HomeBook Reviews

Agents of change

14 October 2024Book Reviewsagent-based modelling, complexity economicsNick Dunbar

Making Sense of Chaos’ by J. Doyne Farmer (Penguin Books) As any student will tell you, no doubt armed with chat GPT, economics is defined as “The study of the allocation of scarce resources”. But a more difficult question is this: what is economics for? To its critics, much of academic economics appears to exist…

Levelling the Playing Field

7 August 2024Book Reviewsartificial intelligence, generative AI, innovation, large language modelsNick Dunbar

How to get in early and work with AI before it transforms our world. My review of Ethan Mollick’s book

The Unaccountability Machine

17 May 2024Book Reviewscybernetics, economics, information theory, managementNick Dunbar

Could a forgotten management theory from the 1970s solve today’s economic malaise? A review of the book by Dan Davies

It was great apart from all the death

19 December 2023Book ReviewsCovid-19, personal financeNick Dunbar

Felix Salmon recasts the Covid pandemic as an economic drama of risk preferences and micro-interactions.

The mountain range and the heat bath

14 July 2023Book ReviewsAI, artificial intelligenceNick Dunbar

Is there another book left to be written about AI? The second of a two-part series.

Mechanical desires – some published and unpublished books on AI

30 June 2023Book ReviewsNick Dunbar

How do recent books help us understand the boom in artificial intelligence, and what is left to be written?

Rigged: The Incredible True Story of the Whistleblowers Jailed after Exposing the Rotten Heart of the Financial System

8 June 2023Book Reviewsinterest rate benchmarks, LIBORRobert Carver

Were prosecutions of bankers for LIBOR rigging an injustice? This is the argument of a new book, reviewed by Rob Carver

Microprediction: Building an Open AI Network

22 September 2022Book ReviewsAI, predictionRobert Carver

Open source prediction networks offer cheap AI forecasting outside the control of tech giants. But lack of infrastructure means the vision has yet to be realised, writes Rob Carver.

Viruses: Agents of Evolutionary Invention

2 November 2021Book Reviewsbiology, Covid-19, evolution, medicineNick Dunbar

Dozens of books have already been published on the pandemic, and many are already out of date. To appreciate Covid, it’s best to step back and read this account of viruses published four years ago.

How my ancestors helped me through the pandemic

5 January 2021Book ReviewsCovid-19, medicine, pandemicsNick Dunbar

The experience of a doctor who fought pandemics a century and a half ago provides some hope for today