Science|Business’s summer reads of 2024

So you’ve escaped Brussels (or Berlin, or Paris, or Warsaw…), and are finally lying on the beach with an ice cold Mythos in hand. Research and innovation is, quite understandably, the last thing you want think about right now.

But when you’ve at long last finished the latest Elena Ferrante, or squinted through Season 2 of House of the Dragon with the ocean in the background, thoughts might drift back to work.

Rather than attempting to digest the Commission’s latest communication, or stressing over a recent grant call, the summer break provides a chance to think deeper, and get out of the minutiae of EU policy.

Here, our journalists recommend their top books, podcasts and articles to stimulate some new thinking on research, innovation and technology, and – hopefully – return to the grind in September fizzing with fresh ideas.

 Books

On the Brink of Utopia, by Thomas Ramge and Rafael Laguna de la Vera 

Rafael Laguna de la Vera is the founding director of Germany’s (relatively) new Sprind innovation agency, which next year should have around €250 million to play with, to fund challenges, trials and infrastructure tackling everything from Alzheimer’s disease to long-term energy storage. So his new book, co-authored with the technology writer Thomas Ramge, is not just an abstract call for innovation to be done differently, but a real vision with money and people behind it. De la Vera savages our age of what he calls “innovation theatre” - the illusion of progress through new apps and digital platforms which fail to provide real world benefits. He also takes aim at the mountain of bureaucracy that hamstrings European public efforts to fund innovation, and calls for funders to measure real world results – the model Sprind is attempting to implement as we speak. It’s still unclear if de la Vera’s new agency will be a success, but his book is a radical challenge to existing research and innovation programmmes like Horizon Europe. And even better – it's free to download.  David Matthews

Technology in America: a History of Individuals and Ideas edited by Carroll Pursell

‘Big Tech’ these days is, by and large, American: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Nvidia and all the other mega-multinationals. If you want to understand where these organisations come from, a good start is this compilation of academic essays on earlier American tech entrepreneurs – from Eli Whitney and the cotton gin, to Robert Goddard and rockets. You can trace the American love affair with new gadgets back to at least Thomas Jefferson, who while the first US Secretary of State personally took charge of patent examination – on one occasion ordering the unhappy inventor of a new desalination process to come into his office to demonstrate it (patent denied; not novel enough, the future president ruled). And few of these tech entrepreneurs were nice guys: Henry Ford makes Jeff Bezos look like a paragon of kindliness. But the economics, policy, values and dumb luck that played into these entrepreneurial histories are all noteworthy – and material for the reflection of policy makers outside the US trying to gin up their own innovation ecosystems. Richard Hudson

Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman

If you want to escape with some fiction, this speculative novel paints a compelling picture of where advancements in AI, biotech and geoengineering could lead us in the future. We are in the 2030s, and the death of the world’s last giant panda has resulted in a system of ‘extinction credits’, which in many ways echoes the EU Emissions Trading System. Each credit allows a governments or private company to make a species extinct, and the credits can be bought and sold. Many of these extinct species have DNA samples stored in biobanks so they can one day be resurrected, but a mysterious cyberattack wipes out the last traces of these species and kicks off a mad dash to find out who’s responsible and save the venomous lumpsucker, the world’s most intelligent fish. Martin Greenacre

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro  

The British writer’s latest novel is a gentle yet powerful read. Like all Ishiguro’s writing, it’s a deeply layered book about being human, but this one is written from the perspective of an artificial intelligence ‘friend’, a usual companion in the dystopian world Ishiguro paints. You won’t learn about AI, but you will be immersed in a beautiful meditation on human life through the eyes of a robot. Goda Naujokaitytė

American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin

A Pulitzer Prize, a Hollywood blockbuster (remember “Barbenheimer”?), a best-seller – yes, this scientific biography really is as good as the noise it sparked since its 2005 publication. The basic story: how a brilliant but socially awkward American physicist came to lead the 20th century’s most consequential and horrific R&D project – and was then persecuted by the American political establishment in one of its periodic waves of collective insanity. It’s a door-stop at 721 pages, but it’s written by a historian-journalist team with brio and is meticulously researched and annotated. The political maelstrom around the Manhattan Project’s scientific director will sound familiar to anyone following the contemporary torment of Robert Fauci and other COVID-era scientific leaders. And if you want to read about the consequences of Oppenheimer’s work, try Hiroshima, the 1946 book by The New Yorker journalist John Hershey that opened eyes around the world to the enormity of what happened in that city. Richard Hudson

Power and Progress by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson 

A sweeping history of technological advances and human prosperity by two MIT economists, the core message of Power and Progress is that new tools, machines or other innovations don’t necessarily lead to benefits for the average person – unless we have the power to seize some of the spoils for ourselves. Particularly eye-opening is the book’s history of medieval England. Far from being a period of stagnation, the Middle Ages enjoyed all kinds of new inventions, from crop rotation to windmills. But this surplus was hoovered up by the dominant landowner and political power of the age, the Church, for its own vanity projects, rather than going to the peasants doing the actual work. You’ll never look at a cathedral in quite the same way. The authors finish with a blistering series of warnings about artificial intelligence, which they fear will, on its current trajectory, benefit only tech elites and erode democracy. One of the authors, Simon Johnson, suggested to us in February that we need a new movement for “pro-worker” AI in order to avoid a similar fate to medieval serfs. David Matthews

