Read Beat (...and repeat)

Science fiction has long contemplated the possibility that machines could rise up against their human creators. Movies such as 2001, Terminator, Matrix, and I, Robot are part of our cultural history. But James Barrat, author of The Intelligence Explosion, suggests that it’s not out of line to worry about just where technology is leading us--for real. 

Barrat, a documentary filmmaker, has been on the AI beat for some time now. His earlier book, Our Final Invention, was published in 2013. That book had a message: dangers inherent in artificial intelligence are legitimate concerns.

“Intelligence isn’t unpredictable merely some of the time or in special cases,” he noted. “Computer systems advanced enough to act with human-level intelligence will likely be unpredictable and inscrutable all of the time.” 

Humans need to figure out now, at the early stages of AI’s creation, how to coexist with hyperintelligent machines. Otherwise, Barrat worries, we could be in trouble.

In his new book, Barrat lays out five basic points:

1. The rise of generative AI is impressive, but not without problems.

While generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT and DALL-E, have taken the world by storm, those programs also present a downside. Fake news, fake photos, and phony videos can result. As generative AI models get bigger, they also start picking up surprise skills, said Barrat—like translating languages—something nobody programmed them to do.

2. The push for artificial general intelligence (AGI).

AGI, or artificial general intelligence, means creating an AI that can perform almost any task a human can do. The potential is huge. AGI could make us more productive and innovative, but winners would set the agenda, dominating society.

3. From AGI to something way smarter.

If we ever reach AGI, things could escalate quickly. That’s where the concept of the “intelligence explosion” comes into play. The idea was first put forward by I. J. Good who, in 1965, realized that a machine built as smart as a human might be able to make itself even smarter. That could lead to artificial superintelligence, also known as ASI.

4. The dangers of an intelligence explosion.

Arthur C. Clark, the science fiction writer whose work inspired 2001: A Space Odyssey, told Barrat in an earlier interview that humans steer the future as the most intelligent beings on the planet. A more intelligent presence would likely grab the steering wheel, said Clark.

5. How AI could overpower humanity.

It wouldn’t take long for AI-controlled weapons to escalate conflicts faster than humans could intervene. Advanced AI could also take over essential infrastructure—such as power grids or financial systems.

Governments could use AI for mass surveillance, propaganda, cyberattacks, or worse, giving them unprecedented new tools to control or harm people. We are seeing surveillance systems morph into enhanced weapons systems right now, said Barrat, suggesting that Gaza today looks like Dresden or Hiroshima after the bombing.

Barrat suggests checks and balances to stay in control, calling for strong oversight, regulations, and a commitment to transparency.

The 15th in the Gray Man series is out this February. That means it’s time to talk with author Mark Greaney about the latest Court Gentry entry. Entitled The Hard Line, action takes place in Bulgaria, Nicaragua, Boston, and Washington, D.C., to list just a few of the action-packed locations involved.

If you’re not familiar with the series, it’s a spy thriller. We’re talking espionage and international intrigue with weapons wielded by extremely dangerous individuals. It’s a formula familiar to readers.

Greaney credits collaborating with the late Tom Clancy, legendary author of the Jack Ryan series, as helping stimulate his own writing.

“Greaney began his first book in 1990 while enrolled at the University of Memphis,” noted the school’s alumni magazine in a 2021 article. “He finished 15 years later. His second book took just seven months, and he’s been off and running ever since,” the magazine noted.

Off and running to some of the locales he uses in his book. Greaney said in the Read Beat interview that he was just about to head off to Las Vegas for its annual gun show, an opportunity where he can soak up details on some of the hardware detailed in his books. 

This was the fifth time we’ve checked in with Greaney on a new release. That’s in a span of just under four years. That gives you some idea of how prolific this guy is. He talks about running up against deadlines yet churns out pages like a machine, almost like one of the driven characters he writes about. 

He’s already at work on number 16, by the way, so Gray Man fans, rest easy. There’s more to come.

Not sure why I launched into a memory of Goldfinger at the onset of our latest interview, but Mark didn’t seem to mind. While I complained about the movie scene where all the mobsters are gassed (for no apparent reason), I was happy to hear that Greaney had his own recollection of the Ian Fleming novel, noting that it seemed Fleming spent much of the book writing about golf.

But that’s part of the charm of this author. As successful as he is in the crowded spy-novel field, he’s a regular guy, open to talking about just about anything while admitting he’s always on the hunt for storylines and interesting characters. 

