I am a scientist, educator, successful entrepreneur, and author. I believe that human civilization is threatened by the wonderful and dangerous technologies that we created in the last two centuries: fossil fuels, nuclear weapons, gene editing, AI, and social media. As a creator of technologies, I feel responsible that more hasn’t been done to properly control them. My current mission is to sound an alarm about the potential tyranny of technology through my novels, 100 Years to Extinction and the sequel, 12 Years to AI Singularity, on my website and on social media. While the recommended books on my list are nonfiction, my fictional story presents the science and technology accurately as nonfiction would.
What happens when artificial intelligence (AI) becomes the greatest threat to human survival? Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking warned: “The development of…
I believe the artificial intelligence Singularity is coming and is super important.
The recent essay by Matt Shumer, Something Big Is Coming, that got 84 million views, highlights that importance. I love futurist author Ray Kurzweil’s book that describes that future. Kurzweil predicts the Singularity will occur in 2045. I believe it may be sooner.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called AI "the single most serious national security threat we've faced in a century, possibly ever." I love how Kurzweil’s book lays out the issues we will face. He predicts AI will expand human intelligence a millionfold and change human life forever, including our employment.
I believe we need to understand and be prepared for how that future will unfold, and his book helps us do that.
In this visionary and fundamentally optimistic book, the legendary oracle of technological change explains how AI will transform our species beyond recognition.
'The best person I know at predicting the future of AI' BILL GATES 'A fascinating exploration of our future' YUVAL NOAH HARARI 'Essential reading to understand our exponential times' MUSTAFA SULEYMAN
Within our lifetimes, we will be able to connect our brains directly with AI, enhancing our intelligence a millionfold and expanding our consciousness in ways we can barely imagine. This is the Singularity. Ray Kurzweil is one of the greatest inventors of our time with over 60…
I loved the way Nexus looks at human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us and our world.
For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. Will we lose that power to AI? I believe Harari adds an important historical perspective to complement Kurzweil’s view of the future.
I found Harari’s account about the role of Facebook’s AI in the persecution of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar to be fascinating.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world.
“Striking original . . . A historian whose arguments operate on the scale of millennia has managed to capture the zeitgeist perfectly.”—The Economist
“This deeply important book comes at a critical time as we all think through the implications of AI and automated content production. . . . Masterful and provocative.”—Mustafa Suleyman, author of The Coming Wave
For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite allour discoveries, inventions, and conquests,…
The Animal in the Mirror is a wake-up call to your higher self. Why do we keep reacting, fearing, and repeating the same patterns—no matter how much we know better? Because beneath our thoughts and emotions still lives the animal within: the ancient survival instinct that once kept us alive…
As in my second recommendation, Harari adds the historical perspective to humanity’s survival.
The coming battle with AI is just the latest for humans. One hundred thousand years ago, at least six humanoid species inhabited the Earth and battled for survival. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens.
Harari does a beautiful job of explaining how our species succeed in the battle for dominance. He describes how our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms; how did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism?
We need to understand our past to properly control our future with AI.
100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?
In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the…
I believe this book is a must read because Jennifer Doudna’s CRISPR-Cas 9 gene editing invention will be the second major technology to threaten the existence of humanity.
Doudna won a Nobel Prize for her discovery. She said, “The idea that you would affect evolution is a very profound thing.” Will CRISPR be used to create a new super humanoid species, or used by AI to create a species that is more to their liking and easier to control than humans? Or will AI use it to create deadly viruses to rid the Earth of the pesky human species?
Understanding the power of this breakthrough technology is essential to our understanding the future. I found it fascinating that the technology is based on the method bacteria developed 3 billion years ago to protect them from viruses.
The best-selling author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs returns.
In 2012, Nobel Prize winning scientist Jennifer Doudna hit upon an invention that will transform the future of the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA.
Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions. It has already been deployed to cure deadly diseases, fight the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, and make inheritable changes in the genes of babies.
But what does that mean for humanity? Should we be hacking our own DNA to make us less susceptible to disease? Should…
Guns, Furs, and Gold offers a riveting narrative of the American West by exploring the interactions of the Arikaras, Crows, Cheyennes, and Arapahos with each other and with Euro-American traders, explorers, and settlers from 1804, when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark embarked on their voyage of discovery, to 1864, when…
This is a wonderful book that I found difficult to put down.
It is about a different technology that made profound changes in civilization: our ability to navigate and explore the world. That new technology allowed European civilization to threaten the civilizations of indigenous people on other continents. Will it be similar to AI threatening the civilization of humans?
I was particularly struck by the wars going on between people of the same culture, but living on neighboring islands. Their lack of cooperative existence put their cultures at risk. Will human civilization have the same lack of cooperation in dealing with artificial intelligence?
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR FOR 2024 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW • A “thrilling and superbly crafted” (The Wall Street Journal) account of the most momentous voyage of the Age of Exploration, which culminated in Captain James Cook’s death in Hawaii, and left a complex and controversial legacy still debated to this day.
“Hampton Sides, an acclaimed master of the nonfiction narrative, has taken on Cook’s story and retells it for the 21st century.”—Los Angeles Times
On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest…
What happens when artificial intelligence (AI) becomes the greatest threat to human survival? Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking warned: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." 12 Years to AI Singularity is a near-future epic that follows the humans, sentient robots, and large language models (LLMs) racing toward the most pivotal moment in history: the point when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and control, the AI Singularity.
Can humans and AI evolve together into a harmonious future, or is war inevitable? Some robots and humans become best friends. People appear after their death as on-screen avatars and robots. Robots marry humans, and humans raise robot children. Robots and humans join hands in a movement to make Earth great again.
The Smart Mission brings together NASA’s most important lessons on how people, knowledge, and systems shape complex projects.
Drawing on decades of experience at NASA—including my time as the agency’s first Chief Knowledge Officer—this book explains why mission success depends less on process and more on culture, learning, and collaboration.…
The human brain goes negative easily, yet we’re trained to see happiness as “normal.” We would be better off knowing that our happy brain chemicals are not designed to be on all the time. Why doesn’t anyone teach this?
Because it’s not what people want to hear. We’re trained to…
