The most recommended artificial intelligence books

A fantastic expose about the perils of Artificial Intelligence written with clear passion for a just and equitable AI future.

This book serves as an introduction into AI’s deep learning technology and its political effects. In easily digestible prose, it charters the ways that AI impacts society and how it feeds into various social predicaments, such as the rise of right-wing movements in Europe and North America. 

Speaking of noir, Kiln People is basically Mickey Spillane with replicants. This book posits a future where the well-off use temporary copies of themselves to do things that are dangerous or difficult or just boring. The copies fall apart after a few days, at which point they ideally merge their memories back into their original. Brin’s protagonists are a private detective and one of his copies who decides he’d rather spend the few hours of life he’s given doing something more interesting than his original’s scutwork. I came to this story for the fun premise, but I stayed for the deeper exploration of the morality of creating an army of sentient beings whose only hope is to live long enough to be re-absorbed into the mind that created them.

Peter Flach’s book on machine learning had a profound impact on me. The book is simple to understand, and highly visual. But beyond that Peter himself is a lovely person who obviously cares about all his students. I believe for getting started in machine learning and wanting to understand the algorithms that power many models, this is a great place to start.

But most importantly it’s a great way to understand the power and gain more intention behind what we are doing.

The first book of V.R. Tapscott’s Jane Bond series of humorous science fiction is a good release when you just need a lighthearted laugh.

While on break from her school librarian job, Jane Bond (no relation to the famous spy) finds part of a spaceship containing the AI pilot and sets off on an adventure to find more missing parts, sending her into plenty of humorous and dangerous situations. A very fun and enjoyable series.

The best parts of this book really represent a gold standard in pedagogical clarity.

Although it’s now twenty years old, there is still much to learn from this rather unconventional book that covers the boundary between machine learning, information theory, and Bayesian methods. There are also odd tangents and curiosities, some of which work better than others but are never dull.

Just writing this review makes me want to go back to it and squeeze more out of it.

Max Barry’s satirical science-fiction novel, Machine Man, is a dark and funny mediation on contemporary society’s compulsive over-reliance on technology. The narrator, Charles Neumann, is a mechanical engineer who, while obsessively searching for his phone, loses his leg in an industrial accident. After building himself a new machine leg, Charles purposely loses his other leg, so he can replace it with another machine leg. After seeing how great his new legs work, Charles wonders if maybe he should replace more of his body parts with machine parts, begging the question: Where does humanity end and technology begin?

Stanislaw Lem, the Polish philosopher and science fiction novelist, had the talent of writing novels that raise profound questions about the human condition. One of the issues he tackled was whether our human form of intelligence is just one of many types of intelligence that might be found in the universe.

In one of his most gripping and mind-stretching novels, The Invincible, an Earth spaceship lands on an apparently uninhabited planet only to find that many years previously, another race had crash-landed on the planet, and their small, robotic assistants were the main survivors of the crash. Those automata evolved into a collection of tiny “flies,” which, although not individually conscious or possessed of reasoning, use evolved herd behaviors to destroy their surviving alien masters and all other living creatures on the planet’s surface. When the humans from Earth explore the planet, they encounter clouds of these tiny metallic… show more.

I met Dr. Wachter, at the University of California in San Francisco and we were discussing the applicability of technology in a patient’s hospital room to improve care. 

I was introduced to his book and was mesmorized. It was one of my early conversations from a clinician stressing that we need technology, computers to be invisible not irresistible in healthcare.

He writes compelling stories about medical errors which only by the stroke of luck didn’t cause a fatality.  It reminded me of my sister-in-law who was misdiagnosed as being Type 2 diabetes when she was Type 1. 

This misdiagnosis could have proved fatal. The proper use of AI, especially the current wave of generative AI could have made a huge difference.

The best way to describe the Repulse Chronicles is to say that they are a historical record of a war that hasn’t happened yet, using AI and military technology that hasn’t been invented, yet. 

Written by Indie author Chris James, the Repulse Chronicles are innovative in the extreme, in both style and content, yet as with all the stories I love the most, it’s the interface between people and technology that fascinates me the most. Some people rise to the occasion, others sink, yet in all cases, we recognize ourselves in the characters. That is what makes the story so powerful.

This twenty-year-old little book has maybe the best title ever conceived, and it does a pretty good job of living up to it – and in fact, in our age of AI, it seems startlingly prescient.

Fernandez-Armesto has recognised that the category ‘human’ is right at the centre of our way of understanding the world, and that fundamentally it makes no sense: we don’t really know what it means, what constitutes it, or how to delineate it. On our journey, we occasionally trigger one of his actual opinions like a hidden land-mine, which keeps you on your toes; but mostly he leads us through a learned and (yes) humane history of how these questions have been understood by different people at different times.

A book to read to learn what a strange animal you are, and to do so in hugely affable, sharp-tongued company.