OFF THE SHELF: MARCH 2025

How to Think about AI, A Guide for the Perplexed by Richard Susskind (OUP, March 20, 2025)

No hesitation in recommending this terrific volume, which is written in completely non-technical language and addresses every conceivable question you may have about so-called ‘Artificial Intelligence.’ The only irony is that the book wasn’t produced using AI and is published by OUP on analogue paper. A relic of the past beaming light on a giddying future, one could say.

The book is structured in five parts, Understanding AI; Thinking differently; Making AI work; Confronting the risks and Contemplating the Future. The author, whose two sons Jamie and Daniel are also authorities in this subject area, has been a visiting professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, whose influence and stature continues to grow apace. His own background was in devising ways to get AI to help lawyers, right back in the 1980s. In a codified realm such as law, there ought to be a triage for any conceivable legal case: do this or do that, here are your options. And it has worked. In some ways this is a clever way of reminding the audience that artificial intelligence as a field of computerised efficiency for human endeavours is not new. It has been a grand pursuit since the mid-20th Century with successive waves of summer and winter, excitement and setback. Instead of trying to explain how it works, Susskind begins by describing what AI can do, and needless to say the other huge area of positive application, besides law, is medicine. He notes there are ‘AI systems that can diagnose illnesses, interpret scans, recommend treatments, undertake robotic surgery, counsel patients, and assist in drug and vaccine development.’ AI helped to accelerate some of the COVID vaccines.

That is not to say that it is all convincing. Susskind says that some AI enthusiasts think AI might rescue humanity from some of its most acute crises, including poverty and climate change. Yet the energy needs of AI and its potential to exacerbate inequality are already much commented on, problems the author is acutely aware of.

One of the thrills of Susskind’s book is how the reader feels caught up in the experiment. Chat GPT was launched on 30 November 2022 by American laboratory OpenAI. OpenAI was only founded in 2015, and GPT, so that you know for the pub quiz, stands for ‘Generative Pre-trained Transformer.’

As Susskind says himself, the range, output, dexterity and sheer speed of this product, the best-known such system, seemed incredible at launch, and remain so three years later.

Will we get to ‘artificial general intelligence’ where a computer has the full intellectual range of a human being? The author tells his clients that this will happen by the mid-2030s, but adds here that the timing doesn’t matter; it will happen. He touches on Ray Kurzweil, James Lovelock, Nick Bostrum. It gets a bit scary. Where are ethics in all this? They are forgotten, if they ever existed at all, and talk about implementing ‘guardrails’ is cheap, he suggests. Turn to page 57 and you realise that the whole enterprise of universities is at risk. He doesn’t adequately cover copyright infringement, the implication being that it is merely an impediment that will get kicked aside. The existential risk of ‘unintentionally devastating AI’ is adjudged to be ‘fairly high.’ The Terminator film comes to life but as an epic, unintended consequence. Susskind references Geoffrey Hinton, the ‘godfather of AI’, who delivered the Romanes lecture at Oxford in 2024 and who quit his role at Google to warn the public of the risks of AI having experienced an ‘epiphany.’ Chapter 10 about consciousness is a delightful exploration. We assume we’re different from machines at the point of consciousness. By the end of the chapter you’ll be far less sure about that, while some of the underlying problems have been central inquiries by philosophers since at least the Enlightenment – Kant rears his head.

This book is probably the most valuable single book to read in 2025 and at least for now, we doubt very much that the carefully weighed intelligence of Susskind’s approach to the subject, informed as it is by a whole career, could in any way be matched by a machine.

