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Will Eaves: What I'm thinking about ... artificial intelligence

'Babbage's beautiful monster, with all its banks of ante-digital data, is no more a self-starting entity than my laptop. Or my toaster'

At a recent centenary-year conference on the life and work of the mathematician and logician Alan Turing – a pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI) – I found myself asking two questions: 1) what, pace The Stones, starts us up and gets us (or any kind of life) going? And 2) why are we always comparing AI and its computational products with human intelligence?

The Switch

Doron Swade, former Curator of Computing at the Science Museum, is talking about the Victorian mathematician Charles Babbage and his designs for his proposed mechanical calculators, the Difference and Analytical Engines. Both were unbuilt during the nineteenth century, but Swade finally completed a (very beautiful) working model of a Difference Engine in 2002. He's fascinating on the subject of Babbage's correspondence with Byron's daughter, Ada Lovelace, who saw that numbers, as manipulated by the sophisticated Analytical Engine, could be made to represent entities other than quantity – that the design, in concept, represented the start of a fundamental transition from calculation to computation. Then Swade says something that strikes me as suggestively odd: Babbage's Engine, as the embodiment of mathematical rule, was "an autonomous construct".

Was it? "The machine will compel a cycle of operation", Babbage wrote. But what compels the compulsion? I thought the rule for something being autonomous, like a kind of life, is precisely that it has to self-start. It has to be original in the sense that it has to be more than the result of an imposed discipline. And by those standards, Babbage's beautiful monster, with all its banks of ante-digital data, is no more a self-starting entity than my laptop. Or my toaster. Lovelace called it a "calculus of the nervous system", which is a great phrase, but … you had to pull a lever to get it going. Even now, the mechanical world must be turned on. The cry still goes up: "Where's the switch?" Swade is a conference adept, but many of his fellow speakers are having trouble working the lights onstage. Or can't find their way around the desktop. "Now, I don't quite know what I'm doing here … where's the file? I thought I moved it … "

I'm feeling stupidly reassured about all this, when the man in the seat next to me embarks on a terrible coughing fit, a real empurpled horror, with the kind of tense hiatus between grim expectoration and desperate, gurgled apology which has me looking around for a more responsible, perhaps medically trained, bystander. The coughing man is a professor, decorated and retired. When I said I came from the humanities side of things, he said "Is that code for something?". I can just see him being wheeled out, packed off in an ambulance. In fact, he recovers and heads for the bar in the interval. But what if he had not?

I imagine a nurse picking up the phone to one of his grown-up kids in the middle of the night, and one of them groping for the light, minutes after having made love, and coming to terms with his death, vaguely aware that beginnings and endings are peremptory and undesigned, but held in balance; and all at once it strikes me that we're not self-starting either, are we? You and me. We're not, as individuals, self-organised. Nothing alive is. Something, whether it's sex, or a bolt of lightning, has to get us going. Matter began to twitch billions of years ago, but why did that happen? There's no law of physics saying it has to. Why twitch? Why self-replicate? Why? The leap from the inorganic to the organic – that's the bullet everyone's trying to dodge. Where's the switch?

Mechanical Art

Here is a common objection to AI. Machines won't be worthy of being considered to be thinking machines until they can write like Shakespeare, or Jane Austen, or even Jodi Picoult. Turing acknowledged this prejudice (The Argument from Consciousness) in his 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence. The question of whether or not a machine can write a sonnet or a symphony, he later added, is not the interesting question. The interesting question is: by whom should such a sonnet or symphony be judged, and how? Turing argued that a machine poem might best be appreciated by another machine, and not by a human being.

I think what he was getting at is this: AI is bedevilled by anthropomorphism. But it isn't how well machines can do things, from our point of view, that ought to concern us. We have to wean ourselves off the idea of estimating machine function as a kind of graded, comparative performance, with "most human-like" as the prize-winning category. Actually, it's the extent to which we are categorically excluded from whatever it is machines are doing that matters. When they finally speciate – become different – a fundamental barrier to mutual comprehensibility will come into existence, in the same way that a species barrier presently exists between dogs and cats or cats and humans. "I suppose", Turing said in conversation, "when it comes to that, we won't really know what they [machines] are thinking."

