POSSIBLE MINDS: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
With Editor JOHN BROCKMAN and local contributors:
CHRIS ANDERSON, ANCA DRAGAN, and GEORGE DYSON
Wednesday, February 27, 2019, 7:30pm
Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley
Tickets available now!
Berkeley Arts & Letters presents a panel discussion on the future of artificial intelligence and the nature of human existence.
Advances in artificial intelligence have forever altered the way we live -- from Alexa in your living room to autonomous vehicles and drone warfare -- and AI is poised to define the coming decades for better or worse. Tech giants, including Google and Facebook, are engaged in an AI arms race, while Elon Musk, the late Stephen Hawking, and other thought leaders have warned that unsupervised, self-improving machine learning poses a major threat to society. So where is AI headed next, and how will this rapidly emerging technology impact our world?
In Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI, science world luminary John Brockman has assembled twenty-five of the most important scientific thinkers to discuss the groundbreaking opportunities and potential dangers that AI presents. The result is an unparalleled round-table examination of the mind, thinking, intelligence, and what it means to be human.
Joining us for an evening of conversation are three of the Bay Area contributors:
- Chris Anderson: former EIC of Wired; cofounder and CEO of 3DRobotics.
- Anca Dragan: UC Berkeley professor; cofounder of the prestigious Berkeley AI Research Lab.
- George Dyson: historian of science and technology; author of Darwin Among the Machines
Leading the panel is Possible Minds editor John Brockman, founder of the powerhouse international literary and software agency Brockman, Inc. as well as the publisher of Edge.org, an online salon that the Guardian has called "the worlds smartest website."
--
Please note:
Duration of event is subject to author's preference.
Signing and additional details coming soon.
This event is all ages. Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs of any kind, please write events AT booksmith DOT com and we will do our best to accommodate you.
With Editor JOHN BROCKMAN and local contributors:
CHRIS ANDERSON, ANCA DRAGAN, and GEORGE DYSON
Wednesday, February 27, 2019, 7:30pm
Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley
Tickets available now!
Berkeley Arts & Letters presents a panel discussion on the future of artificial intelligence and the nature of human existence.
Advances in artificial intelligence have forever altered the way we live -- from Alexa in your living room to autonomous vehicles and drone warfare -- and AI is poised to define the coming decades for better or worse. Tech giants, including Google and Facebook, are engaged in an AI arms race, while Elon Musk, the late Stephen Hawking, and other thought leaders have warned that unsupervised, self-improving machine learning poses a major threat to society. So where is AI headed next, and how will this rapidly emerging technology impact our world?
In Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI, science world luminary John Brockman has assembled twenty-five of the most important scientific thinkers to discuss the groundbreaking opportunities and potential dangers that AI presents. The result is an unparalleled round-table examination of the mind, thinking, intelligence, and what it means to be human.
Joining us for an evening of conversation are three of the Bay Area contributors:
- Chris Anderson: former EIC of Wired; cofounder and CEO of 3DRobotics.
- Anca Dragan: UC Berkeley professor; cofounder of the prestigious Berkeley AI Research Lab.
- George Dyson: historian of science and technology; author of Darwin Among the Machines
Leading the panel is Possible Minds editor John Brockman, founder of the powerhouse international literary and software agency Brockman, Inc. as well as the publisher of Edge.org, an online salon that the Guardian has called "the worlds smartest website."
--
Please note:
Duration of event is subject to author's preference.
Signing and additional details coming soon.
This event is all ages. Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs of any kind, please write events AT booksmith DOT com and we will do our best to accommodate you.
CORY DOCTOROW presents RADICALIZED
In conversation with RICHARD KADREY
Monday, March 25, 2019, 7:30pm
Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley
Tickets available now!
Berkeley Arts & Letters presents New York Times bestselling author of "Little Brother" and co-editor of BoingBoing Cory Doctorow for his new book "Radicalized", a collection of four new, urgent sci-fi novellas of America's present and future from one of the most on-pulse genre voices of our generation. Joining Cory in conversation is NYT Bestselling author of 15 novels including Sandman Slim, Richard Kadrey.