You get a sense of The Killing Age by Clifton Crais, a history professor at Emory University, when you read “killing became the West’s most profound contribution to world history" in the author's preface.

“The violence that created our present world of global warming is too often forgotten in the now vast literature on the Anthropocene, including and especially the violence that was the Industrial Revolution. We forget—or don’t want to remember—that the Industrial Revolution emerged out of a century and a half of untold predation, made singularly possible by the modern manufacturing and global spread of guns, which made killing infinitely easier,” wrote Crais.

“The Industrial Revolution in England and the United States cannot be explained without understanding the enslavement of Africans and their exploitation in the Americas and the changed landscapes that both created. The factories of Europe and North America cannot be explained without understanding the dispossession of Native Americans and the conversion of their lands into cotton fields,” added the author, who reminds readers that the flintlock musket was the “world’s first global gun.”

Crais runs down this history that we’d like to forget, acknowledging in his interview on Read Beat, that some of the reactions to the book include that it’s “a bummer” as well as being a leftist take on capitalism. 

But Crais calls The Killing Age “the story of the men who wrought this destruction…It is also about the people who fought them and who offered and defended alternative visions of the world grounded in communal values such as sharing and environmental responsibility.”

Among the many historic figures that Crais includes in his study are John Jacob Astor, Andrew Jackson, Herman Melville, and John Sutter. Among many others, you’ll find Wovoka, also known as Jack Wilson, who helped spread the Ghost Dance across the American West; Samoury Toure, the West African warlord who founded an empire and resisted French imperialism; and “General” Ecueracapa, the warlord leader whose use of horses, guns, and trade helped transform the Comanches into one of the most dominant powers west of the Mississippi.

Astor, perhaps America’s first millionaire, was a German immigrant who sold guns to help him profit from the North American fur trade. Astor saw there was a finite source of those furs as America’s beaver population was depleted so he nimbly pivoted to pursue other business interests. “As the (18th) century ended, Astor had the ear of the country’s most powerful leaders (some of whom owed him money),” noted Crais.

Melville documented the carnage being wrought on the high seas as whale oil was pursued in the 19th century, a time when not only whales were butchered by the millions, but bison. The cover of The Killing Age shows a mountain of buffalo skulls, a photograph taken in 1892 in Detroit, pointed out Crais, where buffalo bones were converted to a wide variety of industrial products.

Crais said all the violence that shaped our world had a result. Following the nightmare that was World War II, the globe became more orderly as rule-based economies prevailed. 

Crais said he hopes that recent developments don’t usher in a return to the lawlessness he documents in earlier times. History can serve as a call to action when it comes to restoring civility, he noted.

When you think about the early days of motion pictures, you might recall the New York/New Jersey area where Thomas Edison set up shop in 1893. Maybe you reflect on those very early days when producers in search of sunshine ventured to shooting locations in Florida and pre-Hollywood California. 

But you probably don’t think of Texas.

Yet that’s where Gaston Melies went to make movies in 1910 at the Star Film Ranch outside of San Antonio. Gaston was the older brother of Georges Melies, the famous French filmmaker whose 1902 epic, A Trip to the Moon, indelibly imprinted that scene where the Moon struggles with a rocket in its left eye.

Not so much is known of this other French brother, noted Kathryn Fuller-Seeley and Frank Thompson, authors of The First Movie Studio in Texas (University of Texas Press). But it turns out that Gaston and his troupe created some of the first authentic cowboy films shot in the “real” West.

This book wasn’t Thompson’s first rodeo, as they say. His 1996 effort, The Star Film Ranch: Texas’ First Picture Show, described how Gaston went about the business of producing more than 230 films between 1903 and 1913. Only about 16 of them survive, mostly in fragmented form, but Fuller-Seeley and Thompson are optimistic more might be found in the years ahead.

Gaston was thrust into the world of movies when Georges enlisted him to go to New York to safeguard the Melies copyrights. “Gaston was then obligated to start producing films himself to ensure that his brother’s films could continue to be released under the auspices of Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Co., also known as the Edison Patents Trust,” stated the authors.

The brothers had their own movie preferences, noted the authors. While Georges celebrated the magical in his pictures, Gaston sought realism. “Contemporary articles about Gaston’s sojourns in Texas stressed that his films would feature ‘real cowboys, Mexicans, and Indians,’” wrote Fuller-Seeley and Thompson.

Among the stories told in First Movie Studio is the tale of “Big Bill” Gittinger, the “real-life” horseman/cowboy who went on to an extensive career in westerns—never as a star—but working alongside the silent cowboy stars of the day, people like Harry Carey, Hoot Gibson, and Buck Jones. 

