collection
Books I've been reading
- 01
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
The race to superhuman AI risks extinction, but it's not too late to change course.
- 02
Roland-Allen.com
Home of the author of THE NOTEBOOK: A HISTORY OF THINKING ON PAPER, available now
- 03
Neal Stephenson - Termination Shock
The personal website of author Neal Stephenson, unless it's been hacked.
- 04
More Everything Forever
This "smart and wonderfully readable" (New York Times) exposé shows why Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death...
- 05
Abundance
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2025 • NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2025 • KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOKS ...
- 06
Deep Response: An Emergency Education in Post-Consumer Praxis
You see the climate destabilization, biodiversity loss, resource scarcity, toxic bioaccumulation, and climate injustice happening all around us. You aren't the type to bury your head in the sand or shrug it off and so you roll up your sleeves. But where to start? How to ensure your work doesn't...
- 07
The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind
Longlisted for the 2024 Financial Times Book of the Year. How life and the economy became a black box—a collection of systems no one understands, producing outcomes no one likes. Passengers get bumped from flights. Phone menus disconnect. Automated financial trades produce market collapse. Of all the challenges in modern life, some of the most vexing come from our relationships with automation: a large system does us wrong, and there’s nothing we can do about it. The problem, economist Dan Davies shows, is accountability sinks: systems in which decisions are delegated to a complex rule book or set of standard procedures, making it impossible to identify the source of mistakes when they happen. In our increasingly unhuman world—lives dominated by algorithms, artificial intelligence, and large organizations—these accountability sinks produce more than just aggravation. They make life and economy unknowable—a black box for no reason. In The Unaccountability Machine, Davies lays bare how markets, institutions, and even governments systematically generate outcomes that no one—not even those involved in making them—seems to want. Since the earliest days of the computer age, theorists have foreseen the dangers of complex systems without personal accountability. In response, British business scholar Stafford Beer developed an accountability-first approach to management called “cybernetics,” which might have taken off had his biggest client (the Chilean government) not fallen to a bloody coup in 1973. With his signature blend of economic and journalistic rigor, Davies examines what’s gone wrong since Beer, including what might have been had the world embraced cybernetics when it had the chance. The Unaccountability Machine is a revelatory and resonant account of how modern life became predisposed to dysfunction.
- 08
Language Machines
How generative AI systems capture a core function of language Looking at the emergence of generative AI, Language Machines presents a new theory of meaning i...
- 09
The Irrational Decision
How the computer revolution shaped our conception of rationality—and why human problems require solutions rooted in human intuition, morality, and judgment