Connected by social, technological, and economic visions of today and what America could be in the near, near future, the stories are:
Unauthorized Bread is a tale of immigration, the toxicity of economic and technological stratification, and the young and downtrodden fighting against all odds to survive and prosper.
In Model Minority, a Superman-like figure attempts to rectifiy the corruption of the police forces he long erroneously thought protected the defenseless...only to find his efforts adversely affecting their victims.
Radicalized is a story of a darkweb-enforced violent uprising against insurance companies told from the perspective of a man desperate to secure funding for an experimental drug that could cure his wife's terminal cancer.
The fourth story, Masque of the Red Death, harkens back to Doctorow's Walkaway, taking on issues of survivalism versus community.
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Praise for "Walkaway"
"Is Doctorow's fictional utopia bravely idealistic or bitterly ironic? The answer is in our own hands. A dystopian future is in no way inevitable; Walkaway reminds us that the world we choose to build is the one we'll inhabit. Technology empowers both the powerful and the powerless, and if we want a world with more liberty and less control, we're going to have to fight for it." -- Edward Snowden
"The darker the hour, the better the moment for a rigorously-imagined utopian fiction. Walkaway is now the best contemporary example I know of, its utopia glimpsed after fascinatingly-extrapolated revolutionary struggle. A wonderful novel: everything we've come to expect from Cory Doctorow and more." -- William Gibson
"The Bhagavad Gita of hacker/maker/burner/open source/git/gnu/wiki/99%/adjunctfaculty/Anonymous/shareware/thingiverse/cypherpunk/LGTBQIA*/squatter/upcycling culture...zipped it down into a pretty damned tight techno-thriller with a lot of sex in it." -- Neal Stephenson
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Canadian-born Cory Doctorow is the author of the New York Times bestselling young adult novel "Little Brother", and the co-editor of the popular blog BoingBoing. His other YA novels include "Pirate Cinema" and "Homeland" (2013), the sequel to Little Brother. His adult novels and short stories have won him three Locus Awards and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He has been named one of the Webs twenty-five influencers by Forbes Magazine and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He lives in London with his wife and daughter.
Richard Kadrey is the New York Times-bestselling author of fifteen novels, including the Sandman Slim supernatural noir series. Sandman Slim was included in Amazon’s “100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime.” Chad Stahelski of John Wick fame is directing the book as a feature film. Some of Kadrey’s other books include The Grand Dark, Hollywood Dead, The Everything Box, and Butcher Bird. In comics, he’s written forHeavy Metal, Lucifer, and Hellblazer. He’s also been immortalized as an action figure.
Please note:
Duration of event is subject to author's preference.
Signing and additional details coming soon.
This event is all ages. Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs of any kind, please write events AT booksmith DOT com and we will do our best to accommodate you.
In conversation with RICHARD KADREY
Monday, March 25, 2019, 7:30pm
Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley
Tickets available now!
Berkeley Arts & Letters presents New York Times bestselling author of "Little Brother" and co-editor of BoingBoing Cory Doctorow for his new book "Radicalized", a collection of four new, urgent sci-fi novellas of America's present and future from one of the most on-pulse genre voices of our generation. Joining Cory in conversation is NYT Bestselling author of 15 novels including Sandman Slim, Richard Kadrey.
Connected by social, technological, and economic visions of today and what America could be in the near, near future, the stories are:
Unauthorized Bread is a tale of immigration, the toxicity of economic and technological stratification, and the young and downtrodden fighting against all odds to survive and prosper.
In Model Minority, a Superman-like figure attempts to rectifiy the corruption of the police forces he long erroneously thought protected the defenseless...only to find his efforts adversely affecting their victims.
Radicalized is a story of a darkweb-enforced violent uprising against insurance companies told from the perspective of a man desperate to secure funding for an experimental drug that could cure his wife's terminal cancer.
The fourth story, Masque of the Red Death, harkens back to Doctorow's Walkaway, taking on issues of survivalism versus community.