Gittinger, who also worked under legendary director John Ford and later with Buster Keaton in 1930, had a tendency to always be changing his name. “For reasons unknown, Gittinger found it nearly impossible to settle on a screen name or even a consistent spelling of his given name,” the authors noted.

However you spell the names, the book provides a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at 1910 San Antonio and that time when Americans first went to the movies—not to watch a specific film--but to see a program of four or five 15-minute shows created by this budding film industry that, for a time, set up shop in Texas.

There’s probably no brighter star in the Hollywood heavens than Marilyn Monroe. The blonde bombshell who died at the age of 35 in 1962 has been the focus of hundreds of accounts, linking her with the leading celebrities of the day—John F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, and Arthur Miller, to name a few. 

While linked to numerous conspiracy theories that resound more than 60 years after her death, Marilyn Monroe remains both a fixation and a mystery .

Lynn Cullen, a writer whose past historical fiction has included books involving Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe, recalled seeing Monroe for the first time on television in The Seven Year Itch when she was eight. “She seemed to be a glorious butterfly, flitting from everyone’s net just in the nick of time,” Cullen related in When We Were Brilliant. 

“I didn’t see sexy, I saw brave. When I grew up and became a writer, I longed to write a novel about her, just to understand her,” noted Cullen.

But Cullen couldn’t find a fresh angle on Marilyn until she came upon photographer Eve Arnold, “Almost inconceivably, out of the hundreds of photographers for whom Marilyn sat, only one was a woman. Eve’s photos of Marilyn looked different from everyone else’s, easily identifiable when lined up with other photographers’ shots,” she said.

When We Were Brilliant is the Marilyn and Eve story. To follow the blurb on the book’s back cover, “Eve is better than anyone she’s seen at capturing a person’s inner truth. Together they can help each other. Together, (Marilyn) says, they can make something brilliant.”

There’s Marilyn’s real-life trip in 1955 to tiny Bement (a village of 1,700, some 75 miles southeast of Peoria), Illinois to help celebrate the little town’s centennial. Arnold recorded the trip for posterity with pictures as Marilyn, no diva, said Cullen, spent actual time with townspeople. Newspaper accounts of the trip testify to the charming unreality of it all. 

The first time I heard of Marilyn's Midwest visit was from Peoria writer Jack Mertes who wrote an account of Monroe’s time in Bement (pronounced be-meant), the small town where she judged a beard-growing contest. “In the 1980s, I went to Bement and talked to a lot of the people. They all remembered her,” said Mertes.

As for her favorite Marilyn movie, Cullen says it’s The Misfits, the 1961 drama starring Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift. “Despite the horrible time she spent during filming, she delivered,” said Cullen.

Rural America faces serious problems. That record has been playing for decades: the lack of jobs, healthcare, housing, and internet access are just some of the low notes.

Who hasn’t driven through a small town to observe empty buildings that once housed banks, hotels, or theaters and wondered about the place’s future?

Former farm towns that once bustled on Saturday nights, and distinct villages that prided themselves on self-sufficiency, are among the casualties as more and more Americans, who long left the farm, have moved to opportunities in the city.

So what’s become of the countryside? Norm Walzer has some answers. As founder of the Institute for Rural Affairs at Western Illinois University in 1989, Walzer, a former WIU economics professor, has been working on behalf of small towns for more than 40 years. In Opportunities in Rural Areas, a 2022 book he wrote with Christopher Merrett, the current director of the Institute for Rural Affairs, laid out both problems and possible opportunities for rural America.

First, some of the problems: a population decline including a shrinking farm population—not in the size of the farms but the number of farmers; a highway system that allows motorists to bypass rural communities; internet shopping that’s impacted the entire retail industry; and a severe decline in the nation’s healthcare infrastructure in rural areas.

Opportunities are also outlined: a growing discontent with urban life (that spiked during the pandemic); the desire for a better quality of life, such as gardening and recreational opportunities; the ability to work remotely (emphasizing the importance of internet access in rural areas); and affordable housing at a time when many middle-class families are challenged to own their own home in many cities. 

In the latest book by Walzer and Merrett, Retaining and Transitioning Businesses in Communities: Strategies in a New Era, opportunities are explored to help keep small businesses viable when company owners seek to retire or transfer ownership.

Each small town has its own set of advantages and problems, said Walzer, noting that there’s one constant: a town’s residents must be involved to effect progress. The fact that rural America skews older in age than the national norm might prove to be a benefit when it comes to organizing citizens to take action. “People who are retired bring experience and often have the time to contribute,” he said.

