SINGAPORE – In this week’s Book Box, The Straits Times looks at four books that tackle technology. Buy the books at Amazon. These articles include affiliate links. When you buy through them, we may earn a small commission.
Book review: Kara Swisher’s big tech tell-all feels dated and out of touch
Unfortunately, there is not much in pioneer Internet journalist Kara Swisher’s supposed tell-all that is revelatory.
Big tech is dominated by white, wealthy men divorced from reality, eager to “move fast and break things”. Check.
Governments have been too slow to regulate because they have for so long underestimated new media – surely, at this point a pedestrian conclusion.
Artificial intelligence is the next frontier and it “will eventually plough over us like a highway construction machine rolling over an anthill”.
This is a warning so belated it has become mainstream.
Book review: Space thriller meets Chinese history in Hao Jingfang’s dizzying Jumpnauts
Folding space made Hao Jingfang famous. In 2016, her science-fiction novelette Folding Beijing made her the first Chinese woman to win the prestigious Hugo Award for science fiction and fantasy works.
That story imagines a space-scarce Beijing divided into three classes, with each class allocated a set time exposed to the surface while the other two sections of the city are folded away as their residents sleep.
From folding cities, Hao has moved on to folding universes. In her second novel, the cerebral thriller Jumpnauts, alien technology enables civilisations to transcend space, “tunnelling” between universes, connecting and entangling them.
Book review: Annie Bot questions the meaning of intimacy, humanity and autonomy
Annie is as human as can be, except for the fact that she is a robot, created to please her owner Doug at all costs.
Life with him is simple. Annie spends her days exercising, cleaning and getting ready to please Doug in bed. Designed to require his pleasure in order to achieve her own, she wants for little more than making sure he is satisfied with her.
Everything crumbles when Doug’s old friend Roland comes to visit. In a single night, Annie learns that she is modelled after Gwen, Doug’s ex-wife, and keeps her first secret after a tryst with Roland in the broom closet.
The subsequent spiral reveals that Doug sees her as little more than a human-like toy, whose entire purpose is to fulfil him sexually or be subject to his wrath.
Book review: Best-selling children’s author co-writes playful book with ChatGPT
ChatGPT, which made The Straits Times Life Power List in 2023, has since added a few more feathers to its crowded cap.
The natural language processing chatbot can now say it shares a publisher, Oneworld Publications, with three Booker Prize-winning novelists.
Its latest co-author is Andy Stanton, an award-winning English children’s writer best known for the popular Mr Gum series.
Stanton, however, relegates himself to the footnotes of this mainly artificial intelligence-generated, mostly childish novel about Benny, a blue whale with a small penis who wages holy war on another underwater religious sect due to differences in member sizes.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers March 23
Butter by Asako Yuzuki sees its third week as the No. 1 fiction bestseller.