Home #itscomplicated by Saba Karim Khan (Liberty, 2025)

The author (St Cross, 2007) graduated from Oxford with an MPhil in Social Anthropology and now works at NYU's campus in Abu Dhabi. Having launched the book recently at the Karachi Literature Festival, she reports it going to a reprint already which is a great success. She says, ‘it’s a non-fiction anthology that explores people's messy yet meaningful relationship with ‘home’, which in this case is Pakistan. The book rests on one conviction—that Pakistan, home to over 240 million people, over 70-80 languages and fascinating natural diversity—cannot be reduced to a breaking news ticker.’ By getting away from caricatures about Pakistan it goes right behind the scenes using a wide variety of voices: doctors, screenwriters, journalists, filmmakers, scientists, intelligence personnel, actors, academics, entrepreneurs, home-makers, students, and authors.

Jane Austin in 41 Objects by Kathryn Sutherland (Bodleian Library Publishing, March 13, 2025)

2025 is the 250Th anniversary of novelist Jane Austen’s birth. This book provides an extraordinary perspective on her life, venerating and explaining simple objects that shed light on the writer and the world she inhabited, also the world that she bequeathed right down to Grayson Perry’s commemorative pot from 2009. Favourites include Mr Darcy’s ‘wet shirt’ from the sensational moment that his role was acted by Colin Firth in Andrew Davies’ mini-series of Pride and Prejudice in 1995, when his character emerged dripping from the lake at Pemberley and Austen’s Establishment tale got updated as  the 1990s dream of a big house and a sexy husband. Elsewhere we get The Cobb in Lyme Regis, with the steps from which Louisa Musgrove fell in Persuasion, Austen’s last completed novel. We even get treated to the Windsor Castle copy of Emma. The book is wonderfully imaginative, knowing no bounds while each item provokes as much as it explains. Back to Grayson Perry’s pot, the last exhibit: it is an exquisite piece of art, a sensuously painted pot of regency ladies sipping tea, but go closer and its full of reversals and class irony, hence the title ‘Jane Austen in E17.’

Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and George Ward (Harvard Business Review, March 25 2025)

The authors seek to offer the most comprehensive, in-depth picture yet of workplace wellbeing and its key drivers, providing a new perspective on the intersection of happiness, productivity, and organisational success.

Jan has been Professor of Economics and Behavioural Science at Oxford’s Saïd Business School since 2015 and Vice-Principal at Harris Manchester College since 2019. George holds a Research Fellowship in Economics at Somerville College.

They draw on work in economics, psychology, sociology, management, and other disciplines to explain how workplace wellbeing includes how we think about our work as a whole and how we feel while we are at work. The endpoint is a blunt truth, that improved wellbeing translates into improved productivity. There is an amazing dataset that categorizes all human activities on a sliding scale. The most happiness is associated with intimacy, or sex if you prefer; then things like pets and gardening. At the very bottom deep in the negative zone is going to work, which is one tick off lying in bed feeling sick. So even small improvements in making work a more affirming experience result in large improvements to workplace performance.

Our Brains, Our Selves: What a Neurologist's Patients Taught Him About the Brain by Masud Husain (Canongate, February 2025)

The author (New College, 1981), an acclaimed neurologist, asks: What makes us who we are? Is it our background that creates our identities? Or our families, where we lived, how we were brought up and educated, the jobs we've held? Yes, all of the above, but more fundamental than any of these is our brain.
This is never more evident than if we lose even a single one of our cognitive abilities. People who develop a brain disorder can find that their identity, their sense of self, can undergo dramatic changes. Through the stories of seven of his patients, acclaimed Oxford University neurologist Masud Husain shows us how our brains create our identity, how that identity can be changed, and sometimes even be restored. Among the people we encounter is a man who ran out of words, a woman who stopped caring what others thought of her and another who, losing her memory, started to believe she was having an affair with the man who was really her husband.
These compelling human dramas reveal how our identities are created by different functions within the brain. They show how modern neuroscience can help to explain the changes in behaviour that occur when our perception, attention, memory, motivation or empathy are altered. By understanding how our brains normally function, neurologists are bringing hope to patients with brain disorders and illuminating the human experience. The resulting journey will ignite new ideas about who we really are and why we act in the ways we do.