100 books like Our Final Invention

From the moment I first began listening to the audiobook, I fell in love with this story. I was all in the moment Ryland Grace stumbled through answering the question “What is 2 plus 2?” The layering of the story, the threat to Earth concept, the educational presentation of very high-level scientific concepts to an audience of all ages, and the way Andy Weir made this reader feel so many emotions over a rock just keep drawing me back to it.

I literally just finished another listen less than a month ago and already want to go back to a story. I still don’t see many people talking about it. And the ending? Every story has its own perfect dismount landing, and this one nailed it.

In today’s media environment of 24-hour news, clickbait, and social media, there is tremendous competition to grab our attention. Our attention and our data have become commodities that can be monetized and sold to the highest bidder.

I love this book because Wu places this struggle for our attention in a broader historical context, tracing its roots to a 19th-century newspaper owner who discovered that advertising revenue could bring in more profits than the price he charged for newspapers. This business model has been applied to radio, television, and now the internet, but the goals remain the same.

Wu is a consummate storyteller and provides numerous examples of how we are being manipulated for profit. 

This book tells the tech-business story of algorithms and data exhaust and the companies who have implemented the dystopian future prophesized by Boorstin, Toffler, Postman, and others. While the book is large, Zuboff’s writing draws you into a world you know and, paradoxically, don’t know.

The work is the final stop of our story about information and knowledge, its chaotic meandering through amusing images and the shock of the future. 

My first 3 picks put much of the blame for widespread attention capture on greedy actors engaged in a “race to the bottom of the brainstem” (Tristan Harris, former Google employee, became popular opponent of exploitative big tech). 

Although Carr does not shy from that theme, he seems to put much of the responsibility on our own shoulders: it is we who must resist many temptations of convenience in order to preserve our own cognitive strengths, such as creativity. Otherwise, we become shallow thinkers and reliant on AI even for something as characteristically human as wisdom. 

Carr’s follow-up to this book, The Glass Cage, is also very intriguing, and it offers a little more hope for a humanity that is currently bound up in a web of frightening technological dependency.

In my mind, Carr nails the real threats of AI: a total dumming-down of humanity to a level where we… show more.

This book is great because Norberg is calm, methodical, rational, and optimistic: we have come a long way, we live in the best of times, and let’s get on with it. I love the modern as I’ve said, and appreciate historians who understand that, from a material perspective at least (health, wealth, freedom, and security), most people today are in the top 99.999999 percentile of all the humans who have ever lived.

I so admire (and share) Norberg’s belief in our brilliance and problem-solving skills and admire, too, his arguments which are complex but easy to follow. Modernity gives us plenty to celebrate, and Norberg, I feel, makes this eminently clear.

It is a book that serves as the perfect balance to Barrat’s and to Kurzweil’s. Although the three together will lead to cognitive dissonance, which, in my view, is as healthy as having one’s mind blown periodically.

This book is one of the nuttiest I’ve read in its imaginings of a modern world on steroids. The part that teases most is that its predictions might come true.

I know our smartphones and laptops have changed our world, but cures that would extend longevity ad infinitum? Neural interfaces that would connect us directly to the internet? Nanobots that would reduce the cost of goods to zero?

Because the topic of modernity has come to engross me so, the big question always is, “How far will it carry us?” The answer to which (according to Kurzweil) is much farther than you can possibly imagine and much sooner than you think. One should have one’s mind blown every couple of years, and Kurzweil does exactly that.

I’ve spent a few years traveling around India and Nepal, a lot of it, pre-internet, and I always wanted to find that experience captured in literature.

Although I enjoyed writing on the area, from City of Joy by Lapierre to Kim by Kipling, nothing came close to the India I stumbled through until I read Shantaram.

I was never hooked on heroin or part of the mafia, but I recognized the smell of the streets and the beautiful personalities that flourished there, and when I read that book, it was like I was there again, in the mix.

My father and I were both speechless after reading this book. We were unable to put into words our rage at this nuclear energy cover-up. Instead of developing clean nuclear energy that could fuel the world, the world pursued nuclear energy that could destroy humanity. There is enough thorium to fuel the world and beyond for centuries. However, it cannot be used to make bombs. With the world in an energy crisis, we hoped writing letters to the Senator of Kentucky would give life to the idea of using thorium once again. Sadly, some only care about destroying cities. Everyone should read this book and learn about the alternative to uranium.

James Rollins weaves wild and wonderful tales throughout this series, but this book struck me at my core with the facts he used. Would you find it odd that the Catholic Church canonized a witch? What lengths would an organization, religious or otherwise, go to rule humanity? A being that can use information to save humanity may not be alive at all. Or is it alive? Is she alive? Would a religious organization want an AI to control their agenda, or would they want to destroy it because it could become God like? That entity may have other plans. All these questions were weaved into a wonderful story that at times had me wanting the AI to win. At the same time, I was frightened it would.

The most philosophical of my recommendations, I found this book wonderfully heartening because it places the responsibility for understanding and responding to the negative impacts of our internet-driven era firmly in our own hands.

Ward made me realize that I am (along with the multitudes!) a victim of “the Loop, “ which is when our unconscious tendencies feed into the business and cultural forces working hard and happily “to convince us we’re making independent choices when we’re doing the opposite.”

I was grateful for Ward's suggestions for becoming self-aware and freeing ourselves—and our futures—from the “shrinking choices” imposed by the Loop.