Books like Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

01

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Max Tegmark · Science

Life 3.0 is Max Tegmark's accessible survey of the questions raised by the prospect of human-level and superhuman artificial intelligence: What are the plausible paths to AGI?

Shares artificial intelligence and existential risk with Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.

02

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control

Stuart Russell · Science

Human Compatible is Stuart Russell's argument, from inside mainstream AI research, that the standard model of AI — build a system that optimizes for a fixed objective — is the wrong approach, and that the transition to much more capable AI systems requires a fundamental change in how AI is designed.

Shares artificial intelligence and ai safety with Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.

03

The Master Algorithm

Pedro Domingos · Science

The Master Algorithm is Pedro Domingos's survey of machine learning — the field of computer science that creates algorithms capable of learning from data — organized around a central speculative thesis: that there exists, or may be found, a single master algorithm from which all learning can be derived.

Shares artificial intelligence and machine learning with Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.

04

The Singularity Is Near

Ray Kurzweil · Science

The Singularity Is Near is Ray Kurzweil's forecast that the exponential growth of information technology — computing power, storage, bandwidth, and the reverse-engineering of the human brain — will produce a technological singularity around 2045: a point at which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence in all relevant domains, beyond which we cannot reliably predict what happens.

Shares artificial intelligence and future with Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.

05

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan · Science

Pale Blue Dot takes its title from a photograph taken by Voyager 1 in 1990, as it left the solar system, at Sagan's request.

Both dig into future.

06

The Alignment Problem

Brian Christian · Science

Brian Christian's The Alignment Problem examines a fundamental challenge in machine learning: how do you ensure that an artificial system actually pursues the goals you intend, rather than a close but dangerous approximation?

Shares artificial intelligence and ai safety with Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.

07

Deep Learning

Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville · Science

Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville is the standard graduate-level textbook on the mathematical and computational foundations of deep neural networks.

Shares artificial intelligence and machine learning with Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.

08

Atlas of AI

Kate Crawford · Science

Atlas of AI is Kate Crawford's account of what artificial intelligence actually is — not a disembodied intelligence but a physical system built from extracted minerals, underpaid labor, vast energy consumption, and accumulated data taken largely without meaningful consent.

Both dig into artificial intelligence.

09

Gödel, Escher, Bach

Douglas Hofstadter · Science

Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, published in 1979, asks how meaning can arise from formal rules — how a biological machine can think, feel, and experience self-awareness.

Both dig into artificial intelligence.

10

How to Create a Mind

Ray Kurzweil · Science

Ray Kurzweil's central claim in How to Create a Mind is that the neocortex — the part of the brain responsible for higher thought — operates on a single repeating algorithm called the pattern recognition theory of mind.

Both dig into artificial intelligence.

11

The Book of Why

Judea Pearl · Science

The Book of Why is Judea Pearl's argument that the dominant tradition in statistics — which insists on correlations and avoids causal claims — is a fundamental intellectual mistake, and that building a proper science of causality is the most important unsolved problem in both science and artificial intelligence.

Both dig into artificial intelligence.

12

The Coming Wave

Mustafa Suleyman · Science

The Coming Wave is written by Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and CEO of Microsoft AI, who is as inside the AI development world as anyone writing seriously about its risks.

Both dig into artificial intelligence.