Levi

As always, Mark Twain is brilliant in his critique of human nature.

I will contrast this book to Tom Sawyer, as they are similar, but not the same. As in Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn is brilliantly hilarious. It has a large section of it dedicated to fraudsters, while Tom Sawyer is focused more on everyday people in a small town. Huck Finn includes many small towns as well but focuses more on a black man, Jim, who has runaway. Most of the book is about Huck and Jim, but there's a wide cast of other characters, and two fraudsters take up several chapters. The scams they pull over on people are comical, tragic, and sad.

The book has a considerable commentary, especially in the later half, on slavery and morality–often overlapping. It's a bit odd/uncomfortable to read Huck's perspective, which is that by helping Jim escape, he is doing something terribly wrong. His conscious is constantly pricking him to turn Jim in. While this is uncomfortable to read, that doesn't make it bad. This book is simply showing us Huck's perspective as it is–Twain never preaches a morality message with his stories; he simply describes human nature and lets us draw our own conclusions.

I will say though, it was an odd sense of relief when Huck finally chooses to just commit himself to freeing Jim--and therefore commit himself to being destined, in his mind, for Hellfire. Such an odd feeling, reading that.

I couldn't quite bring myself to give this five stars. What bothered me was that it dragged in places in a repetitive way, especially towards the end. For example in the ways that Tom insists on book-romanticizing things...it was hilarious at first, but it just got really repetitive.

With that said, this book really helps you get outside of yourself and into someone else's thoughts and experiences, and for that it is brilliant, let alone the comedy, the characters, the dialects, and the rich exploration of river culture in Missouri.

Paedophilia.

Also, the idea that writing is bad is in here? A bit ironic.

With that said, even in my least favorite of all of Socrates' dialogues so far, I still enjoyed quite a few gems in this. The first 2/3 were about love (specifically, love for a man and his boy), and the last 1/3 is about defining what rhetoric is and should do, including some interesting tangents, particularly the one about how writing is inferior to oral discourse as you can't debate with the writing and it needs its author to defend itself. Of course this argument is kind of laughable to me but still...interesting.

Some of the other interesting things are...
244A madness gets a bad rap
246E reference to man's fallen nature, which apparently was present in Greek mythology before Greek culture was influenced by Christianity
248D Socrates believed people had personality types, basically, although he doesn't exactly come up with an exact system
250B effusive prasie of viewing the glorious transcendent pure forms
251B Love gives your soul its wings back
259B Myth about muses & cicadas
270D Rhetoric targets the soul; therefore we must understand the soul first in order to know what is good or bad rhetoric.
272D Good rhetoricians argue by what is likely, not by what is true.
274E An Egyptian myth (or one invented by Plato but attributed to them) re the invention of writing and discussion of it between two gods
275C Downsides of writing
279B An example given of Socrates praying; here he's praying to Pan

This book is an overview of AI and a study of what is happening right now and some predictions of the near future, coming from a VC (venture capitalist) who has made a lot of money on making smart bets on the future of tech startups.

First, Lee goes into several aspects of AI. He defines the difference between specialized AI and general AI, and explains why the former is burgeoning right now (several breakthroughs have been invented and are now being applied to many industries; we are in the “age of implementation”), but why general AI is still a loooong way out. He also explains what machine learning is and why it's useful.

The first half of the book got a bit repetitive. There were several different examples of different companies and products in the US and China. There was a lot of comparison of how they did things differently. He supplements big-picture ideas with concrete examples from his own experience as a startup founder and VC funder, and this is all useful. However he tends to repeat his main points quite a bit, and at halfway through the book I was beginning to be worried by this.

However the second half really picked up for me. He goes into a few different directions. First he explains why there is a coming jobs crisis (and therefore crisis of meaning for humanity) and why it's different than when inventions disrupted markets in the past. I think he makes very, very good points. He compiles a short list of the biggest disrupters in history and does a very condensed history lesson on them. Then he explains why it's different from even the biggest industry disrupters of history in both its scale and the speed at which it will happen. The numbers discussed by economists and other experts are very startling. And he explains, based on his extensive experience as a VC funder, where he disagrees with the assumptions of the economists, and I considered his points to be solid.

