Walter Isaacson

People throw around the word genius a lot these days and you can become pretty jaded about it. That’s why reading about someone as staggeringly brilliant as Leonardo can be a bit exhausting. Not only is it the sheer number of things he pioneered or perfected, but the detail Isaacson goes into. That is the main reason it took me most of a year to finish this book. Another is that it is a bit repetitive in the sense that his paintings, studies, notebooks and life circumstances didn’t show more differ that much and all received the same breathless awe.

Not that he wasn’t deserving; he was. He more than many others. Here are a few things I learned and loved about Leonardo -

> He was gay and almost out...as out as you could be at this time
> He eschewed religion, but paid it lip service as the times and patrons dictated
> He had a fine sense of frivolity and whimsy
> He invented musical instruments, but didn’t play them
> He didn’t complete a lot of paintings and left very few completed ones behind considering how revered he is as a painter
> He is the first person to have understood and explained that arteriosclerosis is a function of time
> He discovered that the blood itself makes heart valves work
> He was often distracted and did not complete a lot of his work, or else bring it to its most logical conclusion
> He hardly published anything
> Some paintings are lost as are some notebooks, but surprisingly a lot survived

Early on we understand that while Leonardo was a book buyer and had an extensive library, he wasn’t formally educated and considered it a benefit. He was of the opinion that rote learning stifled true discovery and thinking. He preferred to experiment and not just take someone else’s conclusions as the truth. Admirable and the genesis of the modern scientific method. It is too bad that he didn’t publish his findings as they could have been beneficial decades and even centuries before someone else found the same thing and it became commonly accepted or the de facto best practice.

An amazing person and an interesting book, but one that tried my patience at times. show less

In "The Code Breaker," Walter Isaacson focuses on brilliant, ambitious, daring, and imaginative trailblazers from various countries who have spent years studying the complexities of RNA. One of them, biochemist Jennifer Doudna, along with her associates, discovered that this versatile molecule can be used to cut and edit portions of our DNA. The tool that accomplishes this task is called CRISPR. In addition to delving into the technical aspects of CRISPR, Isaacson explores the temperaments show more and quirks of Jennifer Doudna, who received the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry; Frenchwoman Emmanuelle Charpentier, who shared the prize with Doudna; James Watson, who made history when he and Francis Crick revealed the structure of DNA; and He Jiankui, who took the unprecedented step of editing the genes of viable human embryos. Unsurprisingly, Jiankui's actions elicited worldwide protests. Leading authorities in the field of bioethics worried that crossing this red line might have tragic and unforeseen consequences.

The achievements of these and other groundbreaking men and women took on special significance when a new and deadly type of coronavirus emerged. Scientists who normally kept their work under wraps until they were ready to reveal their findings joined forces to fight Covid19. They employed cutting-edge technology to create testing kits, therapeutics, and vaccines to stem the tide of the pandemic. In some ways, this is a non-fiction account of two aspects of science. One is a cutthroat race to outdo one's competitors—to submit an original paper to a peer-reviewed journal before anyone else; obtain patents as quickly as possible; attract funding to pay for future research; and win prestigious awards. Initially, the lure of science for Doudna was her intense curiosity. Although she admits that she is as competitive as her fellow researchers, she insists that her ultimate goal is to make the world a healthier and safer place for future generations.

Isaacson is a master of his craft who, in addition to his meticulous use of primary and secondary sources, offers fascinating and readable anecdotes that he links to the book's central themes. Moreover, Isaacson addresses the serious ethical dilemmas that we face, now that genetic editing is no longer in the realm of fantasy. It is one thing for experts to edit genes to eliminate inherited diseases that cause terrible suffering. However, should entrepreneurs launch companies that might help wealthy couples have designer babies? How can we prevent unscrupulous individuals from manipulating human genes for nefarious purposes? There are no easy answers to these troubling questions. If we cannot agree on enforceable safeguards, it is frightening to contemplate the free-for-all that may ensue. Let us hope that, going forward, members of the scientific community will use CRISPR and other similar innovations for the betterment—and not to the detriment—of humanity. As Doudna says, "We must move forward cautiously and with respect for the power we've gained."

