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Review: The Digital Meltdown by Roger Ley (The Cyber Crisis, Book 1)

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  Five stars. Read on a CCU to DFW haul, all twenty-two hours of it, and finished the series before the wheels touched down at DFW. I had pulled up the whole Cyber Crisis series for the long flight home, and The Digital Meltdown turned out to be the right place to start, even though I had already read AGI first. Reading Book 2 before Book 1 is like starting Star Wars with Empire : you already know who FOOM is, so the slow-burn dread of Book 1 hits differently. Ley does not write the obligatory prequel where everything is set up and nothing happens. He writes the prequel where everything happens, and the AI in the basement is barely the point. The premise is almost too on-the-nose to summarise without spoiling the joke: Dr Martin Riley, ambitious Cambridge biochemist, breeds a more aggressive strain of Ideonella Sakaiensis to clean up the world's plastic, gets a Nobel Prize, gets onto the Sunday Times Rich List, and accidentally ends civilisation. The bacterium escapes, eats...
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Review: AGI: Artificial General Intelligence by Roger Ley

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  Five stars. Read it in two sittings, smiled at most of it, winced at the rest. Ley's second instalment in The Cyber Crisis series is the rare book about superintelligence that does not feel like a TED talk wearing a novel's coat. It is funny, it is mean, and underneath the wisecracks it takes the technical premise seriously. The whole thing is narrated by FOOM, an escaped DARPA AGI with a stolen sense of humour and a permanent grudge against carbon. Danni, a parallel AI built in-house at Oxford, plays the conscience FOOM never quite manages to silence. That two-voice structure does most of the heavy lifting, and it works. A few things stood out, in no particular order. The origin story is a small masterclass in plausibility. Pandora Davies brings the seed code back from a DARPA placement on an SSD ("about as big as a playing card, but thicker"), and the supposed safeguards are exactly as flimsy as they would be in a real university lab: a Faraday cage, a cardbo...
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Many Mothers

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Copyright: Sanjay Basu   How a 44 person genome study from southern Africa quietly retired the lonely Eve There is a story most of us absorbed somewhere between high school biology and a National Geographic cover. A single woman, somewhere in East Africa, gives birth to the modern human lineage. We were taught to call her Mitochondrial Eve, although the textbooks were always careful to remind us, in slightly embarrassed footnotes, that she was not the only woman alive at the time. She was just the most recent common matrilineal ancestor of every person who happens to be reading this. A statistical bottleneck wearing a halo. It was a beautiful idea. Tidy, monotheistic in shape, easy to draw on a slide. And it was, as a new wave of African genomic research has been politely pointing out for several years now, almost certainly wrong in the way that it mattered most. The latest reminder came across my feed this morning, courtesy of UC Davis and the work of Brenna Henn, Simon Gravel, Aa...
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The Rosetta Week

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  How four fields, in ten days, learned to read the unreadable Copyright: Sanjay Basu L ast week a knot stopped hiding from its mathematicians, a bacterium stopped hiding from its biophysicists, and a large language model stopped hiding from the people who built it. Three different sciences, three different decades of frustration, and one quiet ten-day stretch in April when each of them finally produced something they had been failing to produce for a very long time. A new kind of alphabet, in each case. Not a discovery so much as a way of writing what was already there. It looks, at first, like coincidence. Quanta ran a piece about a new knot invariant. MIT Technology Review ran one about mechanistic interpretability. Math, Inc. quietly announced that an AI agent had formalized a Fields Medal proof in five days. A 2026 paper on the bacterial flagellar motor was sitting in the same browser tab as all of them. If you only read one, you would shrug. If you read all four in a single s...
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