The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence
by Sebastian Mallaby; · 30 Mar 2026 · 607pp · 161,998 words
find its own path to the objective. The obvious risk is that the AI will choose a disastrous means to the stipulated end: In one famous thought experiment, the AI maximizes the goal of paper clip production by killing the humans that divert metal to other uses. If computers developed their own desires
Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI
by Carissa Véliz · 21 Apr 2026 · 503pp · 129,255 words
bullshitters because they are made to be plausible with no regard for the truth. It probably didn’t cross Alan Turing’s mind that his thought experiment, the famous imitation game in which a machine tries to pass as a human being, would encourage companies to build impersonators. Bullshit doesn’t need to
…
; particles exist in a probabilistic haze, their exact state indeterminate until observation collapses their wave function into a singular manifestation. Schrödinger’s cat is a famous thought experiment in quantum mechanics designed to illustrate the paradoxical nature of quantum superposition. In this hypothetical scenario, a cat is placed in a sealed box with
Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind
by Susan Schneider · 1 Oct 2019 · 331pp · 47,993 words
particular substrates and seek clues in the AI’s behavior. Another line of argument is more subtle and harder to dismiss. It stems from a famous thought experiment, called “The Chinese Room,” authored by the philosopher John Searle. Searle asks you to suppose that he is locked inside a room. Inside the room
…
deaf people can’t appreciate music at all. 5. Those familiar with Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument will recognize that I am borrowing from his famous thought experiment involving Mary, a neuroscientist, who is supposed to know all the “physical facts” about color vision (i.e., facts about the neuroscience of vision) but
Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture
by Bernardo Kastrup · 28 May 2015 · 244pp · 73,966 words
having inner life the way you and I have, no matter how complex the program. As philosopher John Searle demonstrated decades ago with his famous ‘Chinese Room’ thought experiment, the manipulation of variables is utterly unrelated to subjective experience.54 Moreover, eliminative materialists fail to notice that their claim about the non-existence
Paper Money Collapse: The Folly of Elastic Money and the Coming Monetary Breakdown
by Detlev S. Schlichter · 21 Sep 2011 · 310pp · 90,817 words
start our analysis of the effects of an expanding money supply with a model that is purely a mental construct. It is a simple thought experiment that was famously used by David Hume about 250 years ago in his essay “Of Interest.”1 Even, Instant, and Transparent Money Injection Let us assume that
Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right
by Michael Brooks · 23 Apr 2020 · 88pp · 26,706 words
second, an imaginary situation in which we bring two moral principles into conflict in order to discover which one we care more about. The most famous thought experiment is the so-called “Trolley Problem,” which was originally formulated by the British philosopher Philippa Foot, though the version that most people are familiar with
The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality
by Kathryn Paige Harden · 20 Sep 2021 · 375pp · 102,166 words
you’ll get? It’s a premise that will be familiar to anyone who has taken an undergraduate class in political philosophy. The most famous version of this thought experiment was proposed by the philosopher John Rawls, who imagined something called “the veil of ignorance.” Behind the veil of ignorance,31 no one
Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It
by Richard V. Reeves · 22 May 2017 · 198pp · 52,089 words
, they have less reason to support institutions and policies that favor the less fortunate. After all, their children won’t need them.26 In his famous thought experiment, the philosopher John Rawls suggested that a just society would be the one that was agreed upon by people unaware of which rung they would
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
by Atul Gawande · 2 Jan 2009 · 182pp · 56,961 words
who understands systems will know immediately that optimizing parts is not a good route to system excellence,” he says. He gives the example of a famous thought experiment of trying to build the world’s greatest car by assembling the world’s greatest car parts. We connect the engine of a Ferrari, the
Junk DNA: A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome
by Nessa Carey · 5 Mar 2015 · 357pp · 98,853 words
sound levels or from multiple shades of grey. Biologically, we may owe an awful lot to our nudges and tweaks. Footnotes a This is a famous thought experiment. No actual frogs were harmed in the creation of this anecdote. b They are known as linc RNAs, which stands for long intergenic non-coding
Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice
by Casey Rosenthal and Nora Jones · 27 Apr 2020 · 419pp · 102,488 words
Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis
by Leo Hollis · 31 Mar 2013 · 385pp · 118,314 words
Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe
by Ray Jayawardhana · 10 Dec 2013 · 203pp · 63,257 words