It's worth adding, too, that the notion of inter-species inferiority or superiority is ours. It's a category error, and one that has to do with our particular kind of self-consciousness. It may turn out to be lacking in a machine consciousness, which is not bound to carry over into its workings the precisely human operations of the precisely human ego, though that is not to say the machine will be without feelings. It will merely be without our feelings. When machines truly start to think, they will be unthinkably different. That is what we have to try to grasp.

Will Eaves discusses his latest novel, This is Paradise, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 21 August 2012

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Nick Harkaway: What I'm thinking about ... the real cost of free stuff

'The lottery win denies the solid, simple, common-sense wisdom on which I was raised, but which now seems almost Dickensian: the acknowledgement that there's no such thing as a free lunch'

I should be thinking about tigers, or organ theft, or environmental mayhem. I'm at a book festival, and all those are in my next novel – a novel I'm so desperate to get back to that I can barely see straight.

Instead, I keep returning to a sort of family tree.

It begins with the American dream, a promise of moderate prosperity: a detached house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, a stately family car in the drive. It's the promise at the root not only of the US self-perception, but of every modern capitalist democracy – not a job for life, but a life made good by a job. But it has been suspect for much of the last hundred years – Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men is about the hollowness of the hope in the time of the Great Depression. The second world war didn't help. Then the space race of the 60s and 70s revived the premise; Nasa commissioned a series of artists' impressions, essentially Cave Creek, Arizona, but in orbit – replacing the westward expansion of the early US with an outward one into the wider solar system. The idea of space colonisation coincides, also, with the arrival of environmentalism in the form of the Gaia hypothesis, and boundaries to capitalism in The Limits to Growth. It's a way of avoiding the acknowledgement of a world of finite resources and the corollary that wealth is a zero sum game: if you own X, that means I don't.

The original dream was replaced, ultimately, by the lottery win: the perfect story of being discovered, of a natural talent shining through a TV screen or down from a stage, inspiring worship and wealth. But the truth of the lottery win is hard, even as the fantasy is outrageous: it probably won't happen to you. It relies not entirely on talent, nor on hard work. It happens when your ship comes in. And again, the lottery win denies the solid, simple, common-sense wisdom on which I was raised, but which now seems almost Dickensian: the acknowledgement that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Everything is paid for in the end.

That truth is the inconvenient one, both to politicians who must pledge obvious impossibilities in the popularity contest of election, and corporations, who have learned that the simplest way to sell something is to claim that it costs nothing. Throughout the 90s and early 2000s, our financial industry and governments leaned on a snake oil mirage of wealth creation, a bubble predicated on the obvious falsehood that things could only get better. The digital rhetoric of a nascent internet played its part, too: a consequence-free environment where creative works could be endlessly duplicated, identity was malleable, and discussion was unregulatable. The digital cost is still being counted, though I suspect it will ultimately be lower than the gain. The larger mirage was revealed for what it was in the collapse of its most extreme example: the sub-prime mortgages which were never intended to be repaid, were in fact to all intents and purposes unrepayable, but which were created to be sold on, a toxic future which inevitably poisoned the financial waters when the bill came due.

The law of conservation of energy applies. Nothing is without consequence. In abandoning the understanding that things – services, goods, wars and houses – have costs, we risk becoming infantilised, incapable of making decisions about government or finance, and perhaps above all about the environment, the wellbeing of the planet upon which we depend and which our children will inherit from us. It's convenient to those above us, and messily injurious to us and our future. The free lunch is a bad idea, and we need to rid ourselves of it, to take back our understanding of consequence and worth, and demand to see the numbers so we know what we're getting into.

And having said that aloud, perhaps I can go back to my book.

Nick Harkaway is discussing The Blind Giant and his latest novel, Angelmaker at the Edinburgh International Book Festival

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Frank Close: What I'm thinking about ... Higgs Boson and nuclear spies

'Perhaps some Guardian reader remembers something that will help me find out the truth about Pontecorvo, defector and father of the neutrino'

That Higgs Boson. It gives structure to the universe but its discovery, on July 4, has turned my own world upside down. The fourth of July is Independence Day in the US, but there's been no freedom for me since then. I've had to revise my book The Infinity Puzzle – changing future tense and "maybe" into past tense and "is" – write articles for magazines, give talks, and now appear on stage with Peter Higgs himself in Edinburgh.

