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AI for the Rest of Us
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items I spent a decade inside Big Tech at Apple, Amazon, and Meta. Then I got laid off, in an industry that was simultaneously telling the world AI would create more jobs than it eliminated. These are the books that helped me understand what actually happe...
The book that changed how I think about AI (and I worked in Big Tech for a decade.) Kate Crawford pulls back the curtain on what AI actually is: not magic, not neutral, not inevitable. It’s mines, warehouses, data centers, and the people bearing the ...
Atlas of AI: Power, Politics & Planetary Costs
Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson make the case that AI progress isn’t inevitable or neutral; it’s a choice made by a small group of people who benefit from it. The rest of us just live with the consequences. If Atlas of AI shows you what AI costs, Po...
Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Tech Struggle
The real conflict in AI isn’t humans vs. machines: it’s the people who control the machines vs. everyone else. Oxford economist Maximilian Kasy strips away the mystique and shows that AI isn’t nearly as complicated as they want you to think. What it ...
The Means of Prediction: How AI Works
Brian Christian spent years talking to the researchers actually building AI systems and what they told him should concern all of us. The Alignment Problem is about one deceptively simple question: how do we make sure AI does what we actually want? Tu...
The Alignment Problem: ML and Human Values
Three researchers, a philosopher, a data scientist, and a computer scientist, walk into a book and actually agree on something: AI can be built ethically, but only if we stop pretending the hard questions don’t exist. This is the least alarmist book ...
Moral AI: And How We Get There (Pelican Books)
Max Tegmark asks the question nobody in Silicon Valley wants to sit with: what actually happens to human life when AI surpasses human intelligence? Not in a sci-fi way, but in a “what-do-we-eat, what-do-we-do, what-does-meaning-look-like way.” This i...
Life 3.0: Being Human in AI Age
Written by Mustafa Suleyman (one of the people who actually built this stuff) which makes it either the most credible or the most conflicted book on this list depending on how charitable you’re feeling. He argues that AI and synthetic biology represe...
The Coming Wave: Tech, Power & 21st Century
Before everyone was talking about AI bias, Cathy O’Neil was doing the math. This book follows the algorithms quietly making life-altering decisions about your job applications, your loan approvals, your insurance rates, and your bail and shows exactl...
Weapons of Math Destruction: Big Data & Inequality
Ruha Benjamin coined the term ‘the New Jim Code’: the idea that technology doesn’t eliminate discrimination, it just makes it faster, cheaper, and easier to deny. Facial recognition that can’t see Black faces. Hiring algorithms that screen out histor...
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools
The book that named what was happening to all of us before most of us had words for it. Zuboff argues that Big Tech built an entirely new economic logic; one where your behavior, attention, and private experience are raw material to be harvested, pre...
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: Fight for Human Future
While Silicon Valley was busy disrupting industries, Virginia Eubanks was documenting what automated systems were doing to families on Medicaid, in homeless shelters, and in the child welfare system. The algorithm that decides if your kids get taken ...
Automating Inequality: High-Tech Tools & Poverty
If some of the books on this list feel heavy (and they should, because this stuff is serious) Hello World is the one you read to remember that understanding this doesn’t require a computer science degree. Mathematician Hannah Fry walks you through ho...
Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms