I created an Amazon bookstore for this blog, which has some of my favorite books and a few I haven’t read but have heard good things about and will read soon. (Like the Hume.)

As far as books you might not have, Moral Machines is really good, as is House of Cards, which gives psychology and psychotherapy a spanking. Robyn Dawes is one of my favorite thinkers in the field of heuristics and biases. I will never forget how impressed I was when I read his paper about how simple mathematical models outperformed doctors on diagnosing a variety of medical problems. In the experiments, doctors were consistently overconfident and overweighted certain variables even they knew very well those variables were not that relevant. It also changed my opinion about the feasibility of AI — most people are not aware of this literature and would probably think that a multi-exabyte human would routinely outperform a kilobyte-sized model, though that isn’t the case in many domains.

In my opinion, the field of heuristics and biases is so relevant to AI research that I find it difficult to take any AI researcher seriously that isn’t at least somewhat familiar with it. Also in the field of heuristics and biases, I recommend Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, and it’s interesting how the presentation of heuristics and biases here varies here from the traditional pessimism about humans in much of that literature. Instead of emphasizing where heuristics go wrong, Gigerenzer emphasizes the success of simple models. But why do we consistently use kilobyte strategies in our exabyte brains?

I put Enough and Beyond Therapy on there because they’re the gold standard in transhumanist criticisms. A one-two punch, from the left and right, if you will. I think most people will find that the transhumanist philosophy still stands very resolutely and easily after these token assaults.

I put The Golden Age on there because it’s my favorite sci-fi book. I read it the summer before my first transhumanist conference (Transvision 2003), where I gave my first talk (on the Singularity, of course — feel free to give a shout-out if you were in the audience) and met many people that I still associate with, like Aubrey, Eliezer, James H., Michael Vassar, et al., so some sentimentality is associated with it in my mind.