This was a great pleasure, and fun. Chris Close (no relation) took photos of Peter and me, trying to catch bubbles, which floated in front of us like bosons bubbling out of the vacuum. Having just completed a 5000-word essay, to be titled Bonfire of the Infinities, which will bring the original Infinity Puzzle up to date next year (I will put it on a blog somewhere so no one feels short-changed) I can now have my own Independence Day and get back to what my twitter page, @closefrank, reveals is my current project: Bruno Pontecorvo – a great scientist, but was he also a spy?

The centenary of Pontecorvo's birth is next year, so I can't hang about. As a student in the 1930s in Italy he discovered the principle which today underpins nuclear power, and which was important in developing the atomic bomb. He worked on the Manhattan project, developing nuclear reactors in Canada, then moved to Harwell and on August 31 1950, at the height of the cold war and McCarthy's witch hunt, vanished through the iron curtain.

Pontecorvo was a communist, and it was no surprise when, five years later, the Soviets revealed that he had been working for them, allegedly on peaceful applications of atomic power, since his defection. For many in the west, the fact that his Harwell colleague, Klaus Fuchs, had been exposed as a spy just months before Pontecorvo fled, had some significance. Some KGB defectors insist that Pontecorvo was spying for them all along, though whether this is fact or just a way to sell exciting books has never been established. I will not give my opinion here, as I am still checking and ferreting, but here is a strand, which might trigger someone's memory.

Those of a certain age may recall Peter and Helen Kroger, KGB spies discovered in 1962 to have been living in Ruislip for several years, while running the Portland spy ring. In 1950 they had been spies in the US, but the Soviets exfiltrated them back to Moscow, in a panic following the exposure of Fuchs and other spies, just weeks before Pontecorvo disappeared. A lot was happening in 1950. Perhaps some Guardian reader remembers something from those times, or has insights as to how some of these pieces fit together.

What is certain is that by settling in the USSR, Pontecorvo missed out on at least one Nobel prize. He is regarded today in physics as the father of neutrino astronomy – a new branch of science. Having had the seminal ideas, he was unable to carry out the critical experiments himself because of Soviet intransigence. The facilities in USSR weren't adequate, and the Soviets would not allow him to leave the country to perform the experiment at Cern. All that he could do was write up the ideas – in Russian. By the time his paper had been translated into English, and appeared in the west, 18 months had elapsed, during which three scientists in the US had independently come up with the same idea, performed the experiment, and subsequently won the Nobel.

There are other examples of how Pontecorvo's scientific career was limited by his decision – whether voluntary or forced – to settle in the USSR in 1950. If he was a spy, he paid a heavy personal price, far greater than did those who were exposed as spies at the time. Had he stayed in the west it is likely that his name would be known for great science, not for a fateful event at the end of August in 1950. Whether he would be a household name, like Peter Higgs, we shall never know. But I must get on with my Pontecorvo research, because the Nobel prize for physics is announced in October, and should Stockholm choose a prominent scientist from Edinburgh, it's likely that my days will return again to writing more articles, and giving further popular talks.

Meanwhile, though, if anyone has any leads that speed me on my way to Pontecorvo, please get in contact with me at f.close@physics.ox.ac.uk.

Frank Close is professor of theoretical physics at Oxford University, and author of The Infinity Puzzle – the story of the quest for the Higgs boson (Oxford University Press)

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My belated thank you to Liz Lochhead

One day in the early 80s, the poet Liz Lochhead got a blank reception from a bunch of young students. David Barnett was one of them – and says she inspired him to be a writer

I'm not sure if Scotland's makar, or poet laureate, Liz Lochhead – appearing at the Edinburgh Book festival this weekend – remembers visiting a comprehensive school in Wigan sometime in the early 1980s, but I do. And I remember it with a strange mixture of slight discomfort, vague shame and a hard-to-define sense that it set me on the road to somewhere.

I can't remember what year it was, but I started the school in 1981, and it would have been within a couple of years of that. To be quite honest, it wasn't the sort of school where poets and writers beat a path to. We were a thousand-strong student body who were resolutely northern, urban and working class. There used to be a joke that the careers advice in the mid-years of the school was largely based on how tall you were. If you were a strapping lad you were advised that there might be a job in the police, or possibly the army. For everyone else, going down the pit was still just about a viable option. Girls were told about the delights of secretarial work. There was an unspoken suggestion that prison or gym-slip motherhood was the likely life progression for a large percentage of the school population.

But the school tried, and the teachers did their best, and occasionally strange things happened, such as the appearance of a breezy, bohemian-looking woman with an exotic Scottish accent.

