My Favourite Books of 2023
Every year, I list some of my favourite new Christmas albums as well as a couple of books I particularly enjoyed over the last year (see also the 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 editions). This year, it’s an unusually short list: not because I did not get round to reading, more because I am a bit too exhausted at this point to spend many of my remaining brain cells before Christmas to write about what I read. So only five recommendations this time, I’m afraid. A very happy Christmas to you all from Oxford and happy reading & listening 🎄
Books
Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms are Transforming Financial Markets
Donald MacKenzie, 2021, Princeton University Press
While not a book about AI — the area in which I’ve carved out my niche since before it become cool in 2019 — Donald MacKenzie’s book on high-frequency trading is the kind of book that should be written about AI, especially as it pertains to the news.
MacKenzie is a sociologist and it is fascinating to see how he is undaunted by the apparent complexity of the financial and algorithmic systems he seeks to explore, understand, and explain as part of his research (somewhere at the beginning of the book there’s a wonderfully wry remark about how all these things usually aren’t as complicated as they seem and that a lot of the talk around it is merely to keep people out).
For those unfamiliar with what high-frequency trading is: think super-fast, computer-driven stock trading where algorithms make lightning-quick decisions to buy or sell for tiny profits in the blink of an eye. The faster you can process data and execute trades, the more likely that you can outperform your competitors. And there is an upper limit to that: the speed of light. Nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum (approximately 300,000 kilometres per second) although you can get very, very close. One of MacKenzie’s examples is the data transmission time from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s datacenter to Nasdaq’s datacenter in New Jersey (in milliseconds (ms), one thousandth of a second) along the geodesic. With glass fiber (at a refractive index of 1.47) this takes about 6.65 ms. The fastest microwave links in 2016 needed about 3.98 ms. The Einsteinian limit for the same distance is about 3.94 ms.
He’s not one to get sucked into bull-shitty talk of “technology revolutionising XYZ” but instead carefully lays out how the interplay of technological advances, financial incentives, human ingenuity, and cold, hard politics and power have re-shaped the infrastructure on which modern trading happens; and how trading itself has (and has not) changed as a result.
Come for the sociological framing…
“It would, for example, be a mistake to think of finance’s large technical systems as either simply the outcome of human intentions or as fully under human control. Such systems can manifest behavior that is neither anticipated nor welcomed by the human beings who design and construct them.”
…stay for the crazy stories from the field, including this one about honey, bird-droppings, and designing a casing for a laser transmitter needed for a weather-resistant network of integrated laser/millimeter-wave links among the New Jersey share-trading network:
“High tech as that is, an utterly mundane material phenomenon threatened to cause a substantial difficulty: with the equipment needing to be the open air, on towers or on top of tall buildings, it was inevitable the bird droppings would fall on the glass of the laser units, potentially blocking signals. As Persico told me:
There were literally seven figures [a sum in excess of $1,000,000] spent on creating a [coating] that was resistant to bird droppings, and the way that [the bird droppings were] simulated [in testing coatings] is that honey has the same viscosity [and it was poured] on the units to develop a [coating] where that would slough off.”
In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators After the Cinema
Gabriele Pedulla, 2012, Verso
First published in 2012, “In Broad Daylight” is a great, and in my view time-tested exploration of the ever-evolving relationship between cinema and its audience. Pedulla skillfully navigates the complex intersections of technology, culture, and spectatorship, and chronicles how the “cinematic experience” has transcended the traditional confines of the movie theater— moving from a communal setting to personalised and fragmented experiences enabled by digital media.
The book isn’t particularly long but packed with punchy chapters that theorise the changing nature of film and cinema. What I found delightful about it was the absence of any form of nostalgia in Pedulla’s analysis. He clearly loves cinema and movie theatres but this doesn’t cloud his view when it comes to examining how technology and audience habits change the movies. For instance:
“Things changed as soon as technological innovations began to offer a wide range of possibilities and moving images were liberated from the picture house’s constraints. Precisely because it has been openly challenged, the movie theatre suddenly appears right before our eyes. Only now that the frame has shed its false naturalness, thanks to the competition of new media, are we able to see it as an artificial construction that was perfected over the course of decades.”
And:
“Following the auditorium’s decline, the style of films will change as well, and with it possibly the type of pleasure and aesthetic experience sought from moving images. Divested of the big screen, cinema of the future will inevitably be different from what we have had until now. As will its spectators.”
