Triple Cooked

This is the first of my reflections posts nearly six months after publication of The Atomic Human. It’s been busy, not only with giving talks about the book, but with teaching and supporting our efforts in ai@cam, Accelerate Science and my own group’s research.

The idea of the reflections posts is that they allow me to share thoughts that wouldn’t fit into the book, or thoughts that have emerged out of the book. To get things going I thought I’d kick of with the Advent Calendar of Atomic Human. Most of the work on 1st December was getting the website ready, but the aim was always to showcase Dan Andrew’s beautiful work illustrating the chapters.¹ So the first image made it out an hour before midnight GMT in the UK!

Dan Andrews' illustration of Chapter 1. See scribeysense.com

For the second post, I wanted to give a nod to some of the people I got to talk to and share ideas with while writing. One question I often get is “How long did the book take you to write?”, it’s a difficult question to answer because it was written, roughly, across a decade. The first version was being pulled together across 2015 and 2016, but it was mainly warning about the emerging digital oligarchy and the dangers of concentrating data. Events moved rather ahead of the book with the 2016 US election.

I sometimes think of the book as “triple cooked”, I know some find the layering of stories distracting, but I’m also glad that others see the depth that it can give. To the extent that the depth is there, it’s emerging from a process of writing and rewriting, at least across the first half as I looked to find my voice. I’m very glad that many who know me say they can hear me in the words. This was an objective of mine ever since reading this article by Simon Hoggart about Christopher Hitchens. I always enjoyed reading both Hoggart and Hitchens and a piece of advice Hoggart gave Hitchens stuck with me.

I can claim some tiny credit; in one of his later Vanity Fair columns, written under the death sentence, he generously said that I had told him to write as he spoke, and that had liberated his style.

I think ever since then I strived to “write as I spoke”, but that’s not actually what you literally want to do. As many who’ve read transcripts of their own meeetings will see you typically want to write much more eloquently than you speak!

The triple cooking comes because after the first draft I went to work for Amazon for three years. I always knew I wanted to return to academia, and I jumped at the chance to return when my current job was advertised. I was sorry to leave some unfinished work at Amazon, particularly around science culture. But shortly before leaving I’d spoken to a publisher who’d offered me a contract to write. My current chair is the DeepMind chair, I don’t work for Google/DeepMind but they fund my chair. Unfortunately an overzealous lawyer in Amazon didn’t quite see it that way and when the legal department heard of my impending move to academia I was marched from the office and placed on garden leave. This gave me some unexpected free time and I began to write again. Across the pandemic I wrote the second draft with the contract I’d been offered in mind.

I’d spoken sympathetically to the publisher about the pressures they faced from large companies like Amazon, so it was with some irony that I observeed how even a small publisher tries to exploit its power over authors. Several colleagues had advised me not to sign the contract without modifications, and although I had a finished draft I decided I needed more professional advice. My colleague Steven Cave was kind enough to introduce me to Robert Kirby, his agent for his books on immortality. Robert loved the ideas, agreed to take me on but told me I needed to write a proposal for publishers rather than sharing the draft manuscript.

I think there’s no harder piece of writing to do than to write a proposal for a book you’ve already written. Because once you’ve written a book, you realise the book you should have written … and typically it’s not the book you wrote!

It took about six months to forget the book I’d written and write a proposal for a new book. That book is The Atomic Human. And its triple cooked because it was written thrice.

1. For work from Dan illustrating one of our Accelerate Science events see https://scribeysense.com/accelerate-programme-for-scientific-research ↩