| FALTER Has the Human Game Begun To Play Itself Out? Bill McKibben New York: Henry Holt & Company, April 2019 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-250-17826-8 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-250-17826-6 | 291pp. | HC | $28.00 | |
| Page 58: | "A barrel of oil, currently about sixty dollars, provides energy equivalent to about twenty-three thousand hours of human labor." |
| Missing word: S/B "currently worth about sixty dollars". |
| Page 59: | "In the summer of 2016, temperatures in cities in Pakistan and Iran peaked at slightly above 129 degrees Fahrenheit for a couple of days in July, the highest reliably recorded temperatures ever measured on planet Earth." |
| Incorrect: Per Guinness World Records, Death Valley in California claims the crown. A temperature of 134°F (56.7°C) was recorded on 10 July 1913, and validated by the World Meteorological Organization. |
| Page 157: | "[Bill] Joy, the father of the UNIX operating system, argued that the new technologies starting to emerge might go very badly wrong..." |
| Incorrect: Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson fathered UNIX at Bell Labs circa 1971. I surmise that McKibben heard that Bill Joy, then a grad student and ace programmer at Berkeley, developed BSD UNIX — a version different than the original AT&T UNIX. |
| Page 158: | "In his foundational 2008 paper, "The Basic AI Drives," researcher Stephen M. Omohundro pointed out that even an AI pointed in the most trivial direction could cause real problems. 'Surely no harm could come from building a chess-playing robot,' Omohundro begins—except that, unless it's very carefully programmed, 'it will try to break into other machines and make copies of itself, and will try to acquire resources without regard for anyone else's safety...'" |
| This scenario of the piratical chess-playing robot seems far-fetched to me. |
| Page 194: | "But both are transformative nonetheless—and, crucially, the power they wield is human in scale. They don't threaten the game we've been playing all these years. Indeed, they threaten to make it more beautiful." |
| Word choice: S/B "promise". |
| Page 222: | "In the United States, young people staged a sit-in at Congress to demand a special committee on a 'Green New Deal' by early 2019 pollsters reported that..." |
| Punctuation, capitalization: S/B "'Green New Deal.' By early 2019". |
| Page 222: | "The same is true around the world, from Duterte's Philippines to Erdogan's Turkey to Maduro's Venezuela to Putin's Russia, where protest is often lethal." |
| Word choice: S/B "fatal". |
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