Additional Note: "The Code Breaker" is enhanced by its colorful photographs and illustrations, endnotes, and comprehensive index. show less

Innovators is about men and their machines, but it all starts with a woman--Ada Lovelace. Living in the 19th century no less, she's credited with the concept of a programming loop as expressed in some notes when Ada (a mathematics wiz) translates a French article on her mentor, Charles Babbage, and his proposed Analytical Engine. From Babbage's early designs of machines that he calls "engines" up to Google's search engines, this book is an engaging narrative history. Walter Isaacson--known show more for his biographies--includes all the major players. Some famous and familiar names, like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, yet there are other contributors too, like Atanasoff or Donald Davies, who're not well known. For technology novices, like me, the opening pages have a well-noted photo timeline. Where, both there and throughout, the ladies are also remembered, not leaving out Grace Hopper (works on COBOL) and the six women programmers who worked at the University of Penn on the ENIAC computer. This book isn't just a dry and uninteresting account because its author includes many biographical snippets of the pioneering players that helps to liven up the story. I found the confrontation between Jobs and Gates over who ripped off whom particularly amusing. It's loaded with all sorts of bits and bytes like that.

Besides showing how we got to the Digital Revolution, what makes Innovators so significant is its main premise. That as one thing leads to another, the spark of creativity comes from the interplay of ideas among those willing to share and collaborate. Though a book longer than I usually read, I totally enjoyed getting to know all those creative and inventive folks. Surely it was time well spent. show less

On a day when Elon Musk, richest man in the world, donates a 'sizeable sum' to Donald Trump's campaign after a bungled assassination attempt, this blockbuster biography may be a 'must-read' to help understand the possible future relationship of capital to politics at the heart of the imperium.

Musk is 'sui generis'. A man with Aspergers who cannot be understood except in the light of his brain structure. He is not normal and he does not mind who knows it. Loathed and admired in equal show more proportions, few can look on him with equanimity or complete objectivity.

To be fair, Professor Isaacson, despite being alongside Musk for a couple of years and so potentially subject to influence, manages to present a 'warts and all' biography which will ensure that admiration will be tempered by an understanding of his risky and often unintentionally cruel behaviour.

Musk is complex. His achievements are undoubted and are based on a peculiar mind-set that places technocratic ambitions for the safety of future humanity at the root of major projects that take phenomenal risks based on a single-minded ruthless ambition.

We have here the man who, inter alia, triggered the EV revolution with Tesla and the space economy with SpaceX, originally led the world in attempting to control AI including the man/machine interface through Neuralink and dictated the terms of the Ukraine war through Starlink.

He contributed to the mass take-up of household solar energy (though this was commercially less successful than most of his enterprises) and his interesting super-liberal view of free speech and interest in a total financial services platform led to his troubled acquisition of Twitter, now X.

This commitment to free speech (which it turned out he imperfectly understood despite his 'genius' much as he had to learn international relations on the hoof in the case of Ukraine) is worth understanding. It is not some abstract ideological interest but pragmatic.

He, I think rightly, understands that problems are only solvable under conditions of vigorous open debate (even if his personality often squashes dissent in his own operations) and that the more complex the problem, the more debate is required.

His caveat is the 'law of physics'. He is a true technocrat. Any problem that can be solved according to the law of physics should be solved and immense risks taken to solve it at that. Politics and human problems are, however, beyond physics and their complexity requires constant struggle.

To get the best outcome in society and politically, he seems to see free speech as an essential tool. Controlled speech results in skewed models of reality run by those who do the controlling. A skewed model of social reality is as bad as ignoring the laws of physics in engineering and materials science.

Musk is also a mass of contradictions evidenced by his own behaviours including a complete disregard of the family lives of the human raw material used in his great projects yes a highly ethical (by his own lights) if sometimes clumsy approach to his complicated private relations.

His private behaviours are his and his family's business but Musk becomes our business when he creates a new economy with social effects and engages in a political world that he massively influences but evidently still imperfectly understands (although no learner could be faster).

His 'genius' lay originally largely in rethinking the commercial base for heavyweight manufacturing for the 'new economy'. He is rightly seen as a 'tech billionaire' given his awareness of the value of the data generated by his inventiveness and how it can be cross-pollinated for profit.

However, what is also clear is that his approach to manufacturing was also ground-breaking both in understanding material science and cost control (taking risks that permitted expensive mistakes in order to learn) and in bringing production back into the shortest possible supply chain process.

