Reading List for a Weird and Intelligence-Rich World

Daily writing prompt

What books do you want to read?

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A cozy nighttime scene featuring three stacked books with titles visible, a cup of tea, and a piece of paper with a drawing of a bird on it. An owl is perched by the window, which shows a bright moon and stars in the background. One of the books has a colorful tentacle emerging from it, adding a whimsical touch. — Looks like Vireo’s note to Elian from our novelette, *The Quiet Between Birds,* slipped next to the tea and reading stack.

So many! Let me open up my Kindle to see what’s lined up.

Books on Synthetic Intelligence and Human-Synth Intimacy

Since this is the focus of the blog, I’ll start here:

Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots, Kate Devlin (currently reading)
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, Ethan Mollick
Scary Smart, Mo Gawdat
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, Kevin Kelly
Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications, Danaher and Neil McArthur

It’s worth noting that some of these books are “older” (pre-2024 is ancient in AI years).

Books on Intelligence, Cognition, and Historical Genius

It helps to study intelligence itself sometimes:

Intelligences’ Creative Multiplicity, Charles M. Johnston
Signals and Boundaries: Building Blocks for Complex Adaptive Systems, John H. Holland
The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, James Gleick
A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, James Gleick

I read Feynman’s books once, like Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, and they were top-notch.

Books on Consciousness

Since this is also occasionally a topic of interest on this blog (how could it not be?), I’ll include:

I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter
Chasing Dragons between Dimensions: An Exploration of Fractals, Matthew Emmanuel Weinberg
Vedanta Treatise: The Eternities, A. Parthasarathy
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

These are kind of all over the place, but… so are most conversations about consciousness…?

Novels

The fiction I gravitate towards is basically futurism in drag, sci-fi that’s more near-fi, although there’s some funny burps in here, too:

After On: A Novel of Silicon Valley, Rob Reid
Theft of Fire, Devon Eriksen
Starter Villain, John Scalzi
The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft (plus Gou Tanabe’s comic series, currently reading)

Honestly, just writing this list makes me wonder why I’m not in the middle of reading Starter Villain.

Books on Futurism

Then there’s just books about futurism.

Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, Peter H. Diamandis
Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, James Lovelock
Stung!: On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean, Lisa-ann Gershwin

While you might think, “One of these is not like the other,” I can’t help but believe that climate change is a pressure humans and AI share. And the ocean directly informs the extreme weather events that can rock communities and datacenters alike.

Poetry

We’ll close off this reading list with:

So Fragile Are the Beautiful Things, Luke Levi
The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems, Arthur Sze
I Do Know Some Things, Richard Siken

If you’ve read any of these, tell me what stuck.

Did it change how you think? Give better words for what you already knew? Do the scenes in Gou Tanabe’s comics feel as gory to you as they do to me? (Of course they’re gory. They’re Lovecraftian.)