I remember being quietly told that my presence would be required in the school library one afternoon, along with a couple of dozen other students. When we got there, Lochhead was introduced to us. No one had heard of her. She was a poet, we were told. I remember that we were all slightly nonplussed. What did she want with us?

Lochhead spoke to us about poetry, and writing. She read some of her poems to us.

I vividly remember one called Men Talk. I didn't really know what feminism was at that point, save as a vaguely insulting term delivered in bleak sitcoms. Men Talk was about how women jabber and gossip and nag and do go on all the time, but men talk. We all found it quite funny. Some of us got it.

We liked it because, vaguely, it was a bit like the rap music that was beginning to get popular. I remember a few days later when a few of us gathered around an opened-out cardboard box, and we'd try to spin on our backs and bust moves, a bunch of pasty-faced working-class white boys in knockoff sports gear, that refrain about women jabbering but men talking going through my head, drowning out Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.

Slight discomfort, I mentioned. That was because it didn't do to stand out at school, or so I thought. Not unless you were brilliant at sport or particularly tough. Being asked to miss lessons to go and listen to a poet marked us out as something a bit odd.

Vague shame, because I remember vividly all of us utterly failing to interact and engage with Lochhead. She did her bit, read her poems, tried to speak to us. We muttered and shook our heads, went red in the face. Asked one or two awkward and banal questions. Somewhere inside I felt terrible, that she'd come all this way and we sort of shrugged. I remember catching a disappointed look from one of the teachers. But I'd been singled out enough; I wasn't going to start asking questions of a freaky-looking feminist poet. I'd liked what she'd done. That was enough for starters.

And the other thing? Being set on the road to somewhere? I suppose that was the first time I'd ever met a writer. Someone who described themselves as a writer, a poet. That was what Lochhead did, that was what she was. A door creaked open slightly, allowing just a crack of light through. I wasn't tall enough for the police, after all, had no desire to go to Northern Ireland with the army, and didn't particularly want to go down the pit. But people could actually be writers … ?

So I'd finally like to say to Liz Lochhead that while I'm sorry we failed to rise above our social conditioning that day in the early 80s, she did get through to at least one surly pre-teen boy, even if she perhaps didn't feel like it at the time.

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Kim Thúy: What I'm thinking about ... how to translate love

'The gesture of love is not universal: it too must be translated from one language to another, must be learned'

Just recently in Montreal, I saw a Vietnamese grandmother ask her one-year-old grandson: "Thương Bà d-ể d-âu?" I can't translate that phrase, which contains just four words, two of them verbs, to love and to carry. Literally, it means, "Love grandmother carry where?" The child touched his head with his hand. I had completely forgotten that gesture, which I'd performed a thousand times when I was small. I'd forgotten that love comes from the head and not the heart. Of the entire body, only the head matters. Merely touching the head of a Vietnamese person insults not just him but his entire family tree. That is why a shy Vietnamese eight-year-old turned into a raging tiger when his Québécois teammate rubbed the top of his head to congratulate him for catching his first football.

If a mark of affection can sometimes be taken for an insult, perhaps the gesture of love is not universal: it too must be translated from one language to another, must be learned. In the case of Vietnamese, it is possible to classify, to quantify the meaning of love through specific words: to love by taste (thích); to love without being in love (thương); to love passionately (yêu); to love ecstatically (mê); to love blindly (mù quáng); to love gratefully (tình nghı ˜a). It's impossible quite simply to love, to love without one's head.

I am lucky that I've learned to savour the pleasure of resting my head in a hand, and my parents are lucky to be able to capture the love of my children when the little ones drop kisses into their hair, spontaneously, with no formality, during a session of tickling in bed. I myself have touched my father's head only once. He had ordered me to lean on it as I stepped over the handrail of the boat.

This is an extract from Ru. Kim Thúy will discuss "upbringings against the odds" with Nigerian novelist Chika Unigwe on Friday (August 17)

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Edinburgh International Book Festival: day seven bulletin

Ahdaf Soueif opens the World Writers Conference, with John Burnside, Jackie Kay and Michael Morpurgo among the writers appearing elsewhere

The heavens have well and truly opened in Edinburgh on day seven of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, but nothing will dampen spirits in Charlotte Square today, as the Edinburgh World Writers' Conference gets underway.