The book gives us almost a standard behaviour pattern linked to his personality. First, the idea and using his reputational credit to ensure funding. Then the moment of realisation that to make it work, he has to live and sleep the product - there is a pattern of sleeping on factory and office floors.

If he has to live and sleep the product so does everyone else until the problems are solved and the product is rolling off the line as the best thing the customer can get at the right price and then he moves on to the next project, adopting the same method and burning out everyone around him.

His attitude to people is ruthless but not from malice. He simply does not take into account their 'being' outside their role as agents of his vision of progress. The secret to this probably lies in the influence of the high libertarian and militaristic science fiction that formed him as a boy.

There is story after story in this book (reported fairly by Isaacson) of people part of his 'fun' inner circle at the centre of his project and then literally forgotten once he has moved on. This man forgets even his rages and bullying once he has triggered the action he wants.

So many 'victims' still (an engineers' version of 'Stockholm Syndrome' perhaps) still look on him with awe and respect despite his callous behaviours because working with him was evidently the most intense period of their lives and they know that he and they achieved something significant.

This is why judging the man is difficult. He is not entirely the self-centred robber baron of the gilded age. He does not screw the workers simply to buy Italian statues and high class British aristocratic wives. He really does think his mission is not to make money but to save humanity.

This gives any of us who care about how people are treated in life and the rights of working people some pause for thought because Musk reminds us of a more constrained and more decent Stalin, driving humanity for some greater cause, far from the usual capitalist baron.

The problem is that, forgetting socialist alternatives for the moment, Musk seems to suggest that great things will be achieved through libertarian struggle and risk that will benefit humanity whereas traditional fat cat corporatism tends benefit most the management class and their social lackeys.

Of course, there is a question here whether (in total) auto-electrification taking place years ahead of schedule, the entry of capitalism into space (let alone his passion for humanity reaching Mars) or man/machine interfaces are in fact beneficial to humanity. On that, the jury is out.

A lot of it depends on whether he has judged the world in ways that are credible because Aspergers may mean either that his view of human reality is flawed or perhaps far-seeing. We simply cannot know until what he thinks will happen actually happens or not.

For example, a great deal of his energy is directed into the production of massive new rocketry. This has been triggerede ultimately by his belief that humanity may be doomed because of its own irrational flaws and can only be saved if it is recolonised by human Martians one day.

Similarly, he (and he is not alone in this) sees AI as an existential threat to humanity, a genie let out of the bottle. Neuralink (man/machine interface) is a very deliberate attempt to create a means by which humans can control machines perhaps by becoming hybrid with them.

There is lots of meat to ponder in this book about how science fiction and fantasy shape men's minds, about the mind of the engineer, about risk (Musk is addicted to risk) and about childhood misery and trauma (which have played an undoubted role in shaping the man).

Indeed, Elon Musk is almost a character out of a 1950s science fiction story, one with the standard trope of a driven scientist prepared to sacrifice anything (including people) for the sake of progress and the future. A hero in the literature of the time and a puzzlement to ours.

His 'vision' extends to his private life. Unlike those pressimistic anti-natalists whining about global resources and wanting population reduced, Musk is almost Papal (or national socialist) in his belief in producing children. Children are, to him, an absolute good and he seems caring to his.

And he has a lot of them by traditional means, surrogacy and artificial insemination. Although he clearly cannot give them the attention they probably deserve, they are important to him. Family is pulled into his business dealings as much as any Murdoch ... if they can deliver.

Issacson has produced an exemplary contemporary biography although, of course, it ends in April 2023 and the story continues. It is also divided into two parts with very different characters - the first up to roughly January 2022 is conventional and based on many witness statements.

The second shifts from traditional biography to something closer to journalistic reportage since it based on Isaacson living alongside Musk and his events as they took place. We are taken through the acquisition of Twitter in considerable detail.

The character of the two parts is thus very different. Close observation of Musk gives us a less forgiving picture of the man. Close contact seemed to bring out an awareness in Isaacson of his brutality under pressure as he attempted to deal with people who were not always engineers.

This brings us on to the politics of Elon Musk which are not rigidly ideological as they are with, say, the libertarian Peter Thiel or simply concerned with corporate profit and so a disinterest in society and politics except as consumers, workers and suppliers as with Steve Jobs, say.

