Today saw the publication of my new book on Amazon, “Andrew and the Marvellous Analytical Engine”.
The Kindle edition is available now, and is a steal at £9.99.
Next week sees the release of the paperback edition, priced at an affordable £19.99.
Ideal for one of those hard to get Christmas presents, if you are thinking of getting your shopping done early.
The contents of the book are described in the introduction as follows:
This book tells a part of my story within a larger story.
I was born in 1973, as the analogue age was slipping into the digital one though I did not notice it. By the time I was a child in the 1980s, personal computing had become a national craze in Britain, ushered in by Sinclair Research with its small plastic marvels—the ZX80, the ZX81, and of course the “rubber keyed wonder” the ZX Spectrum.
In the 1990s when I was at Bar School, I migrated, to IBM compatible PCs, witnessed the arrival of Windows, and watched WordPerfect vanish into the graveyard of software. I saw the rise of the internet and the sudden appearance of the World Wide Web.
I have grown up with computers: but with a very imperfect understanding of them, and how they work. I do not think I am alone in that, although it is readily apparent to all of us, that they have a huge role in the modern world and are central to the modern civilisation of the current century. Whether that is a wholly good thing, is something I have been thinking about as I wrote this book.
Civilisation itself is a recent affair. The last Ice Age ended a mere 12,000 years ago, and what we call “civilisation” was built on a series of embedded technologies: discoveries so general in their application, and so transformative in their spread, that they changed the direction of history.
Fire. Agriculture. Bronze and then iron. Later, the printing press, and still later, electricity. Historians reckon there have been perhaps two dozen such inflection points. They are arriving faster now, each wave of innovation breaking more quickly upon the last.
Artificial intelligence (AI) I is the newest technology. It is already embedded, woven into countless systems and applications as I have found, half-noticed yet unavoidable. There is no shortage of commentary about its rise, its promise, and its perils: books, papers, websites, films, even the occasional melodrama, if you want to learn more about it.
The information problem it immediately presents, is not one of scarcity but of glut. There is too much information, too little that is digestible. When I “discovered” AI, I quickly realised that it was going to be very important: for our world, and more prosaically for my work. So, I set out to learn about it.
Over the past year, as I have experimented with different AI systems, I have thought about writing something simple: a primer. Not a grand survey, but a short and practical account of what I have learned, written for lawyers of a certain age, like me who will have to live and work with this technology. A compact guide to what matters, and how it may be of use. I hope you will find it useful.