The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good
by Robert H. Frank · 3 Sep 2011
Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System
by Alexander Betts and Paul Collier · 29 Mar 2017
The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity
by Amy Webb · 5 Mar 2019 · 340pp · 97,723 words
Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
by Anil Seth · 29 Aug 2021 · 418pp · 102,597 words
Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump
by Tom Clark and Anthony Heath · 23 Jun 2014 · 401pp · 112,784 words
Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion
by Paul Bloom · 281pp · 79,464 words
The World According to Physics
by Jim Al-Khalili · 10 Mar 2020 · 198pp · 57,703 words
The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets
by Simon Singh · 29 Oct 2013 · 262pp · 65,959 words
Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy
by William Poundstone · 4 Jan 2012 · 260pp · 77,007 words
Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive
by Carl Zimmer · 9 Mar 2021 · 392pp · 109,945 words
Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization
by Edward Slingerland · 31 May 2021
Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society
by Will Hutton · 30 Sep 2010 · 543pp · 147,357 words
Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance
by Alex Hutchinson · 6 Feb 2018 · 403pp · 106,707 words
Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence
by Jacob Turner · 29 Oct 2018 · 688pp · 147,571 words
Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street
by Jackson Lears
Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters
by Brian Klaas · 23 Jan 2024 · 250pp · 96,870 words
Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To
by David A. Sinclair and Matthew D. Laplante · 9 Sep 2019
How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed
by Ray Kurzweil · 13 Nov 2012 · 372pp · 101,174 words
The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann
by Ananyo Bhattacharya · 6 Oct 2021 · 476pp · 121,460 words
From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time
by Sean M. Carroll · 15 Jan 2010 · 634pp · 185,116 words
Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics
by Jim Al-Khalili · 22 Oct 2012 · 208pp · 70,860 words
Erwin Schrodinger and the Quantum Revolution
by John Gribbin · 1 Mar 2012 · 287pp · 87,204 words
Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier · 6 May 2013 · 510pp · 120,048 words
Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future
by Brian Clegg · 8 Dec 2015 · 315pp · 92,151 words
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
by Jonathan Haidt · 13 Mar 2012 · 539pp · 139,378 words
Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe
by Paul Sen · 16 Mar 2021 · 444pp · 111,837 words
Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann · 17 Jun 2019
Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
by Ozan Varol · 13 Apr 2020 · 389pp · 112,319 words
The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War
by Malcolm Gladwell · 26 Apr 2021 · 161pp · 49,972 words
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails With Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others
by Sarah Bakewell · 1 Mar 2016 · 483pp · 144,957 words
The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy: Superintelligent AI and the Geeks Who Are Trying to Save Humanity's Future
by Tom Chivers · 12 Jun 2019 · 289pp · 92,714 words
Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality
by Jaron Lanier · 21 Nov 2017 · 480pp · 123,979 words
The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time
by Maria Konnikova · 28 Jan 2016 · 384pp · 118,572 words
Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell · 11 May 2015 · 409pp · 105,551 words
Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization
by Harold James · 15 Jan 2023 · 469pp · 137,880 words
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature
by Steven Pinker · 10 Sep 2007 · 698pp · 198,203 words
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
by James Gleick · 1 Mar 2011 · 855pp · 178,507 words
The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth
by Michael Spitzer · 31 Mar 2021 · 632pp · 163,143 words
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by David Graeber and David Wengrow · 18 Oct 2021
Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics
by Paul Halpern · 13 Apr 2015 · 282pp · 89,436 words
Thinking, Fast and Slow
by Daniel Kahneman · 24 Oct 2011 · 654pp · 191,864 words
The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday
by Alexander McCall Smith · 22 Sep 2008 · 223pp · 66,428 words
A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson · 5 May 2003 · 654pp · 204,260 words
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
by Daniel C. Dennett · 15 Jan 1995 · 846pp · 232,630 words
Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson · 26 Mar 2019 · 499pp · 144,278 words
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris · 14 Feb 2023 · 864pp · 272,918 words
On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver · 12 Aug 2024 · 848pp · 227,015 words
Surfaces and Essences
by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander · 10 Sep 2012 · 1,079pp · 321,718 words
Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science
by Jim Al-Khalili · 28 Sep 2010 · 467pp · 114,570 words