🧠Mind Expanding 14 April 2024: recent books roundup📚

ChatGPT, please summarise my aspirational bookshelf...

Kia ora,

With my own book dominating proceedings for me over the last few months I haven’t had much time to keep up with the continuing avalanche of quality books being released. Hopefully that is about to change🤞. As such, here’s a short roundup of recently released books (and one older one) which have made their way onto my aspirational “what I should read next if I had time…” bookshelf.

Reading list summary

(For efficiency, the summaries in the list below are largely AI-generated from the book websites themselves and lightly cross-checked and edited by me… accuracy and signal-to-noise ratio hopefully still high enough…links provided to the source for original text).

Books covered in this post:

1. Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom

2. Read Write Own by Chris Dixon

3. We Can Do Better by Maja Göpel

4. Code Dependent by Madhumita Murgia

5. One Hundred Years of Insanity by Bob Lloyd

6. In the Long Run by Jonathan White

7. Gigatrends by Thomas Koulopoulos

8. The New Creatives: How AI Changes the Face of the Creative Industry by Seema Sharma

(Special shout out to book-recommender-in-chief @InaBeek for many of these!)

Suitably vanilla GPT-4 Turbo intro para (including the obligatory “delves”…😂):

“In an era where the rapid advancement of technology and the complex challenges of global issues demand our attention, literature continues to serve as a crucial lens through which we can explore and understand these shifts. From the philosophical inquiries of Nick Bostrom in "Deep Utopia" to the critical examination of AI's impact on the creative sectors in Seema Sharma's "The New Creatives," the following collection of books offers diverse perspectives on how humanity might navigate a future punctuated by digital transformation, existential threats, and the call for systemic change. Each title not only delves into the intricacies of its subject matter but also proposes pathways towards understanding and, potentially, solutions. Here’s a closer look at these compelling works, each a piece of the puzzle in our quest to better understand the implications of our rapidly changing world.“

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1. Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom

   

   • ISBN: 978-1646871643

   • Overview: "Deep Utopia" explores a world where superintelligence has been safely developed, ushering humanity into a state of post-instrumentality, where human labour is obsolete and human nature can be fully shaped by technology. The book questions the meaning of life and human existence in a world where all technical problems are solved, posing philosophical and spiritual dilemmas in an era of technological abundance.

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2. Read Write Own by Chris Dixon