On The Origin Of Risk

Nowadays, I’m primarily known as a contemporary/fine artist, but one of my fondest memories of any of my art-related activities is still that of the first time I ever saw my work in print. It way back in the late 80s, when I walked into my local newsagent and picked up a copy of the first national magazine I ever illustrated for. And to this day I still get a kick out of seeing any of my work appear in books or magazines (be it my sculptures, paintings or illustrations). So I was delighted when the author Adam Timlett (who I was previously aware of through a SciArt collaboration he has with a friend of mine, the artist James White) approached me about illustrating the cover for his upcoming book (now out in hardback and as a Kindle option).

Adam and I met in a little café in West London in October last year (during my annual pilgrimage to the insanity that is Frieze Week) to discuss the book and what sort of images might work well for the cover illustration. I was fascinated by everything he told me about his research. Well, the bits that didn’t go completely over my head, that is. We threw around a few ideas and I scribbled down a load of thumbnail sketches to act as personal visual prompts for later. We came up with lots of interesting ideas for potential cover designs but the main gist of them all was that the image had to convey elements of risk, and biology or evolution, and possibly, but not necessarily, AI. 

You can see a couple of my preliminary sketches here in this post, but not wanting to bore you with all of them I’d like to focus on what led up to the final design. The finished product was put together by the cover designer, Nicola Nahum, who took my digital drawings/redesigning of a queen playing card (the queen bee representing nature/biology and the playing card representing risk) and created this beautifully and minimally laid out cover design.

 

To do the contents of the book justice, I’ve pretty much lifted the following description of what it’s about from the back cover. On the Origin of Risk (subtitle: What organisations, AI researchers & even physicists need to learn from cutting-edge biology, and why) presents a new way of understanding the deep biases we have in the business and scientific communities in our theories of risk and the core concepts we use to manage risk, especially as organisations.

It presents the evidence and argument from cutting-edge biology that risk is managed differently in organisms in Nature, and that we must learn from Nature in order to develop new theories and lead our mathematics of risk in new directions.

It argues that new biology shakes the fundamental assumptions of both the scientific and business communities.

The final half of the book sketches out what these new directions look like. It presents the beginning of a new way to look at problems of risk, including a technical appendix that adds detail on the new mathematics of risk which leverages our latest empirical knowledge of biological systems and original research by the author.

 

If you’d like to order a copy you can click here for a hardback version and here for a Kindle version.