--
Praise for "Walkaway"
"Is Doctorow's fictional utopia bravely idealistic or bitterly ironic? The answer is in our own hands. A dystopian future is in no way inevitable; Walkaway reminds us that the world we choose to build is the one we'll inhabit. Technology empowers both the powerful and the powerless, and if we want a world with more liberty and less control, we're going to have to fight for it." -- Edward Snowden
"The darker the hour, the better the moment for a rigorously-imagined utopian fiction. Walkaway is now the best contemporary example I know of, its utopia glimpsed after fascinatingly-extrapolated revolutionary struggle. A wonderful novel: everything we've come to expect from Cory Doctorow and more." -- William Gibson
"The Bhagavad Gita of hacker/maker/burner/open source/git/gnu/wiki/99%/adjunctfaculty/Anonymous/shareware/thingiverse/cypherpunk/LGTBQIA*/squatter/upcycling culture...zipped it down into a pretty damned tight techno-thriller with a lot of sex in it." -- Neal Stephenson
--
Canadian-born Cory Doctorow is the author of the New York Times bestselling young adult novel "Little Brother", and the co-editor of the popular blog BoingBoing. His other YA novels include "Pirate Cinema" and "Homeland" (2013), the sequel to Little Brother. His adult novels and short stories have won him three Locus Awards and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He has been named one of the Webs twenty-five influencers by Forbes Magazine and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He lives in London with his wife and daughter.
Richard Kadrey is the New York Times-bestselling author of fifteen novels, including the Sandman Slim supernatural noir series. Sandman Slim was included in Amazon’s “100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime.” Chad Stahelski of John Wick fame is directing the book as a feature film. Some of Kadrey’s other books include The Grand Dark, Hollywood Dead, The Everything Box, and Butcher Bird. In comics, he’s written forHeavy Metal, Lucifer, and Hellblazer. He’s also been immortalized as an action figure.
Please note:
Duration of event is subject to author's preference.
Signing and additional details coming soon.
This event is all ages. Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs of any kind, please write events AT booksmith DOT com and we will do our best to accommodate you.
SIRI HUSTVEDT presents MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE
Wednesday, March 27, 2019, 7:30pm
Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley
Tickets available now!
Berkeley Arts & Letters presents international bestselling author of "The Blazing World" Siri Hustvedt for Memories of the Future, a provocative, exuberant novel about time, memory, desire, and the imagination that tells the story of a young Midwestern woman's first year in New York City in the late 1970s and her obsession with her mysterious neighbor, Lucy Brite.
As she listens to Lucy through the thin walls of her dilapidated building, S.H., aka Minnesota, transcribes her neighbors bizarre and increasingly ominous monologues in a notebook, along with sundry other adventures, until one frightening night when Lucy bursts into her apartment on a rescue mission.
Forty years later, S.H., now a veteran author, discovers her old notebook, as well as early drafts of a never-completed novel while moving her aging mother from one facility to another. Ingeniously juxtaposing the various texts, S.H. measures what she remembers against what she wrote that year and has since forgotten to create a dialogue between selves across decades. The encounter both collapses time and reframes its meanings in the present.
Elaborately structured, intellectually rigorous, urgently paced, poignant, and often wildly funny, "Memories of the Future" brings together themes that have made Hustvedt among the most celebrated novelists working today: the fallibility of memory; gender mutability; the violence of patriarchy; the vagaries of perception; the ambiguous borders between sensation and thought, sanity and madness; and our dependence on primal drives such as sex, love, hunger, and rage.
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Siri Hustvedt is the internationally acclaimed author of a book of poems, six novels, four collections of essays, and a work of nonfiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. Her novel "The Blazing World" was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Lost Angeles Book Prize for Fiction. She has also published numerous papers in scholarly and scientific journals. She has a PhD in English literature from Columbia University and is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Please note:
Duration of event is subject to author's preference.
Signing and additional details coming soon.
This event is all ages. Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs of any kind, please write events AT booksmith DOT com and we will do our best to accommodate you.
