100 books like Run Program

I love Adams, but his Dirk Gently books get skipped too often. I find the main character’s situations and solutions infinitely fun.

The book is a classic and kept me reading while trying to figure out what exactly is going on, as there are so many hidden jokes. A re-read is most rewarding! I’ve never encountered so many science principles stuffed between the pages of a comedy.

Tired of spaceships and A.I.? Then how about a humorous take on sci-fi horror? If Twin Peaks were a comedy…and also a book…it would’ve been Anomaly Flats. Weird, disturbing events abound in this quaint Midwestern town where an ancient evil lurks behind the canned goods at the local Walmart, and–since they weren’t trying to kill me personally–many of them were hilarious. Or at least the way the characters reacted to them were hilarious. And in the end, isn’t that close enough?

If all my picks so far have been a bit highbrow for you, let’s go in a new direction. Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits is the work of Jason Pargin (a.k.a. David Wong), former executive editor of Cracked.com, and that should tell you most of what you need to know about his writing. Sometimes clever and insightful, sometimes crass, dumb, and offensive, this book will please anyone who enjoyed Cracked during its heyday, but prefers science fiction to listicles.

This is a fun, relatively light novel that involves the fate of all humankind, etc., etc. The overarching plot here is enjoyable enough, but the real appeal is taking a somewhat meandering trip through a fun universe and getting to know the characters within. Don’t get me wrong; the plot is more than just a joke, which happens occasionally in comedies. It has a satisfying payoff, and Scharlette has a character arc, but–at least for me–the way the story is told is the real draw, not so much what the story itself is.

The dystopia in Bash Bash Revolution is a bit closer to reality than the others on this list: it’s set specifically in 2017, but in a world pushed far closer to the brink of nuclear war than ours, with a much more psychotic version of Donald Trump in charge. Main character Matthew Munson’s mad programmer of a father creates an AI that might save the world from its own destruction, but only by locking every person into a solipsistic nightmare run on video game technology. In a way this book is about choosing between an apocalypse and a dystopia, which is something you don’t see very often.

I must confess the book title drew me to the book as I sought to understand and learn more about the ethics of the misuse of AI. 

Having worked on committees in the AU and advised various entities in the United States, the subject of ethics is front and center. The expanding use of large language models and rise of generative AI makes the potential for harm stronger than ever.  

AI is poised to change our lives and society in ways we have not imagined much like the iPhone when it first arrived. Understanding its potential is useful but understanding its potential for harm is mandatory. 

I found this book to be enlightening on the ethical components of AI and technology.

I love gutsy books by outsiders, and Ms. Saxena, as a woman of color working in the Ivy League and the worlds of artificial intelligence and Big Data, is very much an outsider.

That makes her deep knowledge and insights into how AI and Big Data are changing business even that much more interesting. Plus, this is one of the only books I’ve read that explains how artificial intelligence works in a clear, direct way that doesn’t assume the reader already knows about things like machine learning and neural nets. 

Just when I thought the future was bright and sunny (in part due to Kurzweil), I learn from James Barrat that ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) might well mark the end of our species (and the start of an ever-expanding artificial replacement).

I was fascinated by the people Barrat introduces us to like an expert on the psychology of ASI, and his description of a perfect machine and its runaway implications. I realized this is modernity at its best and worst: we push forward to improve the world but are always at the risk of creating new, unseen problems.

The most troubling question of all (to my way of thinking) is that our idea of perfected humanity (both a modern and a pre-modern aim) ends in the vision of machines like Watson playing endless games of Jeopardy among themselves.

The nanotechnological apocalypse at the background of Anthropocene Rag has turned the United States into a mythological vision. A mysterious construct known as Prospector Ed (who sometimes adopts the persona of Mark Twain) delivers six magical tickets to various scattered Americans, all of whom have lost something in the “Boom.” While the post-nanoboom landscape is deadly (one of the main characters was orphaned when an intelligence-imbued stadium containing her parents simply decided to become something else), there’s also a lot of wonder, and the book is a loving homage to American mythology and lore.

Unlike Hejinian’s book, this one demands your attention, almost obnoxiously. It’s strange, confusing, tough, but worth it. If you can let your mind enter into it fully, you may miss subway stops like I did while reading it. As Neuromancer was for cyberspace, Accelerando is the game changer for transhumanism—the philosophical movement claiming we will soon have the ability to escape our bodies as information. Science fiction requires extraordinary world-building, but Stross creates an entirely new universe in a series of interconnected stories about three generations of the Macx family before and after the Singularity. Characters download themselves and re-manifest, there’s an evil sentient scam called The Slug, and a mass of uploaded lobster brain scans is floating in space demanding amnesty. It’s a trip.