AI Book Club: A Human in the Loop

More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner

"More Than Words argues that generative AI programs like ChatGPT not only can kill the student essay but should, since these assignments don't challenge students to do the real work of writing. To Warner, writing is thinking—discovering your ideas while trying to capture them on a page—and feeling—grappling with what it fundamentally means to be human. The fact that we ask students to complete so many assignments that a machine could do is a sign that something has gone very wrong with writing instruction. More Than Words calls for us to use AI as an opportunity to reckon with how we work with words—and how all of us should rethink our relationship with writing."

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The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how these forces will create immense prosperity but also threaten the nation-state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into disaster, we face an existential dilemma: unprecedented harms on one side, the threat of overbearing surveillance on the other. / How do we ensure the flourishing of humankind? How do we maintain control? ... / This groundbreaking book from the ultimate AI insider establishes 'the containment problem'—the task of maintaining control over powerful technologies—as the essential challenge of our age."

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The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI by Ray Kurzweil

"Kurzweil brings a fresh perspective to advances toward the Singularity — assessing his 1999 prediction that AI will reach human level intelligence by 2029 and examining the exponential growth of technology — that, in the near future, will expand human intelligence a millionfold and change human life forever. Among the topics he discusses are rebuilding the world, atom by atom with devices like nanobots; radical life extension beyond the current age limit of 120; reinventing intelligence by connecting our brains to the cloud; ... and the growth of renewable energy and 3-D printing."

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Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World by Parmy Olson

"In Supremacy, Olson, tech writer at Bloomberg, tells the astonishing story of the battle between these two AI firms [ OpenAI and DeepMind], their struggles to use their tech for good, and the hazardous direction they could go as they serve two tech Goliaths whose power is unprecedented in history. The story focuses on the continuing rivalry of two key CEOs at the center of it all, who cultivated a religion around their mission to build god-like super intelligent machines: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind."

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AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"...Lee argues powerfully that because of the unprecedented developments in AI, dramatic changes will be happening much sooner than many of us expected.... Most experts already say that AI will have a devastating impact on blue-collar jobs. But Lee predicts that Chinese and American AI will have a strong impact on white-collar jobs as well. Is universal basic income the solution? In Lee's opinion, probably not. But he provides a clear description of which jobs will be affected and how soon, which jobs can be enhanced with AI, and most importantly, how we can provide solutions to some of the most profound changes in the future of human history."

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Hands-On Large Language Models: Language Understanding and Generation by Jay Alammar and Maarten Grootendorst

"AI has acquired startling new language capabilities in just the past few years. Driven by rapid advances in deep learning, language AI systems are able to write and understand text better than ever before. This trend is enabling new features, products, and entire industries. Through this book's visually educational nature, readers will learn practical tools and concepts they need to use these capabilities today. / You'll understand how to use pretrained large language models for use cases like copywriting and summarization; create semantic search systems that go beyond keyword matching; and use existing libraries and pretrained models for text classification, search, and clusterings."

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Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari

"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."

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God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O'Gieblyn

"For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our understanding. The rise of science and Descartes's division of mind from world made materialism our ruling paradigm, in the process asking whether our own consciousness — i.e., souls—might be illusions. Now the inexorable rise of technology, with artificial intelligences that surpass our comprehension and control, and the spread of digital metaphors for self-understanding, the core questions of existence—identity, knowledge, the very nature and purpose of life itself—urgently require rethinking."

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AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan

"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. / ... 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."

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Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by David Coleman

"In Co-Intelligence, Mollick urges us to engage with AI as co-worker, co-teacher, and coach. He assesses its profound impact on business and education, using dozens of real-time examples of AI in action. Co-Intelligence shows what it means to think and work together with smart machines, and why it's imperative that we master that skill. / Mollick challenges us to utilize AI's enormous power without losing our identity, to learn from it without being misled, and to harness its gifts to create a better human future. Wide ranging, hugely thought-provoking, optimistic, and lucid, Co-Intelligence reveals the promise and power of this new era."

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