Books like The Second Machine Age

01

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Walter Isaacson · Science

The Innovators is Walter Isaacson's history of the digital revolution, tracing the development of computers and the internet from Ada Lovelace's conceptualization of programming in the 1840s through the emergence of the modern internet, personal computer, and smartphone.

A kindred economics read.

02

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.

Both dig into artificial intelligence.

03

Weapons of Math Destruction

Cathy O'Neil · Science

Weapons of Math Destruction is mathematician and data scientist Cathy O'Neil's investigation of how algorithms — statistical models used to make decisions about people's lives — can perpetuate and amplify inequality rather than reduce it.

Shares inequality and technology with The Second Machine Age.

04

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?

Both dig into artificial intelligence.

05

Chaos: Making a New Science

James Gleick · Science

Chaos: Making a New Science, published in 1987, tells the story of how a loose network of scientists working across meteorology, mathematics, biology, and physics in the 1960s and 1970s developed chaos theory — the study of systems that are deterministic but unpredictable because tiny differences in initial conditions produce wildly different outcomes.

A kindred economics read.

06

Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence

Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb · Business

Power and Prediction is the second book from Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb — the economists behind Prediction Machines — and it takes a more pointed look at what cheap AI-driven prediction actually disrupts.

Shares artificial intelligence and economics with The Second Machine Age.

07

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 technology with The Second Machine Age.

08

Poverty, by America

Matthew Desmond · Economics

Poverty, by America is Matthew Desmond's follow-up to Evicted, and it makes a more explicit and polemical argument: poverty in the United States is not a natural condition or a problem of insufficient resources.

Both dig into inequality.

09

The Internet of Money

Andreas Antonopoulos · Economics

The Internet of Money is a collection of talks Andreas Antonopoulos gave between 2013 and 2016, edited and compiled into a book that makes the case for Bitcoin not as a financial instrument or a speculation but as a fundamental architectural shift in how money works.

Both dig into technology.

10

The Rise and Fall of American Growth

Robert J. Gordon · Economics

Robert Gordon's argument is one of the most carefully constructed and most contested in recent economics: that the period from 1870 to 1970 was a singular century of transformative invention, and that we have been living with the deceleration ever since.

Both dig into inequality.

11

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson · Economics

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that the fundamental difference between rich and poor countries is not geography, culture, or bad luck.

Both dig into inequality.

12

2001: A Space Odyssey

Arthur C. Clarke · Science fiction

2001: A Space Odyssey begins with prehistoric man-apes encountering a featureless black monolith that somehow catalyzes their cognitive leap from prey to hunter.

Both dig into artificial intelligence.