Walzer cited the importance of marketing the rural area, suggesting proximity to a river, lake, or state park (or other prominent feature) needs to be considered.

Another challenge is regionalization, he said. Towns must work together—to solve common needs such as education and healthcare—but also to expand their presence on the tourist map.

Examples of a regional approach include the Creative Corridor in Iowa that connects seven counties, including Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. Virginia’s Growth Alliance includes six counties, while the Illinois Valley unit involves businesses in LaSalle, Bureau, and Putnam counties.

The Illinois River Road National Scenic Byway connects cities and towns along the Illinois River from Ottawa to Havana.

The competition to attract visitors in the 21st century is intense, and it can be costly. That requires towns to be creative when it comes to getting noticed, said Walzer.

Other ideas will be shared at the Institute’s annual conference Feb. 25-26 in Springfield, Ill.

Writing in the Sept. 20, 2025 issue of the Korea Times, Park Jin-hai noted that “Jenny Chan grew up in America caught between clashing versions of history — her school textbooks skipped over the cruelties of World War II in Hong Kong, while her grandmother's stories painted a harrowing picture of life in Hong Kong under Japanese occupation.”

The co-founder of Pacific Atrocities Education, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco dedicated to recalling WWII history in Asia, Chan recalled being initially confused by the different versions. “I thought she was just probably making this up because I never learned about this,” Chan said.

“But she soon learned her grandmother’s memories reflected a broader, often-silenced chapter of Asian history — one in which 35 million lives were lost but rarely acknowledged in mainstream Western accounts,” wrote Park Jin-Hai in the newspaper account.

Since her 2012 graduation from the University of Illinois, Chan said she’s dedicated her life to uncovering, documenting, and publicizing war crimes committed in Asia during World War II. Chan notes that it can’t be forgotten that China suffered a third of the total casualties of all countries in World War II.

The author of Marutas of Unit 731: Human Experimentation of the Forgotten Asian Auschwitz, Chan talks about the biological warfare experiments and other horrors of Japan's Unit 731, an instrument of terror during WWII.

Marutas means logs, the name given the estimated 250,000 victims that were used in biological weapons research during the war, she said. Prisoners were purposely infected with dangerous viruses and bacteria such as the bubonic plague, anthrax, and smallpox, said Chan, adding that prisoners included Chinese soldiers, civilians, Russians, and Allied POWs.

Pacific Atrocities Education publishes books, audiobooks, and YouTube videos detailing WWII history, said Chan. 

AI will change democracy. The only question is how, say the authors of a new book described as "surprisingly optimistic" when it comes to regarding how artificial intelligence will impact the world.

Bruce Schneier, a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, and data scientist Nathan Sanders see AI enabling positive change when it comes to politics. Their book, Rewiring Democracy, challenges readers reeling from AI overload to pay attention to the good that AI can do when it comes to governing.

But powerful players in private industry and public life are already using AI to increase their influence. Yet, steered in the right direction, an AI-augmented democracy can prevail, the authors note.

Schneier, the author of 14 books, including A Hacker’s Mind, said there's more to AI than ChatGPT or being able to make fake videos. He cited three examples of how AI technology is being used to benefit society. 

“In Chile, AI is helping construct a program to help legislators see how new laws interact with existing laws. In California, Cal Matters, a watchdog organization, has developed Tipsheet, a database that gathers an enormous amount of data from state government, including every bill that’s been introduced, every word uttered in public hearings, and contributions made and makes it available to journalists. It augments journalism,” he said.

“In Japan there’s a move to use AI to help constituents have their voices heard, to make it easier for people to be involved in government decisions,” said Schneier. “I could also mention efforts being made in France, Germany, and Brazil to use AI in a meaningful way,” he said.

Rewiring Democracy relates how a mayoral candidate in Wyoming basically ran an “AI for Mayor” campaign in 2024. He lost—as did the politician who ran a similar campaign in England. “That’s not what we want,” said Schneier. “We don’t want AI to replace humans but augment humans.”

AI can also play a role in enabling more people to run for office, he said. Think of local elections where there’s little to no staff help, AI can help those candidates who might not have been able to afford to run before, said Schneier.

“Collectively, humans will help shape society’s next phase of transformation—the first to be influenced by AI. None of us will get exactly the future we want, but we can participate, compromise, and find common ground with each other while advocating for our own rights and needs," Schneier stated in the book. 

