![]() This is not a book to be a stickler about that would be like pontificating about microbrews instead of just getting drunk. If Wonderland inspires grins and well-what-d’ya-knows of legitimate wonder - and it does - it also liberates its audience to wantonly savor them. Marvelous circuits of prose inductors, resistors and switches simulate ordinary history so nearly as to make readers forget the real thing. Wonderland makes a swashbuckling argument for the centrality of recreation to all of human history. In this sense it is interesting, or perhaps alarming, to note Johnson’s suggestion that the advances in AI are currently being accelerated by a 'curiosity reward,' which encourages software to explore data containing surprising results and ignore more predictable regions. Play is addictive because it offers the potential for a different result each time we engage in it. If there is a linking narrative to many of these tales it is the understanding that value is always located in rare beauty. ![]() In some ways, this book is a compendium of all those other books that take a single product or invention – the colour purple or movable type or cinnamon – and make them the singular focus of history. He argues, mostly persuasively, that the major advances in technology and culture have been more often the result of our craving for distraction and for delight rather than for survival. ![]() ![]() In these seductively erudite 300 pages, Steven Johnson makes the contrarian case for a more glass-half-full theory of ingenuity. ![]()
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