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I read a ton of books, but Kevin Kelley's book "Inevitable" is a must-read for anyone trying to understand the present and the future: amazon.com/Inevitable-Und… .
"Wayfinding", "Scale", "Possible Minds", "Beginning of Infinity", "Surfaces and Essences" are my top five recent other books worth reading.
"The Book of Why", "Other Minds: The Octopus...", "From Bacteria to Bach", "The Tangle Tree" and "Homo Deus" are books I would also recommend. The value of books is that they have more depth and are encapsulated with a higher-order structure.
All the above books, I had not read before I wrote my books http://deeplearningplaybook and "Artificial Intuition". Thus, I need to urgently strive for updated editions!
Other than Beginning of Infinity (2012), Surfaces and Essences (2013) and Inevitable (2016). All the books were written in 2018-2019. So it would be impossible to have read them before writing in 2017. But it reveals that there are plenty of ideas coalescing simultaneously.
Here's what's even crazier. I spend a lot of my time reading the latest Deep Learning research. Furthermore, I just completed a book about Norbert Wiener (Dark Hero of the Information Age) who developed ideas extremely relevant to today's AI, but ideas from the 1940s!
What prevents me from going insane from the information overload is that there is a refreshingly consistent overarching narrative for all of this! We should all be thrilled to be living in an age where we are finally discovering who we are!!
As Kevin Kelley writes in The Inevitable - "The greatest benefit of the arrival of AI is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are."
The wonderful book that explains this is "Wayfinding" by @TheOChronicle . amazon.com/Wayfinding-Sci… She begins her book about how GPS is compromising our cognitive abilities to find our way.
@TheOChronicle Possible Minds is a collection of many essays that begins with Norbert's Wiener's work (i.e. Cybernetics and Human Use of Human beings). amazon.com/Possible-Minds… . Many of the essays reveal unique perspectives on AI that's difficult to find elsewhere.
@TheOChronicle I haven't read Sapiens, but read Harrari's follow up book Homo Deus. I suspect Sapiens is a better book since Harrari is a bit out of his element when he discusses AI. He's a historian, so his writing is a refreshing perspective on human civilization. amazon.com/Homo-Deus-Brie… .
@TheOChronicle Homo Deus is a good seque to @DavidDeutschOxf book "The Beginning of Infinity" amazon.com/Beginning-Infi… which is a book that revolves around the scientific method and the computational universe.
@TheOChronicle @DavidDeutschOxf Then there's Geoffrey West book Scale, that explores biology and civilization. amazon.com/Scale-Universa… from the perspective of a theoretical physicist and complexity science.
@TheOChronicle @DavidDeutschOxf Which brings me to the "Tangled Tree", a book about the discoveries in evolutionary biology that reveals the ecological aspect of evolution that goes beyond Darwin. amazon.com/Tangled-Tree-R…
@TheOChronicle @DavidDeutschOxf So understanding this new way at looking at the tree of life, we get to amazon.com/Other-Minds-Oc… . What's impressive about this book is that it shows how an entirely different line of evolution leads to conscious beings.
@TheOChronicle @DavidDeutschOxf Finally, I should end with Douglas Hofstadter's book amazon.com/Surfaces-Essen… which describes the unique characteristics of human thought.
@TheOChronicle @DavidDeutschOxf Which is a good compliment to @yudapearl Book of Why that explores systematic thinking. amazon.com/Book-Why-Scien…
@TheOChronicle @DavidDeutschOxf @yudapearl That said, it is also important to read Dennett's book "Bacteria to Bach" which is a book about evolution both biological as well as cultural. amazon.com/Bacteria-Bach-… .
@TheOChronicle @DavidDeutschOxf @yudapearl Which reminds me to plug this book by @kenneth0stanley amazon.com/Why-Greatness-… which describes the openendedness of evolutionary processes.
@TheOChronicle @DavidDeutschOxf @yudapearl @kenneth0stanley All these books are about the same topic from different perspectives. It's all about the evolution of cognition. This is perhaps why I gravitated to reading these.
