10 Ten AI Books Worth Reading
Teaching with AI: A practical guide to a new era of human learning
Bowen, J. & Watson, C. (2024). Johns Hopkins University Press. https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/53869/teaching-ai
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the way we learn, work, and think. Its integration into classrooms and workplaces is already underway, impacting and challenging ideas about creativity, authorship, and education. In this groundbreaking and practical guide, teachers will discover how to harness and manage AI as a powerful teaching tool. José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson present emerging and powerful research on the seismic changes AI is already creating in schools and the workplace, providing invaluable insights into what AI can accomplish in the classroom and beyond.
Unmasking AI: My mission to protect what is human in an age of machines
Buolamwini, J. (2023). Penguin Randomhouse. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/670356/unmasking-ai-by-joy-buolamwini/
To most of us, it seems like recent developments in artificial intelligence emerged out of nowhere to pose unprecedented threats to humankind. But to Dr. Joy Buolamwini, who has been at the forefront of AI research, this moment has been a long time in the making. Unmasking AI goes beyond the headlines about existential risks produced by Big Tech. It is the remarkable story of how Buolamwini uncovered what she calls “the coded gaze”—the evidence of encoded discrimination and exclusion in tech products—and how she galvanized the movement to prevent AI harms by founding the Algorithmic Justice League.
The alignment problem: Machine learning and human values
Christian, B. (2020). Norton. https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393635829
The Alignment Problem offers an unflinching reckoning with humanity’s biases and blind spots, our own unstated assumptions and often contradictory goals. A dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, it takes a hard look not only at our technology but at our culture—and finds a story by turns harrowing and hopeful.
Progressive capitalism: How to make tech work for all of us
Khanna, R. (2022). Simon and Schuster. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Progressive-Capitalism/Ro-Khanna/9781982163358
Inspired by his own story born into an immigrant family, Congressperson Ro Khanna understands how economic opportunity can change the course of a person’s life. Moving deftly between storytelling, policy, and some of the country’s greatest thinkers in political philosophy and economics, Khanna presents a vision we can’t afford to ignore. Progressive Capitalism is a “practical and aspirational” (Kimberlé Crenshaw, professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University) roadmap to how we can seek dignity for every American in an era in which technology shapes every aspect of our lives.
AI 2041: Ten visions of our future
Lee, K.F., & Chen, Q. (2021). Penguin Randomhouse. https://penguinrandomhouselibrary.com/book/?isbn=9780593238318
Long before the advent of ChatGPT, Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan understood the enormous potential of artificial intelligence to transform our daily lives. But even as the world wakes up to the power of AI, many of us still fail to grasp the big picture. Chatbots and large language models are only the beginning.
In this “inspired collaboration” (The Wall Street Journal), Lee and Chen join forces to imagine our world in 2041 and how it will be shaped by AI. In ten gripping, globe-spanning short stories and accompanying commentary, their book introduces readers to an array of eye-opening settings and characters grappling with the new abundance and potential harms of AI technologies like deep learning, mixed reality, robotics, artificial general intelligence, and autonomous weapons.
Co-Intelligence: Living and working with AI
Mollick, E. (2024). Penguin Randomhouse https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/741805/co-intelligence-by-ethan-mollick/
From Wharton professor and author of the popular One Useful Thing Substack newsletter Ethan Mollick comes the definitive playbook for working, learning, and living in the new age of AI.
The algorithm: How AI decides who gets hired, monitored, promoted, and fired and why we need to fight back now
Schellmann, H. (2024). Hachette Books. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/hilke-schellmann/the-algorithm/9780306827341/?lens=hachette-books
In The Algorithm, Emmy‑award winning Wall Street Journal and Guardian contributor Hilke Schellmann delivers a shocking and illuminating exposé on one of the most pressing civil rights issues of our time: how AI has quietly, and mostly out of sight, taken over the world of work.
Life 3.0: Being human in the age of artificial intelligence
Tegmark, M. (2018). Penguin Randomhouse. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/530584/life-30-by-max-tegmark/
What sort of future do you want? This book empowers you to join what may be the most important conversation of our time. It doesn’t shy away from the full range of viewpoints or from the most controversial issues—from superintelligence to meaning, consciousness and the ultimate physical limits on life in the cosmos.
Literary theory for robots: How computers learned to write
Tenen, D.Y. (2024). Cavalier House Books. https://www.cavalierhousebooks.com/book/9780393882186
In the industrial age, automation came for the shoemaker and the seamstress. Today, it has come for the writer, physician, programmer, and attorney.
Literary Theory for Robots reveals the hidden history of modern machine intelligence, taking readers on a spellbinding journey from medieval Arabic philosophy to visions of a universal language, past Hollywood fiction factories and missile defense systems trained on Russian folktales. In this provocative reflection on the shared pasts of literature and computer science, former Microsoft engineer and professor of comparative literature Dennis Yi Tenen provides crucial context for recent developments in AI, which holds important lessons for the future of humans living with smart technology.
Nexus: A brief history of information networks from the stone age to AI
Harari, N.Y (you might remember him from Sapiens).
Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.
AI snake oil: What artificial intelligence can do, what It can’t, and how to tell the difference
Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor
Confused about AI and worried about what it means for your future and the future of the world? You’re not alone. AI is everywhere—and few things are surrounded by so much hype, misinformation, and misunderstanding. In AI Snake Oil, computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor cut through the confusion to give you an essential understanding of how AI works and why it often doesn’t, where it might be useful or harmful, and when you should suspect that companies are using AI hype to sell AI snake oil—products that don’t work, and probably never will.
Mastering AI: A survival guide to our supercharged future
Jeremy Kahn
A Fortune magazine journalist draws on his expertise and extensive contacts among the companies and scientists at the forefront of artificial intelligence to offer dramatic predictions of AI’s impact over the next decade, from reshaping our economy and the way we work, learn, and create to unknitting our social fabric, jeopardizing our democracy, and fundamentally altering the way we think
