Seeking input on a list of AI books for broader audience

Darren McKee

Seeking input on a list of AI books for broader audience

Darren McKee

6 min readFeb 27, 2023

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Geoffrey Miller

Darren -- thanks for sharing this very comprehensive list; I can't think of anything to add!

Looking forward to your book. I agree that we need more accessible, but technically accurate, books on AI issues. Happy to read any chapter drafts if you want some feedback, in due course.

Darren McKee

Mighty kind of you. I'll be in touch.

seanrson

How about Melanie Mitchell’s Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans?

Erich_Grunewald 🔸

There's also Olle Häggström's Tänkande maskiner. It's in Swedish but IMO it's superior as an introduction to both Human Compatible and Superintelligence (the only other book-length treatments I've read).

JakubK

Shunryu Colin Garvey wrote a dissertation titled "Averting AI catastrophe: improving democratic intelligence for technological risk governance." The pdf is 376 pages (including citations).

Additionally, Garvey's Stanford HAI profile says "his book manuscript, Terminated? How Society Can Avert the Coming AI Catastrophe, is under review."

JakubK

Tom Chivers also wrote The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy: Superintelligent AI and the Geeks Who Are Trying to Save Humanity's Future.

Darren McKee

Thanks for sharing, this and the others. I read that one and it was a bit more about the rationality community than the risks. (It's in the list with a different title)

JakubK

The AI Does Not Hate You is the same book as The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy? I didn't realize that. Why do they have different titles?

JakubK

Cass Sunstein's book, Averting Catastrophe, also seems relevant, although it doesn't focus on AI.

nil

I'd recommend Reflections on Intelligence (the revised edition) by Magnus Vinding. It's a short e-book/long essay which is rather critical about the notion of "superintelligent" AI specifically.

RobPra

I recommend A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence by Michael Wooldridge

LoveAndPeaceAlways

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do by Erik J. Larson wasn't mentioned.

Darren McKee

Oops, looks like I read that last July (and didn't agree with the general thesis). Thanks for the comment.

JamesMiller

I wrote Singularity Rising (2012).

Comments

Book Title	Author	Year Published
The Singularity is Near	Ray Kurzweil	2005
Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century	PW Singer	2009
Global Catastrophic Risks	Ed: Bostrom and Cirkovic	2011
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies	Nick Bostrom	2014
The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World	Pedro Domingos	2015
Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence	Max Tegmark	2017
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order	Kai-Fu Lee	2018
Architects of Intelligence: The truth about AI from the people building it	Martin Ford	2018
Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes	Richard Clarke and RP Eddy	2018
The Sentient Machine: The Coming Age of Artificial Intelligence	Amir Husain	2018
Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence	Jacob Turner	2018
Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control	Stuart Russell	2019
The AI Does Not Hate You: The Rationalists and Their Quest to Save the World	Tom Chivers	2019
Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust	Gary Marcus, Ernest Davis	2019
The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation	Carl Benedikt Frey	2019
Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind	Susan Schneider	2019
Who's Afraid of AI?: Fear and Promise in the Age of Thinking Machines	Thomas Ramge	2019
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values	Brian Christian	2020
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity	Toby Ord	2020
A Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining Who We Are	Flynn Coleman	2020
T-Minus AI: Humanity's Countdown to Artificial Intelligence and the New Pursuit of Global Power	Michael Kanaan	2020
The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI	(Eds) M Dubber, F Pasquale, S Das	2020
Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse	Nina Schick	2020
AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines	Cave et al	2020
AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future	Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan	2021
Evil Robots, Killer Computers, and Other Myths: The Truth About AI and the Future of Humanity	Steven Shwartz	2021
A Vulnerable System: The History of Information Security in the Computer Age	Andrew Stewart	2021
Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence	Kate Crawford	2021
The Age of AI: And Our Human Future	D. P. Huttenlocher, Eric Schmidt, Henry Kissinger	2021
The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann	Ananyo Bhattacharya	2022
The Oxford Handbook of AI Governance	Bullock et al (eds)	2022
Dignity in a Digital Age: Making tech work for all of us	Ro Khanna	2022
The New Fire: War, Peace, and Democracy in the Age of AI	Ben Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie	2022
What We Owe The Future	William MacAskill	2022
Ethical Machines	Reid Blackman	2022
Relationships 5.0: How AI, VR, and Robots Will Reshape Our Emotional Lives	Elyakim Kislev	2022
The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything	Matthew Ball	2022
Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology	Chris Miller	2022
The Equality Machine	Orly Lobel	2022
Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence	Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb	2022

Upcoming
Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Hardcover	Paul Scharre	Feb. 28, 2023

Possibilities
Stoic Philosophy and the Control Problem of AI Technology: Caught in the Web	Edward H. Spence	2021
Evolutionary Digital Environment Net: A Unified Compromise for the AI Control Problem and Climate Crisis	TR Simmons	2021
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power	Shoshana Zuboff	2019
Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security	Edited by Roman V. Yampolskiy (Multiple authors included like Kurzweil, Max Tegmark, Nick Bostrom)	2018
Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World (didn't grab me)	Mo Gawdat	2021
Ray Kurweils' book in 2024