Great list. I’m currently working on a review of Language Machines. A dense book, but some great syntheses of ideas and theories. Hopefully more people will continue to read it.
A strong second for Virginia Postrel’s enthusiasm for David Wooten’s book The Invention of Science. A commonplace view today is that there was no “scientific revolution” in 17th century Europe, that the whole idea denigrates the importance of other contributions to our understanding of the natural world. Wooten’s book is the best ever explanation of what was unique about the “invention” of science in Europe and the reasons it transformed human existence in a way that other surges of interest in the reasons the world is the way it is did not.
This is a surprisingly good list. Broad, but some bangers for sure. There are a lot of book lists and recommendations out there, but this is a good one. Nice work.
Really appreciate this list bringing together history of science with AI alignment questions. The Braitenberg recommendation particularly caught my attention becasue it gets at something most alignment discussions miss: the gap between complex behavior and actual intentionality. I ran into this alot when designing feedback loops for ML systems where emergent patterns looked "smart" but were just artifacts of the training data. Strevens' iron rule about bracketing aesthetics from evidence feels especially relevant now that we're building systems that can generate both convincingly. Wonder if that clean separation ever actually existed or if it was always more aspirational than real.
If you care about digital rights or are seriously interested in how we break free from today’s extractive internet, The Metaweb book (Taylor & Francis, 2023) is well worth your time. It looks at the web not just as technology, but as civic infrastructure, and asks what a human-centered upgrade would actually require.
Also: if you don’t already know Douglas Engelbart, stop what you’re doing and fix that. His original vision for computing was about augmenting human intellect and collective problem-solving, not clicks, feeds, or behavioral extraction. His work is still painfully relevant, and his ideas live on here:
Great list. I’m currently working on a review of Language Machines. A dense book, but some great syntheses of ideas and theories. Hopefully more people will continue to read it.
A strong second for Virginia Postrel’s enthusiasm for David Wooten’s book The Invention of Science. A commonplace view today is that there was no “scientific revolution” in 17th century Europe, that the whole idea denigrates the importance of other contributions to our understanding of the natural world. Wooten’s book is the best ever explanation of what was unique about the “invention” of science in Europe and the reasons it transformed human existence in a way that other surges of interest in the reasons the world is the way it is did not.
This is a surprisingly good list. Broad, but some bangers for sure. There are a lot of book lists and recommendations out there, but this is a good one. Nice work.
Really appreciate this list bringing together history of science with AI alignment questions. The Braitenberg recommendation particularly caught my attention becasue it gets at something most alignment discussions miss: the gap between complex behavior and actual intentionality. I ran into this alot when designing feedback loops for ML systems where emergent patterns looked "smart" but were just artifacts of the training data. Strevens' iron rule about bracketing aesthetics from evidence feels especially relevant now that we're building systems that can generate both convincingly. Wonder if that clean separation ever actually existed or if it was always more aspirational than real.
If you care about digital rights or are seriously interested in how we break free from today’s extractive internet, The Metaweb book (Taylor & Francis, 2023) is well worth your time. It looks at the web not just as technology, but as civic infrastructure, and asks what a human-centered upgrade would actually require.
👉https://metawebbook.com
Also: if you don’t already know Douglas Engelbart, stop what you’re doing and fix that. His original vision for computing was about augmenting human intellect and collective problem-solving, not clicks, feeds, or behavioral extraction. His work is still painfully relevant, and his ideas live on here:
👉 https://www.dougengelbart.org
Read Engelbart, then read The Metaweb. You start to see how far we drifted, and how we might still steer this thing somewhere better.
No book on this list is even close to as insightful as "The Fabric of Reality" by David Deutsch.