Wednesday, March 27, 2019, 7:30pm
Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley
Tickets available now!
Berkeley Arts & Letters presents international bestselling author of "The Blazing World" Siri Hustvedt for Memories of the Future, a provocative, exuberant novel about time, memory, desire, and the imagination that tells the story of a young Midwestern woman's first year in New York City in the late 1970s and her obsession with her mysterious neighbor, Lucy Brite.
As she listens to Lucy through the thin walls of her dilapidated building, S.H., aka Minnesota, transcribes her neighbors bizarre and increasingly ominous monologues in a notebook, along with sundry other adventures, until one frightening night when Lucy bursts into her apartment on a rescue mission.
Forty years later, S.H., now a veteran author, discovers her old notebook, as well as early drafts of a never-completed novel while moving her aging mother from one facility to another. Ingeniously juxtaposing the various texts, S.H. measures what she remembers against what she wrote that year and has since forgotten to create a dialogue between selves across decades. The encounter both collapses time and reframes its meanings in the present.
Elaborately structured, intellectually rigorous, urgently paced, poignant, and often wildly funny, "Memories of the Future" brings together themes that have made Hustvedt among the most celebrated novelists working today: the fallibility of memory; gender mutability; the violence of patriarchy; the vagaries of perception; the ambiguous borders between sensation and thought, sanity and madness; and our dependence on primal drives such as sex, love, hunger, and rage.
--
Siri Hustvedt is the internationally acclaimed author of a book of poems, six novels, four collections of essays, and a work of nonfiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. Her novel "The Blazing World" was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Lost Angeles Book Prize for Fiction. She has also published numerous papers in scholarly and scientific journals. She has a PhD in English literature from Columbia University and is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Please note:
Duration of event is subject to author's preference.
Signing and additional details coming soon.
This event is all ages. Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs of any kind, please write events AT booksmith DOT com and we will do our best to accommodate you.
NATHAN ENGLANDER presents KADDISH.COM
Tuesday, April 2, 2019, 7:30pm
Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley
Tickets available now!
Berkeley Arts & Letters presents Pulitzer finalist Nathan Englander for his best work yet: a brilliant, streamlined comic novel, reminiscent of early Philip Roth and of his own most masterful stories, about a son's failure to say Kaddish for his father.
Larry is an atheist in a family of orthodox Memphis Jews. When his father dies, it is his responsibility as the surviving son to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months. To the horror and dismay of his mother and sisters, Larry refuses – thus imperiling the fate of his father's soul. To appease them, and in penance for failing to mourn his father correctly, he hatches an ingenious if cynical plan, hiring a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to recite the daily prayer and shepherd his fathers soul safely to rest.
This is Nathan Englander's freshest and funniest work to date: a satire that touches, lightly and with unforgettable humor, on the conflict between religious and secular worlds, and the hypocrisies that run through both. A novel about atonement; about spiritual redemption; and about the soul-sickening temptations of the internet, which, like God, is everywhere.
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Nathan Englander is the author of the novels Dinner at the Center of the Earth and The Ministry of Special Cases, and the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His short fiction has been widely anthologized, most recently in 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. His play The Twenty-Seventh Man premiered at The Public Theater in 2012. He also translated the New American Haggadah and co-translated Etgar Keret's Suddenly a Knock on the Door. He is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter.
Please note:
Duration of event is subject to author's preference.
Signing and additional details coming soon.
This event is all ages. Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs of any kind, please write events AT booksmith DOT com and we will do our best to accommodate you.
Tuesday, April 2, 2019, 7:30pm
Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley
Tickets available now!
Berkeley Arts & Letters presents Pulitzer finalist Nathan Englander for his best work yet: a brilliant, streamlined comic novel, reminiscent of early Philip Roth and of his own most masterful stories, about a son's failure to say Kaddish for his father.
Larry is an atheist in a family of orthodox Memphis Jews. When his father dies, it is his responsibility as the surviving son to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months. To the horror and dismay of his mother and sisters, Larry refuses – thus imperiling the fate of his father's soul. To appease them, and in penance for failing to mourn his father correctly, he hatches an ingenious if cynical plan, hiring a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to recite the daily prayer and shepherd his fathers soul safely to rest.