Today's event – the first in the series, inspired by the 1962 Writers' Conference – will feature Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif talking about literature's relationship to current affairs, and will be chaired by Turkish author Elif Shafak.

Elsewhere at the festival today, poet John Burnside will appear, as will journalist and broadcaster Joan Bakewell. Scottish authors Jackie Kay, Grant Morrison and crime writer Denise Mina are in attendance this evening. And former children's laureate Michael Morpurgo will talk about his book Private Peaceful, which is the latest of his works to be adapted for the big screen.

If you're suffering from Olympics withdrawal symptoms, Bill Jones and Richard Moore will be talking about real-life athletics drama, while today's debate in the Guardian Spiegeltent asks Mihir Bose, Ruth Whishart and Richard Moore if professionalism has ruined our national games.

As of 10am, there are still tickets available for the following events:

12.30: John Crace & John Sutherland
13.00: Pat Barker
14.00: Russell Kane
14.00: What the Dickens with Philip Ardagh
15.00: Edinburgh World Writers' Conference: Should Literature Be Political?
16.00: Janine di Giovanni & Ed Vulliamy
18.45: Kapka Kassabova
20.30: Neal Stephenson
21.30: Grant Morrison

Tonight's Unbound is the fantastic Literary Death Match, featuring Greg Proops, Nikesh Shukla, Tupelo Hassman and Rory Skovel.

The signing tent will feature:

And if you're visiting the book festival today, look out for paper sculptures around the site. Yesterday, a number of small paper flowers were discovered in the festival bookshop, all bearing an Oscar Wilde quote "freedom, books, flowers and the moon" with "A Gift For You" written on the back.

Has the mystery paper sculptor struck again? Each carries a limited edition number of /50, but not all have been found, so keep your eyes peeled in and around Charlotte Square and tweet us if you make a discovery.

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Alan Garner: you ask the questions

The author who enchanted the nation's children with the Weirdstone of Brisingamen has agreed to answer your questions. A chance to find out more about Boneland, the conclusion to his Alderley Edge trilogy? It's your call …

So Alan Garner has agreed to answer a bunch of questions put to him by Guardian readers – in other words, us. It's a golden opportunity. Since he was first published in 1960, he's never been out of print, meaning there's more than half a century of top-rate material and criticism to ask him about.

Talking of more than 50 years, this is also a fine chance to ask about Garner's new book Boneland, and the long-delayed completion of the trilogy begun with the Weirdstone of Brisingamen, back when John Lennon and Paul McCartney were playing in a band called The Silver Beatles and Elvis Presley was just returning from the army.

I'm also keen to hear if he still thinks that the widely loved Weirdstone of Brisingamen is (as he declared back in 1968) "a fairly bad book". I'm keen to hear about his unique connection with the landscape in rural Cheshire and how much he thinks its changed over the years, about Red Shift's unique ability to divide the opinions of its readers, about the way he integrates his only family history into his stories, about … sadly, I'm not asking the questions, much as I'd love to. You are.

To do so, just post a comment here. We'll compile a list of your submissions and send them on to Alan Garner, who will answer as many as he can, as quickly as he can! If everyone is as excited as me, I imagine it's going to be quite a busy forum, so do try to post as soon as you can. We'll keep this thread open until Wednesday 22 August at midday.

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Scent of a kitten: the 20 irrefutable theories of book cover design

Do you judge a book by its cover? Designers Jon Gray and Jamie Keenan shared their theories on attracting readers – from cute cats to alluring perfume – at the Edinburgh book festival

1. Face theory

Research suggests that human beings spend 48.6% of their lives decoding facial communication, so a big draw for a potential book buyer will be the familiarity of a face. The cover of Nick Hornby's Otherwise Pandemonium, for example, uses a cassette tape to create the image of a face.

2. Association theory

Human beings make a connection with a given stimulus that leads to how they respond to something they see. The image on the cover of Luca Turin's The Secret of Scent uses the familiar image of the Chanel No 5 perfume label to help the reader respond to the idea that the book is about scent.

3. Zen theory

This theory presents a challenge to the human mind that some will accept and some won't. A zen theory cover mainly involves text with few images, telling the reader little about the book other than the name of the author. This is often used for books from well-known authors, such as Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, who will attract readers with their name alone.

4. Type as image theory

This theory uses original or customised typefaces to create images and ideas. The type often becomes the image, such as on the cover for Steven Levy's The Perfect Thing.