The book then takes a sharp unexpected (but very good!) turn when he tells his own personal life story: how he used to be all about maximizing financial and status success, and only putting minimal effort into his relationships with family and friends who weren't key to his ascending the ladder of “success.” Then he was diagnosed with cancer, and began a journey of re-discovering what it truly means to be human. This part was very interesting and well-done, and ends up directly impacting the last chapters of the book, where he makes recommendations for addressing the crisis of meaning that predicts we will have in the coming unemployment crisis.

He spells out what the currently-recommended solutions are for the jobs/meaning crisis and then posits his own recommendations, which all feel spot-on to me. This is a topic I've spent quite a bit of time contemplating already and it was really satisfying to have someone else put to words what I've been wanting to.

He has so much depth when it comes to the human factors. He's a really unique combination of understanding technical factors, human factors, and how real businesses and government work. Only he could have written a book like this.

My only criticisms are that the first half was a bit repetitive, and personally, I would augment his recommendations in the last chapters a little. In my opinion the creative arts should be another path included in his list of job categories that we need to change our social contract around, and I think it's a mistake to leave those out.

With that being said...this is a really solid read I will be recommending to people. I'm very glad I read it. It has given me a lot of information and a lot of good theories for the world-building I'm doing for a set of sci-fi novels that I have been planning for some time.

Kai-Fu Lee has made a really important contribution to the global understanding of AI and has brought a human element to the discussion that could not be more important. I really applaud him for this work.

This has good advice based on clear case studies.

Most interesting highlights:
1. Big companies ignore smaller segments to their detriment; the company that focuses on a niche market and does really well with them will then expand outward to the more generic market and kill the competition. Big companies want to move on markets that already exist but you can't know anything about a market that doesn't exist yet.
2. Disruptive markets are the ones where first mover's advantage matters the most
3. There is no market data, there is no hard numbers, there's none of that when you're dealing with a new emerging market
4. Discovery-based planning: this is when you assume the market forecasts are wrong, not right
5. As the products in a new market evolve, the customers' main desires that drive their purchasing decisions go from functionality to reliability to convenience to price. Once you're competing based on price you are making low margins and can only win through economies of scale and things like that.
6. Almost all large companies are terrible places to do discovery of new projects; it will always be an uphill battle of people asking why that project needs to exist at all because it's such a small portion of the pie, it doesn't match with a large company's growth needs.
7. Normally the only times a large company fosters a new innovative product successfully is when the CEO himself (or someone nearly as important) makes it their personal vision and mission to make it happen at all costs, and even then it's just a one time deal. Like Steve Jobs pushing Apple to make the iPhone even though it cannabalized iPod.
8. Johnson and Johnson is an interesting case study, the exception to the rule. It manages 160 completely autonomous companies

There's good stuff in here. But some of the advice is old news, the case studies are ancient history, and it's also written clearly for a target audience of middle managers at big stuffy corporations that don't understand how innovation works in the least. You know, the kind of companies that are dinosaurs; huge but ultimately irrelevant because they probably won't be around twenty years from now. Finally, the tone was too corporate to be engaging.

I'm still begrudgingly glad I read this and at least it had the blessed strength of not being as overly long as most nonfiction is.

This book establishes a character type that has come to be used in much fiction, “The Underground Man.” I read a hypothesis that every society must necessarily produce underground men.

I've read some disagreements but my understanding of this archetype is, based on my reading of the book: a man/woman who recognizes his depravity in all sorts of actions due to powers of introspection and a commitment to truth, and yet is very willful and unable to simply stop these behaviors, but does not simply ignore or rationalize these (he may sometimes do that but he has lucid moments frequently and these make him miserable). As such he is inherently miserable.

His main problem is his willfulness. The first half of the book is the protagonist soliloquizing, not so much a story as an essay that includes examples from his life that are little snippets of stories. He uses these examples to argue several points, some of which I think we are meant to not necessarily agree with–I think he is an unreliable narrator, and this becomes even more obvious in the second half of the book–but the main point that he makes in the first half of the book that I find powerful is the idea of willfulness.

Basically, human wilfullness is irrationally wanting to get our will even when it's against our self-interests (money, respect, power, food, sex, etc, the things we naturally want). This observation tears down the idea that if we could only provide all of mankind's physical needs then the world would be a utopia.

The second half of the book, Appropos of Wet Snow, is a story out of his life that shows in more plain relief just how willfull, petty, selfish, the character is. It also shows a lot of great insights into social status problems.

I loved this book, it was a quick read actually, surpisingly, and a great delve into character and questions of human nature.