I'm passionate about what happens at the seam where creativity meets intelligent machines. My work moves between art, design, and AI, and these books sit on that exact edge. The questions they raise, about consciousness, imagination, alignment, and the honest reckoning with what we build, aren't abstract to me. They're the terrain I work in every day, in the studio and in the workshops I teach.
I often return to this book whenever I lose my sense of perception.
Pollan does what only few can do, turning the strangest territory of human experience into something I can almost touch. As somebody who works with creativity and researches intelligence, I find his approach to consciousness disarming. He writes about the mind the way I wish more did, with humility intact.
'Big, generous, illuminating and beautifully written' John Banville, Financial Times
From the best-selling author of How to Change Your Mind, a pioneering search for consciousness in the brain and beyond
A World Appears is the story of the quest to solve the greatest mystery in nature: consciousness. How does it feel to be you with your own personal feelings, thoughts and experiences? Every one of us is intimately familiar with consciousness, but no one knows how - or why - it came to be that three pounds of grey matter can generate a subjective point of view.
I think this is one of the most honest books I’ve read on AI.
Russell doesn’t perform gratuitous alarm or sell optimism, he reasons. In my own research and in the workshops I teach on creativity and AI, I’ve spent years around people building systems whose objectives I quietly questioned, and Russell gave me the vocabulary I’d been missing.
I love that he treats control not as a constraint on intelligence but as its precondition and preoccupation. It’s the rare AI book I trust.
A leading artificial intelligence researcher lays out a new approach to AI that will enable us to coexist successfully with increasingly intelligent machines
In the popular imagination, superhuman artificial intelligence is an approaching tidal wave that threatens not just jobs and human relationships, but civilization itself. Conflict between humans and machines is seen as inevitable and its outcome all too predictable.
In this groundbreaking book, distinguished AI researcher Stuart Russell argues that this scenario can be avoided, but only if we rethink AI from the ground up. Russell begins by exploring the idea of intelligence in humans and in machines.…
What's Gotten Into You is a wondrous, wildly ambitious, and vastly entertaining work of popular science that tells the awe-inspiring story of the elements that make up the human body, and how these building blocks of life travelled billions of miles and across billions of years to make us who…
I love how Christian writes about machine learning the way I think about painting, as a long conversation between intention and accident.
He moves between research labs and moral philosophy with the lightness of a grounded intellectual. I came for the technical clarity and stayed for the humanity in it.
Today's "machine-learning" systems, trained by data, are so effective that we've invited them to see and hear for us-and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Recent years have seen an eruption of concern as the field of machine learning advances. When the systems we attempt to teach will not, in the end, do what we want or what we expect, ethical and potentially existential risks emerge. Researchers call this the alignment problem.
Systems cull resumes until, years later, we discover that they have inherent gender biases. Algorithms decide bail and parole-and appear to assess Black…
I love this book because it takes creativity seriously as a force of nature, not a personality trait.
I’ve grown tired of the way imagination gets romanticized on one side and dismissed on the other. Fuentes does neither. I love how he traces creativity through millions of years and lands on collaboration as its engine, a framing I now return to often in my research and in the studio.
A bold new synthesis of paleontology, archaeology, genetics, and anthropology that overturns misconceptions about race, war and peace, and human nature itself, answering an age-old question: What made humans so exceptional among all the species on Earth?
Creativity. It is the secret of what makes humans special, hiding in plain sight. Agustín Fuentes argues that your child's finger painting comes essentially from the same place as creativity in hunting and gathering millions of years ago, and throughout history in making war and peace, in intimate relationships, in shaping the planet, in our communities, and in all of art, religion, and…
Diary of a Citizen Scientist
by
Sharman Apt Russell,
Citizen Scientist begins with this extraordinary statement by the Keeper of Entomology at the London Museum of Natural History, “Study any obscure insect for a week and you will then know more than anyone else on the planet.”
As the author chases the obscure Western red-bellied tiger beetle across New…
As someone who moves between art and analysis, I know how rarely people speak honestly about failure.
Lynton and Steiner do it with grace and zero performance, which is almost unheard of in this genre. I love the restraint of their writing, the way they refuse the easy arc of redemption. I love how they frame mistakes as material rather than wounds, as something to build from.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A powerful examination of the nature of mistakes, why we make them, the hidden ways they can haunt us, and how surfacing and reckoning with them can help us lead to fuller, more satisfying lives by two powerhouse authors with high-profile, executive experience and vast networks, who made public, life-altering mistakes.
While very few people start enormous companies or discover lifesaving medical cures, we all make mistakes. Yet there are lots of books about successful entrepreneurs, massive failures, and compelling scientific discoveries, and no book that helps us understand how our personalities drive mistakes and how mistakes…
They are building plastic plants, expecting us to water them. Flamini traces what we lose when we outsource the friction that makes us who we are: the practice before the note arrives without effort, the argument that forces two people toward a harder truth. AI offers us the Beige Singularity: averaged-out perfection.
Where other sectors absorb AI under familiar terms (automation, efficiency, optimization), the creative sector cannot reach for that vocabulary. What is automated is not a process but a practice, not a task but a tradition of authorship and craft. The disruption is not incidental. From the Turk to Coltrane, Flamini maps where process thrives and algorithms fail. Part cultural criticism, part cognitive science, for anyone who has felt the seduction of the shortcut.