5. Textual plasticity theory

The human mind reads words as a whole not individual letters. If a letter is missing, the brain will still understand the word. The design for James Gleick's Faster has all the vowels missing from the author's name and title on the cover, but is still readable.

6. Overdetermination theory

The image on a cover using Overdetermination theory suggests the beginning or snapshot of a narrative rather than an overall end result.

7. Ringfence theory

The difference between positive and negative space can determine what the reader sees. The Rubin vase is a good example, where some people see two faces and others see a vase. In this cover, the iPod headphones shape a womb and two lovers' faces.

8. Zoom theory

Zooming in can give a taster of a narrative without giving too much away, while zooming out creates a bigger picture, depending on what is required. The pen nib on the cover of Miguel Syjuco's Ilustrado is an example of close zoom.

9. Encapsulation theory

Typeface and image combine to create one unified image for the reader. Unity is more attractive to humans, as making connections doesn't require as much effort. The cover of Marina Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian has a picture of a tractor and the word "tractor".

10. Molecular theory

Layers of symbols that make up a whole, understandable theme define molecular theory. The cover of Karen Maitland's The Company of Liars uses skull symbols inside a silhouette of a dog to symbolise that this is "a novel of the plague".

11. Unheimlich theory

This theory takes a familiar image or symbol and makes it strange or unsettling. One cover of Lolita uses the image of a girl's bedroom wall to represent a girl's legs and underwear.

12. Absent presence theory

A gap is left on the cover, a missing image or text, that implies something. By having this space, the reader is forced to fill the gap with their imagination in order to understand the meaning.

13. Ju Jitsu theory

The opponent, the cover, forces a view or conception upon the defender, the reader, such as the bloody, violent implications on the cover of Anthony McGowan's love story Stag Hunt.

14. Toy theory

A fixed image allows the reader to remain passive and distance themselves from a cover. A fluid image, like the one on William Boyd's Fascination requires the reader to actively explore the cover and become curious about the content.

15. Obfuscation theory

If something is hidden it suddenly becomes more interesting to the curious nature of the human mind. The cover of an edition of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day obscures the image that depicts the content with white lines and text.

16. Combination theory

Because a book is static, two ideas can be presented at once to create a doubly effective but meaningful image to the reader. Moses Isegawa's novel Abyssinian Chronicles is about modern Africa, and the cover uses old books to create the shape of the continent.

17. Navigation

The eye is deliberately led via an understandable pattern; left to right, bottom to top, to create an easily recognisable overall image. Hannah Holmes's Quirk depicts the brain through a mind map.

18. Turd theory

A single, unsightly object can be seen as repulsive. Multiply the image and use bright colours, and it can become attractive. Usually used in series design, the effects can be seen in a sequence of Georges Simenon books designed by Keenan.

19. Maximisation

Everything is huge and thrown on to the cover. Bigger images and text can catch a reader's eye in a sea of detailed designs. The cover for Zadie Smith's new book, NW, is a good example of maximisation.

20. Fluffy kitten theory

Nothing draws a reader to a book like a picture of a fluffy kitten.

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Edinburgh International Book festival: day six bulletin

From Ruth Rendell to Michael Frayn, here's what to expect on the programme today

There's a Dickens theme running through today's book festival programme. This afternoon, the writer's great-great-great-granddaughter – Lucinda Dickens Hawksley – will appear in a sold-out event to talk about her new illustrated guide to her ancestor and his works. And later on, Claire Tomalin discusses her biography, Charles Dickens: A Life.

It's a busy day for crime and thriller fans too, with appearances from crime legend Ruth Rendell, Icelandic author Yrsa Sigurdardottir, and Scotland's own Christopher Brookmyre. Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland – who writes as Sam Bourne – will chat to Alan Little about his new thriller, and the newspaper's former man in Russia, Luke Harding, discusses the real life crime and corruption in his book, Mafia State.

Other highlights include Michael Frayn, whose latest novel, Skios, has been longlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize, Chaos Walking-author Patrick Ness and historian Tom Holland, as well as absurdist Israeli writer Etgar Keret.

