Originally compiled for James Dobbins.
Non-fiction Books
- Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
- Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark
- Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom
- Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell
Fiction books
- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
- Sci-fi classic. Deals with AI on the moon and its role in war. Every single person working on AI likely read this when they were growing up.
- The Golden Age trilogy by John C Wright
- If you want to read a radically different sci-fi vision of an AGI post-singularity world that remains full of human nature (with its beauty and ugliness)
- Daemon series by Daniel Suarez
- Teases out consequences of an AI-like tool gaining control of the world’s computer systems.
Essays
- A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft by James Somers
- The Battle Over Books3 Could Change AI Forever by Kate Knibbs
- ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web by Ted Chiang
- What is ChatGPT doing… and why does it work? by Stephen Wolfram
- Catching up on the weird world of LLMs by Simon Willison