Words to remember, not least for those who currently theorise what AI “means” for [enter your favourite subject here].
The Man From The Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann
Ananyo Bhattacharya, 2021, Penguin
I am not a fan of hagiography (which this arguably is, at least to a degree), and the book can be a bit dry at times but what Bhattacharya has achieved here is a fine and rich portrait of someone who was — by all accounts—nothing short of a genius, a true Renaissance man. And yet, many will have never heard of John von Neuman (even this year’s Oppenheimer somehow managed to ignore him).
A polymath of unparalleled depth, the Hungarian-American’s virtuosity extended far beyond the realms of mathematics, with his fingers dancing upon the keys of quantum mechanics, game theory, economics and computer science (and the book does a good job at taking us through his inventions and putting the things he contributed to in context). For example, have you ever wondered where the term “zero-sum” comes from?
Von Neumann could not get any further with multi-player games, so he switched to thinking about a situation with just two opponents whose individual payouts sum to zero. ‘It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail, Iris Murdoch once wrote. Von Neumann coined the term ‘zero-sum’ to describe such games of total conflict, in which one person’s loss is the other’s gain. One indication of the influence of game theory is that ‘zero-sum’ has now passed into the vernacular.
Even Wikipedia struggles to adequately convey just how influential his man was…
This, of course, is the other side of the coin: von Neuman played a key role in the invention of nuclear weapons, was part of the target selection committee, and spent much of his later life consulting for the US defence apparatus. With light, there’s also always shadow.
I’ll leave you with this quote from the last page of the book, which has a certain Rortyesque pragmatism to it:
‘For progress there is no cure. Any attempt to find automatically safe channels for the present explosive variety of progress must lead to frustration. The only safety possible is relative, and it lies in an intelligent exercise of day-to-day judgment.’
AI & Society: Spring 2022 Issue of Daedalus
Edited by James Manyika, 2022, Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
I do not have much to say on this book, other than that I have been recommending it to anyone who asked me about a recommendation for what to read on AI over the past year. The reasons are threefold:
a) It is available open-access here.
b) It spans an impressive set of thinkers and views on the subject.
c) It has aged surprisingly well.
Tolle lege, tolle lege…
Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodes and Other Writing from the London Review of Books
Hilary Mantel, 2020, 4th Estate
A compilation of brief essays, ‘Mantel Pieces’ is an ideal introduction if you’re not familiar with Hilary Mantel’s work (which everyone should be as far as I am concerned). Her lecture on “Royal Bodies” contained herein is legendary, of course, (and much misread as a personal attack on what was then Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge) although perhaps the best essay, “Meeting the Devil” focuses on Mantel’s recovery from surgery and offers a sharp observation of what it means to be ill:
Illness strips you back to an authentic self, but not one you need to meet. Too much is claimed for authenticity. Painfully we learn to live in the world, and to be false. Then all our defences are knocked down in one sweep. In sickness we can’t avoid knowing about our body and what it does, its animal aspect, its demands. We see things that never should be seen; our inside is outside, the body’s sewer pipes and vaults exposed to view, as if in a woodcut of our own martyrdom.
(For a great review that captures the essence of Mantel’s literary journalism, look here).
Setting aside the content and the literary qualities of her work, Mantel’s writing also serves as a poignant reminder of elements frequently overlooked in the humdrum of academic life: the significance of individuals’ intricate internal worlds and experiences, the importance of fearlessness and rigor, and, above all, the quality of our prose itself — with writing being more than just a vessel for information, even though we often treat it as such.
Other
Not a book and also not music: Instead, an essay by film scholar David Bordwell on why, yes, “Die Hard” is a Christmas Movie (among other things): https://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2023/12/04/die-hard-revived-an-entry-revisited/
Music
In terms of music, I did not find a single new Christmas album that I liked (so if you have any recommendations, send them my way). But I loved Londres by Oxford-based Costa Rican artist Patiño — which is an absolute gem (and very much not a Christmas album).
Here’s a taster (with the sweltering summer vibes beating the cold, grey winter in an instant…):
Felix Simon is a Dieter Schwarz Scholar at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and a Knight News Innovation Fellow at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism where he is researching AI in journalism and the news industry. He works as a research assistant at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. His tweets can be found under @_Felix Simon_.