"We are optimistic about the potential democratic impacts of AI, even though we see its flaws and potential for misuse, because we want to live in a world improved by the cleverness and industry of humankind. We see a landscape of choices ahead and maintain hope that we can navigate that landscape safely together,” Schneier said.

Kyle Paoletta’s American Oasis comes with a subtitle: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest.

Born in Santa Fe, Paoletta grew up in Albuquerque. The native Southwesterner said he had to leave the region, to live in Boston and New York to find an appreciation for his old stomping grounds. 

After more than 10 years in the East, he discovered not only general ignorance about the Southwest but an indifferent attitude about a part of the country that he feels has an important story to tell.

“It took wildfire smoke from Canada turning the sky in New York red for many media members to fully digest the enormous danger that people across the West have been living with for decades,” said Paoletta.

“For so many Americans, it is only in recent years that the climate has begun to be understood as a hostile force. We southwesterners have never known anything different,” he said.

But American Oasis is more than a call to arms; it’s history with spotlights thrown on some of the fascinating characters that inhabit the Southwest.

We learn about Raymond Carlson, the former editor of Arizona Highways, the magazine that showcased the Arizona desert and life for the rest of America. There’s Jay Armes, who became a national celebrity from El Paso despite the loss of two arms in a freak accident at the age of 12.

When we get to Las Vegas, Paoletta leads with the Kim Sisters, who entranced casino patrons with their musical act in the early 1960s. There’s background on Bugsy Siegel, who opened the lavish Flamingo Hotel in 1946 before he was shot dead in 1947. Then there’s Vida Lin and the Asian Community Development Council of Nevada, a group serving the more than 250,000 Asians and Pacific Islanders who now live in Clark County.

The quote from Hunter Thompson seems appropriate in describing the Vegas scene: “In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.”

But Paoletta confesses to liking Vegas. “No matter how discomfiting I might find the dollar-worshipping ethos of Las Vegas, at least it’s honest,” he wrote.

For all its excess, Vegas conserves its water and ironically understands the need for conservation when it comes to nature, said Paoletta, suggesting that the lessons of the desert—respecting the limitations of the landscape—need to be understood by the rest of the country. 

America has always been a nation of the grow but as the Southwest shows—with climbing temperatures and water scarcity—that attitude can’t go on forever, said Paoletta, adding, “Our duration (as people) will depend on our willingness to attend to the inherent logic of our home.".

Ben Goldfarb’s new book, Crossings—How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, is a reminder that we need to consider the impact of a highway network--not just on the drivers--but on the animals that share the planet.

We tend to take that impact for granted, he said. Drivers don’t realize the barrier effect, the noise pollution (“hugely disruptive to migratory songbirds”), or chemical pollution that our roads can create.

But Goldfarb charts what he calls a movement: states across the country that now set up wildlife crossings in the form of bridges and underpasses. He praised his native Colorado for overpasses and tunnels that have saved thousands of animals.

It isn’t just wildlife that reap the benefits of not becoming roadkill, he said. A reduction in the number of deer and elk that collide with an automobile saves the lives of drivers, too, said Goldfarb.

Citing the progress Canada has made with animal crossings at Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada, Goldfarb expressed the hope that, as developing nations build their own highways, they might learn from what’s being done now to keep animals out of the road, especially since countries like Myanmar or Kenya are some of the most biodiverse places on Earth.

“We have about 100 ocelots left in this country—all in south Texas. Traffic accounts for a 40 percent mortality rate in these animals,” he said.

When precautions are taken and human understanding is involved, nature can be resilient, said Goldfarb, noting the rise of the beaver in this country. “We killed millions of beavers with the fur trade early in this country’s history. We dried out the landscape,” he said.

Now that the beaver is recognized as an attribute to the environment, creating wetlands with its dams that benefit creatures of all kinds, they’re making a comeback, said Goldfarb.

After attending a 2014 beaver workshop in Seattle, Wash. where scientists reeled off the many contributions beavers make to the land, Goldfarb said he became a believer.

In 2018, he published, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. In that book, Goldfarb said he took California, a state with serious water issues, to task for failing to support the beaver population. “Now, seven years later, California is one of the leaders when it comes to supporting the beaver. We can make progress,” he said.

When I suggested Goldfarb write a children’s book on the many benefits of the beaver, he said several books for young readers lauding the beaver are already available. “I’ll get a plug in for Kristen Tracy’s When Beavers Flew, “ he said, citing the true story of the relocation of beavers in Idaho in the 1940s.

Goldfarb plans to stay near the water for his next project, a book on the complexities of fish migration.