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

If you’re looking for something deep to read over the summer break, this 1962 book by an MIT philosopher is essential for any science policymaker. In plain language, it postulates how science happens; how the scientific community comes to reject an old “paradigm” of nature and accept a new one; how we got from an earth- to a solar-centric model, from a Newtonian to a relativistic model. According to Kuhn, science is not a foreordained progression towards an ultimate truth of the world, the universe and everything; it’s an evolution of ever-changing models of the world that large or small scientific communities come to accept – often advanced, at first in the face of fierce opposition, by a young researcher or a newcomer to the field. The book has since been the target of hundreds of philosophers refuting it, but its influence remains (if only as chief populariser of that most-overused word in policy, “paradigm.”)  Richard Hudson

Podcasts and episodes

How the Economy Mistreats STEM Workers 

As governments push for more green innovation, cultivating talent is a key piece of the puzzle. But we don’t quite have it right yet. Looking at the US, sociology professor John Skrentny tells us how the push for more graduates to go into STEM fields, that is science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, isn’t enough. After graduation, they get spewed out into an economy where the brightest minds spend their days trying to figure out how to get you to stay on social media for just a bit longer – how can we do better? Goda Naujokaitytė

Acquired with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal 

It’s a tough task to make four-hour long podcasts about corporate history that don’t send you to sleep. But the hosts at Acquired, Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, who both hail from the US VC world, manage to pull it off with such infectious enthusiasm and curiosity, that you might even end each episode feeling some affection, or at least admiration, for the world’s most powerful companies. They’ve told the extraordinary stories of Nvidia, AWS, TSMC, Qualcomm, Nintendo, and Europe’s own Novo Nordisk, among many others. Some episodes have aged rather badly – a 2021 interview with the then crypto-king Sam Bankman-Fried, for example – but on the whole Acquired takes a healthily analytical approach to explain how and why these companies are so successful, rather than simply delivering hagiographies of heroic, Randian founders. You won’t just learn about one company, but how an entire industry – pharma, sports, or luxury, say – operates.  David Matthews

Tech Won’t Save Us with Paris Marx 

If Acquired leaves you feeling cheery about modern-day capitalism’s capacity for innovation, then Tech Won’t Save Us will bring you back down to earth. Its explicit goal is to smash through the wall of hype and BS constructed by the tech industry and client journalists, and unmask the damage caused by their products (and the inconvenient fact that they often just don’t work). Favourite recent episodes include a discussion of the pointlessness of Apple’s Vision Pro; a self-proclaimed Luddite’s take on Europe’s attempt to remain technologically “sovereign”; and an analysis of Silicon Valley’s recent rally round Donald Trump. Unlike some tech-sceptic podcasts, Tech Won’t Save Us is relatively light on anti-capitalist polemic, and heavy on insightful analysis of companies and industries – take this episode on Chinese carmarker BYD, for example. Brussels sometimes displays an embarrassing credulity in the face of the tech industry’s faddy offerings – witness the Belgian presidency’s embrace of blockchain as recently as last year – so a dose of skepticism is in order.  David Matthews

Whiskey Rebellion Episode 238: Open the Pod Bay Doors 

I’ve been catching up on Whiskey Rebellion, a podcast hosted by Frank Cogliano and David Silkenat, two professors of American history at Edinburgh University. In this episode from last summer, they discuss the past, present and future of AI, including how to define artificial intelligence, what Thomas Jefferson would have thought of all this, and what to do about students using ChatGPT. The hosts are not AI experts, but that’s precisely what makes for an interesting discussion, especially when thinking about how to incorporate the social sciences in policymaking. Martin Greenacre

Articles and websites

‘We’re Living in a Nightmare:’ Inside the Health Crisis of a Texas Bitcoin Town, Time

We’ve all heard about the huge amounts of electricity needed to power things like artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, but this extraordinary story from Time looks at another consequence of certain large data centres: noise pollution. Residents of Granbury, Texas have been complaining of migraines, ear infections, blood pressure and heart palpitations, and they believe these symptoms are related to the construction of a local Bitcoin mine, housing over 30,000 computers which have to be cooled down by thousands of fans. It’s a timely reminder that when we talk about regulations, it’s not all about the data. Martin Greenacre

New Things Under the Sun by Matt Clancy 

For anyone interested in how academic research turns into new technology and growth, this is a must-read website. New Things Under the Sun, a website run by the economist Matt Clancy, describes itself as a “living literature review on social science research about innovation” and offers dozens of fascinating deep dives into topics ranging from the spread of academic knowledge through Twitter, to huge, historical questions, like whether technologies are inevitable. Of course, Clancy is only one man, and acknowledges that he can’t synthesise every relevant paper on a topic. But still, his website is a much more accessible way into questions of science and innovation than attempting to drink from the firehose of new academic papers. David Matthews

Solar storms, ice cores and nuns’ teeth: the new science of history, The Guardian

Jacob Mikanowski explores how technological advancements, such as DNA sequencing and spectrometry, are changing the study of history. “History is now entering its pointillist phase, in which the big motions are caught in a thousand individual movements,” writes Mikanowski. How do historians make sense of the new perspectives scientific findings bring to the narrative-based study of history? It’s a look at the changes interdisciplinarity is bringing to science, in practice. Goda Naujokaitytė