What is the highest-grossing entertainment franchise of all time? You might be tempted to think of Star Wars, or perhaps the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Maybe even Harry Potter? But no: it’s Pokémon – the others don’t come close. The Japanese “pocket monsters”, which star in video games, TV series and tradable playing cards, have made an estimated $115bn since 1996. Is this a sign of the lamentable infantilisation of postmodern society?

Not a bit of it, argues Keza MacDonald, the Guardian’s video games editor, in her winsomely enthusiastic biography of Nintendo, the company that had become an eponym for electronic entertainment long before anyone had heard the words “PlayStation” or “Xbox”. Yes, Pokémon is mostly a children’s pursuit, but a sophisticated one: “Like Harry Potter, the Famous Five and Narnia,” she observes, “it offers a powerful fantasy of self-determination, set in a world almost totally free of adult supervision.” And in its complicated scoring system, “it got millions of kids voluntarily doing a kind of algebra”.

Meanwhile, a lot of adults participated in the 2016 summer craze for Pokémon Go, the phone app that led people to walk around looking for imaginary monsters in real places. Pure escapism, perhaps, for people depressed by the deaths of David Bowie and Prince, not to mention the Brexit referendum. But at least it got people out of the house. When getting people to stay in their house became the law four years later, it was Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a delightful fantasy of village life, that enabled them to socialise remotely, selling 45m copies in 2020.

Before all that, of course, there was Mario, the bouncy Italian star of the arcade game Donkey Kong (1981) and countless games since. Dressed in what MacDonald unimprovably calls his “unorthodox plumbing uniform”, Mario is central to what may be the most aesthetically consistent long-running entertainment series ever. (The brilliant 2023 entry, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, is a video game that is also a slapstick musical.) His creator, the enigmatic genius Shigeru Miyamoto (now 73 years old), insists that he just thinks of his work as the modest application of common sense, but his colleagues know better, speaking reverently of “Miyamoto magic”.

Miyamoto also designed the hit series The Legend of Zelda, inspired by his boyhood love of exploring the countryside, some instalments of which rank among the greatest video games ever created. In one of those curious reversals of association between art and real life, I find to this day that whenever I hear the cawing of a crow, I think of Hyrule Field, an unprecedentedly vast and realistic open space in the 1998 Zelda game Ocarina of Time. MacDonald interviews the lead programmer of that masterpiece, who says adorably of his responsibility for Epona, the hero’s trusty steed: “I worked hard to make her a good horse.”

MacDonald’s conversations with all the gifted (and often eccentric) creative people who actually make the games are full of such wholesome insights, as are her own superb analyses of favourite games, and of the general vibe of Nintendo: its “toymaker philosophy” is an antidote, she argues, to the increasingly baleful role that technology plays in all our lives. “In an era where our utopian conception of new technologies has soured,” she writes, “where social media algorithms and a mass of online ‘content’ vie to ensnare our attention for profit … a game like Zelda shows us that technology can instead be enriching: it can create a true alternative world behind the screen.”

Nintendo, indeed, has seldom been on the bleeding edge of tech for its own sake. Gunpei Yokoi, the inventor of the handheld Game Boy, described his own design philosophy as “lateral thinking with withered technology”. The company says it has no plans to use generative AI in its games: they would rather focus, Miyamoto says, on “what makes Nintendo special”. And that is its core business of simple joy. As Takashi Tezuka, a producer on Super Mario Bros. Wonder, says to MacDonald: “It’s an action game where you get enjoyment out of discovering how to become better.” In a world over which we have no control, the pleasure of mastery is a rare gift.

If Elon Musk is a name that sounds as if it was invented by Ian Fleming, there’s more than a hint of the Bond villain about the South Africa-born American billionaire. It’s not just the extraordinary wealth, which hovers around the quarter of a trillion dollars mark, but the SpaceX business that sends rockets into space and seeks Martian colonisation (very Hugo Drax and Moonraker) and the hypersensitive ego.

All of these sides of Musk are on painful display in Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. So unappealing is the portrait this pair of New York Times technology reporters paint that a more fitting title might be Character Assassination. Or it would if it wasn’t for the fact that Musk himself provides most of ammunition discharged in this damning account.

As the subtitle suggests, the book focuses on Musk’s controversial acquisition of the social media platform Twitter, now renamed X, which the authors describe as “a new, harsher and much more cynical social media company”. It seemed an unlikely development for someone who became the richest person in the world through building extraterrestrial rockets and electric cars, but Musk started out as an internet entrepreneur making his first fortune with an online city guides business, before becoming even more filthily rich from the sale of his share in PayPal.

