100 books like Survival of the Richest

I had to include this book in the list. It’s not a business book, per se—this is hard science fiction—but the Earth’s response to a far-off alien invasion leads to all kinds of business and technological innovation, from “hibernation chambers” to the development of spacecraft that can travel at close to light-speed.

I then went on to watch the Netflix series, but the book is the real deal. I’m a slow reader, which meant I spent at least a year reading through all three books—but it was so worth it!

There’s a lot of thoughtless talk by techno-optimistic philosophers about futures in which we all get to become superintelligent and live for thousands of years if we can apply the right tech to ourselves.

Sykes describes fascinating research on the Neanderthals, beings who were almost, but not quite, us. Reading her book, I wondered what it might have been like to grow up as the child of a union between a Homo sapiens and a Neanderthal. I found this especially useful when we consider future relationships between people determined to remain human and others who want tech to make them posthuman ASAP.

There’s so much information to gleen from Sykes to help us guess at how posthumans might treat beings whom they view as different and possibly inferior.

This final work in Banks’ Culture sci-fi series is all about technologically advanced species making the decision to sublime – to depart the “real world” to reside in “higher dimensions”.

As I read the book I found my philosopher’s brain bullied to understand what subliming could possibly be. When techno-enthusiasts propose radical human enhancement are they effectively suggesting that we should sublime? When the aspiring trillionaires of AI are asked about the future in which they make AIs much smarter than us, they get vague about the details.

The throwaway line of OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella is “all bets are off” after they achieve their stated goal of artificial superintelligence. Should we approach the future gifts of AI much in the way that Banks’s characters approach the offer of subliming?

Schneier’s book taught me that hacking isn’t just something that occasionally happens to your laptop. The powerful hack the laws that govern our society too.

I wondered how the hacking mindset could apply to enhancement techs. Which enhancement techs will the elite reserve for themselves and which might they impose on the gig workers of the future? Suppose Neuralink does manage to get its tech into our heads. Imagine Musk finds himself just short of the funds needed to found his planned Martian city. Might beneficiaries of his brain-computer interfaces find themselves abruptly subject to overpowering urges to immediately own ten Teslas? This sounds absurd.

Perhaps the right question to ask is how crazy it is relative to cities of a million on Mars by 2050. Is it beyond the reach of Musk’s rule-breaking, can-do imagination?

While many game developers have often referred to the virtual world they were building as inspired by the Metaverse of Snow Crash, the term never quite caught on outside their industry—until seasoned media executive and venture capitalist Matthew Ball came along.

Hitting the shelves exactly 30 years after Neal Stephenson’s novel was published, Matt changed all that, explaining the concept in terms that the broader business world could understand. Also highly recommended for delving into the financial and technical challenges that must be surmounted to create a fully instantiated Metaverse.

‘They trust me….dumb f*cks.’ This telling exchange from the Harvard days of Facebook co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg appears in An Ugly Truth, which shines a harsh light on the tech behemoth that, ultimately, is built on the data of billions of people. As Meta, Zuckerberg’s new business incarnation, wafts into the virtual worlds of the metaverse, the story of Facebook is far from over, which makes this engaging book a tad unsatisfying. Nonetheless, it is a vivid example of how with Big Data comes Big Responsibility.

Kara Swisher has spent decades writing about and reporting on the tech kings of the world, including Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and others. Her insights into the rise of tech giants from the early 1990s to the present illuminate the forces that have shaped our world

I loved Swisher’s insight into these powerful men. She’s blunt, funny, and direct in how she exposes their flaws, and the book feels like it’s written by someone who understands and is fed up with these white, controlling male demigods of tech. I imagine the book’s title refers to how she’s burning all bridges by telling all.

As a journalist who was raised pre-internet, I could deeply relate to Swisher’s outrage in lines such as “What struck me was how easily people could be manipulated by fear and rage, and how facts could be destroyed without repercussions.”

Levy is the great Silicon Valley insider-reporter, a tech fan who gets close to the action while remaining clear-sighted and critical about his subjects: inevitably, his weighty book about Mark Zuckerberg’s rise and subsequent travails was indispensable for my own work.

Like the film and its topic, Levy’s book is partly inspiring, frequently troubling, but overall offers an insightful vision of how and why Facebook defined and shaped the first part of the new century. It’s also a reminder of how, if anything, The Social Network was overly nice in its depiction of Facebook’s founder.

If you’ve ever wondered how on Earth Mark Zuckerberg ended up betting his Facebook empire on the unproven technology of Virtual Reality (VR), this is the recent history book for you. 

Blake Harris starts with Palmer Luckey, a homeschooled teenager who shrugged off the received wisdom of all of his elders, and just went ahead and built the first commercially viable VR headset. (That’s an amazing story in itself.) And then he got Mark Zuckerberg so excited about this new experience that, yes, Zuckerberg ended up buying Luckey’s company – and eventually forcing him out.

The History of the Future is about technology, business, the consequences of acting on visionary thinking, and, above all, about how technology is ultimately created and developed by human beings. 

As with the creation of 2001, this 2009 book was written simultaneously with a screenplay, by Aaron Sorkin for The Social Network. As author Ben Mezrich admits up front, entire scenes and stretches of dialog are made up, making this account of Mark Zuckerberg’s real experiences conjuring Facebook as a student at Harvard more like a work of fiction. While the book is wildly entertaining, it falls way short as a cautionary tale about the social media platform that would end up doing damage to our democracy as a petri dish of misinformation and manipulation. Only at the very end of the 2010 movie do we receive notes of alarm, thanks to the film’s closing song. “Now that you know who you are,” the Beatles sing in "Baby You’re a Rich Man", “what do you want to be?” It suggests that Facebook’s business plan… show more.