Seeking input on a list of AI books for broader audience
I’m still working on my AI book and part of that process is reading every other non-fiction, non-technical AI book (both to see what they say and see what else is out there).
Do you have any additions to the list below? Preferably from the past 5 years and I’m generally not seeking textbooks or books that have academics as the main audience.
I have short reviews of most of the first 40 but they are scattered so perhaps I’ll include them in a future post.
| 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 |
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.
Mighty kind of you. I’ll be in touch.
How about Melanie Mitchell’s Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans?
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).
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.”
Tom Chivers also wrote The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy: Superintelligent AI and the Geeks Who Are Trying to Save Humanity’s Future.
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)
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?
Cass Sunstein’s book, Averting Catastrophe, also seems relevant, although it doesn’t focus on AI.
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.
I recommend A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence by Michael Wooldridge
The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do by Erik J. Larson wasn’t mentioned.
Oops, looks like I read that last July (and didn’t agree with the general thesis). Thanks for the comment.
I wrote Singularity Rising (2012).