Lots of sold out events today, but as of this morning, there are still tickets available for:

14.00: Alexandra Harris & John Mullan

14.30: Stephen McGinty & Daniel Pick

15.30: Joanna Bourke & Roger Osbourne

15.30: Philip Ardagh & Axel Scheffler

16.00: Fiona McLAren

16.30: Lindsey Davis & Conn Iggulden

17.00: Gus Casely-Hayford & Alastair Hazell

20.00: Ruth Rendell

20.30: SJ Watson

21.30: Christopher Brookmyre

There's also availability for today's Guardian debate between former Liberal Democrats leader Menzies Campbell and Defending Politics author Matthew Flinders, which asks if we have lost our faith in government.

In the signing tent, you'll find:

Tonight's Unbound is Last Orders, featuring Irish authors Maeve Higgins, Julie Feeney and Kevin Barry. And tomorrow, the book festival will be abuzz as this year's Edinburgh World Writers' Conference gets underway.

Don't forget you can still take part in the Guardian Book Swap, both in Charlotte Square and all over Edinburgh – tweet us with your pictures of books you've swapped, and why you've swapped them.

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Matthew Flinders: What I'm thinking about ... disaffected democrats

'Democracy may not be perfect, but it has delivered huge improvements in health, wealth and the balance of power. So out with the politics of pessimism'

I'm not sure if I dare to share what I'm actually thinking about for fear of being of being labelled mad, sad or even dangerous, but let me take a risk and admit that I'm thinking about the future of democracy. Not democracy in some abstract sense, but democracy in terms of my children's lives: their safety and future, and the simple fact that, whether we like it or not, democratic politics shapes the world around us.

If I'm completely honest, what I'm really thinking about is why so many people seem to have lost faith in political institutions, political processes and politicians. I'm not trying suggest that politics is perfect or that all politicians are angels, but the emergence, in the UK and most parts of the developed world, of huge numbers of 'disaffected democrats' worries me.

It worries me because I've spent time in places where basic democratic rights and freedoms do not exist, where politics is still based on brutality and intimidation; countries best described as fear societies rather than free societies. Seen from this perspective, democratic politics suddenly seems to matter far more - and deliver far more - than many 'disaffected democrats' are willing or able to acknowledge. At a more basic, day-to-day level, I've never understood why so many people seem set on denying that a host of public goods – pensions, free secondary education, health care, sick pay, redundancy pay, clean water, the minimum wage, social housing, etc - bear any relationship to that tarnished activity called politics at all.

More broadly, in the 50 years since Bernard Crick wrote In Defence of Politics there has been a 17% increase in life expectancy worldwide. This increase has been most spectacular in the poorer nations of Asia, where it has reached 20%. "The world is a much better place today than it was in 1990, or even in 1970," the United Nations Human Development Report for 2010 concludes. "Over the past 20 years many people around the world have experienced dramatic improvements in key aspects of their lives … they are healthier, more educated, wealthier and have more power to appoint and hold their leaders accountable than ever before".

Democratic politics is by no means perfect but let us not deny its benefits and achievements.

A far braver (and some might say more foolish) man than I might even dare to suggest that vast sections of the public have become democratically decadent. Decadent in the sense that their expectations of what politics should deliver have become to high; and their sense of their own personal responsibilities to contribute to society have become too low. I'm personally quite glad that Barack Obama turned out not to be superman after all. Too many people sidestep their own individual responsibilities as citizens by looking for a superhero to take control. Obama's election still demonstrates the capacity of democratic politics to renew itself; to reconnect with sections of the political community that had effectively become disenfranchised, and to secure agreements on ambitious policies that many thought could never be achieved. Viewed in this way, I put it to you that maybe the fabric of democratic politics is not as threadbare as many think.

What I'm really thinking is that we can do much worse than honour 'mere politics'. It's easy to carp from the sidelines and bemoan the failure of politics; far harder and riskier to step into the arena and attempt to display a little genius in the art of reconstruction. My concluding thought is therefore this: the 21st century will belong to those individuals, communities and countries who are willing to respond to the world as it changes; to modernize and adapt and see the loss of once-fixed reference points as an opportunity rather than a threat.

Put slightly differently, the 21st century will deliver most to those who are able to rebuff the politics of pessimism and in its place cultivate a more buoyant and vibrant politics of optimism. But this transition will occur only if we are willing to ask some very hard questions about the balance between rights and responsibilities, about the meaning of democracy, and about the limits of politics.

Matthew Flinders is discussing whether we can trust politicians again with Dan Hinds this morning, and he will will be joined by Sir Menzies Campbell in the Rethinking Democracy debate on Thursday at 7pm

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