Machines Like Us, by Ian Mcewan

All well and good but, from what we’ve seen so far, the numbers in this book fall extremely far short of what would prove the existence of any natural law.

To be fair, the author does admit to the limited nature of his database. Limited is right. Even big data and predictive analytics on a supercomputer couldn’t come near to understanding all those brains, generating all that history; each minute of which represents the output of astronomically multilayered interactions, none of which we can possibly comprehend from within our own present-day, astronomically multilayered interactions. So, learning from history, as the author suggests we can do, might not be that easy. The past indeed appears to be a foreign country.

Finally, this Big Book’s conclusions about future world crises and how to solve them are disappointingly oldfashioned. Yes, climate change, pollution and resource depletion (and, above all, the Third World desire to keep up with the Joneses) are all adding to planet-wide problems. But there’s no mention here of nano-technology and its promise entirely to remove these problems over the next few decades.

Above all, there’s the real crisis: the coming of the nano-fabricator – manipulating atoms from dirt, air and water to create anything, free (from food to furniture) – makes everything discussed in this book (and, to be fair, all other books on the same subject) irrelevant.

However, as a first step, Upheaval definitely warrants A for Effort.