Will we wipe ourselves out?

Books
Best science books of 2014
Maria Popova | Brainpickings | 24 November 2014Leading the list are Alan Lightman’s Accidental Universe, an essay collection; Diane Ackerman’s Human Age, a history of humanity; Manuel Lima’s Book Of Trees, which is not about plant life but instead examines our ways of organising knowledge into branches; E.O. Wilson’s Meaning of Human Existence; and Roberto Trotter’s Edge Of The Sky, a book about the Universe written using a vocabulary of 1,000 commonplace words.

Family
The unfairness of families
Jonathan Derbyshire | Prospect | 24 November 2014Interview with philosopher Adam Swift about family values and inequality. Should we restrict the things that parents can do for their children, in the interests of fairness? “The mechanisms that create the unfairnesses between children are mechanisms that go pretty much to the heart of family life … Informal interactions like the reading of bedtime stories are the ones that generate the real inequalities.”
Computers
Automation makes us dumb
Nicholas Carr | Wall Street Journal | 22 November 2014Computerisation traps us in “a vicious cycle of de-skilling”. Pilots, doctors, architects and others cede work to machines and forget how to do it themselves. “By isolating them from hard work, [automation] dulls their skills and increases the odds that they will make mistakes. When those mistakes happen, designers respond by seeking to further restrict people’s responsibilities – spurring a new round of de-skilling.”
Evolution
Darwinism and co-operation
Patrick Bateson | King's Review | 20 November 2014“The fashionable philosophy of individualism draws its respectability in part from an appeal to biology and specifically to the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection … The appeal to biology is not to the coherent body of scientific thought, but to a confused myth. It is a travesty of Darwinism to suggest that all that matters in social life is conflict. Social cohesion may become a critical condition for the survival of the society.”
Commerce
Christmas in Yiwu
Dan W | 19 November 2014Notes from Yiwu Market near Shanghai, a “vast permanent trade fair” of fancy goods for dollar stores, market stalls, souvenir shops. Twenty miles of Union Jack mugs, fridge magnets, passport covers, vuvuzelas, folding scooters, and seemingly half the world’s Christmas decorations. “It felt like Yiwu contained every possible product, a physical analog to Alibaba. As if someone had inflated the Argos catalog to the scale of a city.”
Internet
A rare peek into the massive scale of Amazon Web Services
Timothy Prickett Morgan | Enterprise Tech | 14 November 2014What Amazon does when it isn’t selling books. It builds the cloud. Every day Amazon Web Services “installs enough server infrastructure to host the entire Amazon business from 2004″. By now it probably runs 3-4 million servers in data centres worldwide. Storage is cheap, but networking is expensive: “At the same time that networking is going Anti-Moore, the ratio of networking to compute is going up”.
Futurology
The world in 2050 – and the greatest threats to humanity
Martin Rees | New Statesman | 26 November 2014The UK’s Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, looks at the most serious threats to human life this century. The biggest dangers are the ones that we pose to ourselves, he argues. “Our Earth is 45 million centuries old. But this century is the first when one species – ours – can determine the biosphere’s fate.” Humanity just missed nuclear Armageddon in the Cold War. Now we’re juggling geo-engineering, AI and biotech. “The bells that toll for mankind are like the bells of Alpine cattle. They are attached to our own necks.”