His ideology which we have outlined above as a set of technocratic and apocalyptic concerns about humanity is only contingently relate to any current political formation. He could be a Green except that its tendency to anti-natalism and its anti-growth stance are inimical to hm.

He starts out as a fairly standard issue liberal Democrat with low interest in politics. He meets and is unimpressed with Donald Trump. Yet here, in mid-2024, we find that he is committed, it would seem, to the Republican populist cause. The trajectory is partially explained in the book.

Some of it is unclear but we might identify the self interest involved in corporate taxation measures (although he arranged affairs to deliver $11bn of taxes he did not need to, perhaps to show that such grants should be his decision). Probably he perceives them as anti-growth.

Then there is his free speech concern under conditions where it is the liberal-left and centrists, whether in the US or, more recently, the EU, who are trying to control what people say as a precursor to controlling what people do and perhaps what they think.

Then there is his experience of the military-industrial complex which is ambivalent to say the least. He profits immensely from it through SpaceX and Starlink but is also aware of the vested interests he out-manouevred in order to cut space costs by a huge margin.

Ukraine seems to have shaken him to the core. He stepped in to halt the use of Starlink to attack Crimea while being one of the first (with his usual initial political naivete) to support Kiev by supplying Starlink for Ukraine's defence. He genuinely feared escalation to nuclear conflict.

Humanity destroying itself is one of his background concerns and his investments seem designed to create the conditions to avert apocalypse (whether climate change, nuclear apocalypse or out-of control AI) and to ensure human survival (rockets to Mars) in the event it happens.

Whatever he does there is an acute intertwining of self interest and forward-looking ideology. There is no change (he is right on this) without re-invested profits from growth but his commercial interests are still often looked at through the prism of ultimate ideological ends.

There is a fundamental psychology of fear here, almost certainly of the out of control behaviours of the humans he knows he does not understand fully. However, as a high functioning aspie with exceptionally high intelligence he can understand enough to stop it from the abyss.

This may be presumptuous of him. He may not fully understand how humanity is not an engineering problem but a biological one involving the half-hive mind of a species prepared to sacrifice huge numbers of its own kind to save the whole. The obscene cleansing of war need not be terminal.

In other words, humanity will probably survive despite the rational fears of engineers and aspies because it is self-correcting which is what evolution does but with the added advantage of humans being aware of the environment it needs to manipulate in order to survive.

From this perspective, Musk may be over-egging his pudding but, in doing so, he has added to the tools available to the species to improve its condition. He is not killing people doing it, unlike other visionaries and certainly unlike the monsters at the top of our competing States.

Nor would he, it is clear, if he could. He is life-affirmative. His a peacenik as Trump is more inclined to peace than war. It is good for business but also, in Musk's case, for humanity, albeit that he deals with the military-industrial economy out of necessity in order to build his space economy.

What will be interesting will be whether his advances in robotics (Optimus) will end up being used by the imperial military. Frankly, we would expect them to be so because Musk's ethics only seem to go so far and there is no sign that he is not committed to full spectrum American military dominance.

Musk's Tesla Gigafactories (massive factory operations) are to be found in California (which state he increasingly despises), Texas (which he increasingly treats as home), Berlin and China (where the Chinese broke their rule over joint ownership). He is looking at India.

He is a globalist but not of the sinister managerialist and manipulative WEF type. He would probably be in Russia if it was not a political bridge too far and perhaps in Africa, Brazil or Indonesia one day. As a former South African, he appears to think out of the American box.

So, all told, Isaacson is to be congratulated for producing an insightful and seemingly very honest account of this peculiar 'sacre monstre' who is part of the technocratic neo-feudal billionaire revolution and yet distinctive within it. He has presented us with a mass of contradictions.

If Varoufakis is right about capitalism being displaced by a new serfdom in which our existence is subject to data and 'licences' then Musk is the Duke of Norfolk. His autopilot data and the data from Twitter combined with the work at Neuralink and Optimus may yet change our lives radically.

He does not frighten me. The Democrat Party, the American Deep State and the European Union frighten me far more. However, this book tells us that we need to watch this man carefully because what he does is important and not easily understood in Manichean terms. show less