He was also a Twitter addict, one of those people who couldn’t let a day pass – and often an hour – without posting his opinion or reposting someone else’s. In a previous era the gilded classes liked to demonstrate their affluence and influence with the ownership of newspapers. But as early as 1998 Musk had seen the writing on the screen.

“I think the internet,” he declared back then, “is the be-all and end-all of media.”

Although Twitter wasn’t the be-all and end-all of anything other than cultural warfare, by the end of the last decade it was established as a vital resource for tens of millions around the globe, and the company aspired to rival Facebook. Its chief executive was Jack Dorsey, a curious hippy-billionaire given to gnomic statements, who tried to navigate a path for the platform between the jagged rocks of libertarian principle and liberal concern. It wasn’t an entirely successful strategy, and a divided board eventually encouraged his exit.

His successor, Parag Agrawal, was a devoted technocrat who seemed to believe that all solutions to the toxic social conflicts associated with the platform could be found in better coding. But he never really got a chance to make his mark because he was immediately shown the door when Musk bought the company for $44bn just over two years ago. Or rather he was legally compelled to buy it after making an inflated offer from which, despite his best efforts, he was unable to back out. The court case that clarified Musk’s obligation also revealed a cache of text messages the billionaire sent relating to the acquisition. They show a rash, impatient character given to bouts of intimidation, grandstanding, depression and megalomania.

He practically forced Twitter to sell to him without any due process, and then complained long and hard that he hadn’t had the opportunity to assess the company’s true worth. Nor did he have any kind of coherent plan about where to take the business. He loathed its advertising model, and set about alienating the companies that provided most of Twitter’s income, yet his alternative – raising money through a verification system – was ill-conceived and counterproductive.

The more revenue declined, the more he stripped the workforce, thus losing expertise that in turn stymied efforts to reform the business. As he tweeted six months after the purchase: “How do you make a small fortune in social media? Start out with a large one.”

The justifying cause to which he lays claim is free speech, a noble concept that tends to splinter on impact with complex reality.

While the authors may be a touch too inclined to see any questioning of liberal shibboleths as tantamount to hate speech, there’s little doubt that if Twitter always had its nasty elements it has become a larger cesspool, if smaller business, under Musk.

Throughout it all, with only minor exceptions, he carries on tweeting – or what are we supposed to call it now, X-ing? According to the authors, he became obsessed with becoming the most followed contributor on his own platform, launching a frenzied investigation when the numbers began tailing off, convinced that disgruntled members of the old regime had thrown a digital spanner in the works.

At one point, when a tweet he makes supporting one Super Bowl team gets less attention than President Biden’s backing of the same team, he walks out of the event and flies to San Francisco to oversee efforts to find out how this presidential scene-stealing had been allowed to happen.

There is growing evidence to suggest that social media is deleterious to mental health, and nothing in this book leads the reader to believe otherwise. The kind of polarised and insular thinking that algorithms on platforms such as Twitter/X are primed to spread is in a way personified by Musk, who has persuaded himself that he is on a crusade to save America and the world from what he calls the “woke mind virus”.

It’s not as if there aren’t troubling aspects to some of the more self-righteous social justice movements, but Musk has climbed into bed with Donald Trump, both men citing popular support while being chiefly focused on self-enrichment and the gratification of their overweening vanity.

By the end of this book, you can’t help but feel that Mars may well be the right place for this strange and obscenely wealthy character.

• Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac is published by Cornerstone (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

There is, it seems, an unwritten law in the world of artificial intelligence, which I will attempt to distil here: “Any discussion of AI must include an early and robust reference to the Terminator”. Though the 1984 James Cameron film and its 1991 sequel are quite good, here are two equally made-up but probably mostly true facts: no one under the age of 30 has seen either film and, in any case, neither film has anything particularly insightful to say about AI. But here we are, and the relentless analyses of the moment we are in – where we apparently stand on precipices of revolutions, ushering in utopia or the apocalypse – tend to be written by men who have seen Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator failing to assassinate Sarah Connor many times over. If you can also allude to biblical creation, then you’re winning at AI bingo.

AI expert Neil Lawrence springs both traps on page one of his new book, The Atomic Human, and fulfilling the promise of the Terminator’s most quoted line (“I’ll be back”), the film makes a further 15 appearances. Lawrence doesn’t reference the more recent Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s 2014 AI film (that I, full disclosure, had a minor role in creating) which explicitly mocks techbro Silicon Valley arrogance: a Mark Zuckerberg/Elon Musk-like CEO hubristically misquotes a comment made about the creation myth of his own artificially intelligent robot: “If I’ve invented a machine with consciousness, I’m not a man, I’m a God.”