This is Nathan Englander's freshest and funniest work to date: a satire that touches, lightly and with unforgettable humor, on the conflict between religious and secular worlds, and the hypocrisies that run through both. A novel about atonement; about spiritual redemption; and about the soul-sickening temptations of the internet, which, like God, is everywhere.
--
Nathan Englander is the author of the novels Dinner at the Center of the Earth and The Ministry of Special Cases, and the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His short fiction has been widely anthologized, most recently in 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. His play The Twenty-Seventh Man premiered at The Public Theater in 2012. He also translated the New American Haggadah and co-translated Etgar Keret's Suddenly a Knock on the Door. He is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter.
Please note:
Duration of event is subject to author's preference.
Signing and additional details coming soon.
This event is all ages. Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs of any kind, please write events AT booksmith DOT com and we will do our best to accommodate you.
NATHANIEL RICH presents LOSING EARTH: A RECENT HISTORY
Monday, April 22, 2019, 7:00pm
First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way, Berkeley
Tickets available now!
Berkeley Arts & Letters presents Nathaniel Rich for his new book Losing Earth: A Recent History, based on the New York Times Magazine special issue "Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change,” also currently in development as a TV series by Apple and Anonymous Content. Join us for the one Bay Area chance to see the author present the most urgent story of our times, brilliantly reframed and beautifully told, live and in person.
By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change -- including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their story, and ours.
The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to Nathaniel Rich's groundbreaking chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon -- the subject of news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world. In its emphasis on the lives of the people who grappled with the great existential threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our shared plight.
Now expanded into book form, Losing Earth tells the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil fuel industry's coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence. The book carries the story into the present day, wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking crucial questions about how we make sense of our past, our future, and ourselves. Like John Hersey's Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, Losing Earth is the rarest of achievements: a riveting work of dramatic history that articulates a moral framework for understanding how we got here, and how we must go forward.
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Nathaniel Rich is the author of the novels King Zeno, Odds Against Tomorrow, and The Mayor's Tongue. He is a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to The Atlantic and The New York Review of Books. He lives in New Orleans.
Please note:
Duration of event is subject to author's preference.
Signing and additional details coming soon.
This event is all ages. Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs of any kind, please write events AT booksmith DOT com and we will do our best to accommodate you.
Monday, April 22, 2019, 7:00pm
First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way, Berkeley
Tickets available now!
Berkeley Arts & Letters presents Nathaniel Rich for his new book Losing Earth: A Recent History, based on the New York Times Magazine special issue "Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change,” also currently in development as a TV series by Apple and Anonymous Content. Join us for the one Bay Area chance to see the author present the most urgent story of our times, brilliantly reframed and beautifully told, live and in person.
By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change -- including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their story, and ours.
The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to Nathaniel Rich's groundbreaking chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon -- the subject of news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world. In its emphasis on the lives of the people who grappled with the great existential threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our shared plight.
Now expanded into book form, Losing Earth tells the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil fuel industry's coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence. The book carries the story into the present day, wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking crucial questions about how we make sense of our past, our future, and ourselves. Like John Hersey's Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, Losing Earth is the rarest of achievements: a riveting work of dramatic history that articulates a moral framework for understanding how we got here, and how we must go forward.
--
Nathaniel Rich is the author of the novels King Zeno, Odds Against Tomorrow, and The Mayor's Tongue. He is a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to The Atlantic and The New York Review of Books. He lives in New Orleans.
Please note:
Duration of event is subject to author's preference.
Signing and additional details coming soon.
This event is all ages. Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs of any kind, please write events AT booksmith DOT com and we will do our best to accommodate you.
Enjoy our event with Rebecca Solnit and Jeff Chang, courtesy of C-SPAN:
[The Mother of All Questions]
Rebecca Solnit examines how women have been silenced and the changes occurring within the feminist movement today. She speaks with with author Jeff Chang.