I wonder if we are in a unique moment in history when the discourse is shaped so significantly by the fiction that the men who are in charge of these domains consumed as nerdy youths. Last month it was revealed that Sam Altman, the controversial figure behind OpenAI had asked the actor Scarlett Johansson to voice the latest incarnation of their ChatGPT interface, emulating her role as the AI personal assistant in the 2013 film Her. Johansson declined, but Altman allegedly used a soundalike actor or possibly an artificial Johansson voice anyway. In May, apparently too arrogant (or rich) to bother hiding his deed, Altman tweeted the single word, “her”. Hubris 1: Ethics nil.

We understand big ideas through storytelling. Much has been made of humans as storytelling machines, and Lawrence embraces this mode of science communication with gusto. He indulges us with the Bletchley Park saga, Alan Turing’s brilliance and details of the strategies and technologies of the second world war, in enjoyably exploring ideas of intelligence and how computers can or don’t emulate human cognition. In a chapter called Enlightenment, we veer from Great Man classic tales of Isaac Newton, Winston Churchill and Stephen Hawking, down a cul-de-sac visiting William Blake and Michelangelo, then to Lewis Carroll and Bertrand Russell, and all the way to Elon Musk, via many more.

It says on the press release for The Atomic Human that “the voices of women in AI get overshadowed”. I scanned the index and found that 15 women are named in this 448-page book (16 if you count the goddess Hera), as well as the mention of two groups of anonymous women (Royal Navy Wrens, and the women of Bletchley Park). Winnie-the-Pooh, a fictional bear who as far as I am aware, did not make any pronouncements on intelligence research, or the AI revolution, is mentioned 17 times. I highlight this not to signal my no-doubt jarring political correctness, nor to deny the possibility that, for reasons unexplored in this book, women have played a less significant direct role in the history of AI and big Silicon Valley tech. But if the voices of women are overshadowed in a book by a movie robot or a whimsical bear, then by god we need new stories.

Countless books and films cover the history of Bletchley, of codebreaking, of life in Facebook or Microsoft, about George Mallory and Edmund Hillary, about JFK and the Apollo moon landings. Page after page of the Atomic Human are war stories and rocket stories, jumping about in time and space, and muddling the premise. Maybe I am not manly enough to be excited by this paean to the well-documented but tangential achievements of men. Even if the intended narrative here is to synthesise a thesis about how these well-told tales contribute to our understanding of intelligence, I couldn’t quite pick out the relevance of so many of these boys’ own adventures to the expectation embedded in the subtitle: “Understanding ourselves in the age of AI”.

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Lawrence is, however, refreshingly dismissive of the tiring amount of posturing and bullshit in the world of AI. I may be in a minority in thinking that the trademark “big concepts” are so often pseudo-philosophical grandstanding by men who like the sport and status but maybe should’ve read a bit more philosophy, and at least had a glance at some history: the singularity – the point when technology is irreversibly beyond our control; transhumanism – a waftily defined state where we are human but vastly enhanced via some unspecified tech; Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence – a hypothetical technology whose mind far exceeds that of our own crude meat-brains. I’ve never quite resolved whether these future demons are the hooks to get people interested in the real issues, or simply distractions, the magician’s flourish. Either way, I’ve always found them rather tiresome. Lawrence pleasingly labels them as “hooey”, because in all their grandeur, they seem to be terabytes away from the real world of AI that we already live in.

Instead, Lawrence offers novel insight into what intelligence is, how it evolved, and how it is distributed in different living and non-living systems. Comparisons to psychological processing, and the intricacies of the intelligent learning behaviour of our own nervous systems provide insight into the neural processes that do, might or don’t underlie complex artificial administration – for example, in the process of buying something off Amazon, where Lawrence worked for several years – and how much of what is described as AI is merely computation and statistics. This is a salient point that should be better known, that much of the so-called AI in action today is likely to be an Excel spreadsheet doing some numerical powerlifting. But these are points lost in muddled tales whose relevance is often hard to detect.

I would prefer this book half the length and stripped of “great men” of history, to showcase the things we don’t know about what really happens inside the private offices and labs of Amazon or Facebook, and to puncture the movie-baddie hubris. It has an admirable central humanist message: that we are irreplaceable despite the scary waffle of popular discourse. Overall, The Atomic Human is a sensible book, which is higher praise than it sounds, because it tries and to some extent succeeds in rising above the very shallow oceans of public debates about AI that are often shocking but ultimately dull. I just wish he hadn’t started with a tired Uzi-toting cyborg from the 1980s.