Technology Books

Technology is already running our lives and unless regulations are updated to keep up, it could upend our way of life completely, warns Azeem Azhar, entrepreneur, investor, and creator of the Exponential View newsletter. Here, he recommends his five top tech books to help us navigate the near future, from a technical tome to a science fiction novel.

Data science is often said to be built on three pillars: domain expertise, statistics, and programming. Hadley Wickham, Chief Scientist at RStudio and creator of many packages for the R programming language, chooses the best books to help aspiring data scientists build solid computer science fundamentals.

It could lead us all to immortality or spell the end of the human race. Author Calum Chace picks the best books on Artificial Intelligence or AI.

We are building ever more powerful machines that will compute answers to any questions we care to ask them, says Tom Chatfield, the author and tech philosopher. But are we asking the right questions? Here, he selects five of the best books on the ethics of technology—thoughtful explorations of how our newly-made tools might remake us.

Machine learning uses data to predict outcomes, explains Eric Siegel, a former professor at Columbia who now advises companies on deploying it in their business. Unlike artificial intelligence, it's a real technology with a proven track record, he says. He recommends practical books on machine learning that are accessible to the layperson and useful to anyone looking to use it in their business or organization.

As advances in AI lead some to dream of utopia, the reality is that dystopia is a lot easier to get to, says tech policy adviser Mahlet Zimeta. She recommends books to think more deeply about how technology affects the world around us, from Nietzsche to Chernobyl and from poetry to speculative fiction.

Normally at Five Books we ask experts to recommend the best books in their field and talk to us about them in an interview, either in person, by phone or via Zoom. In January 2023, we asked the AI bot, ChatGPT, to recommend books to us on the topic of AI. Being an AI doesn't necessarily make the chatbot an expert on AI books, but we thought it might have some ideas. This week we caught up with ChatGPT to find out if there were any new AI books it wanted to recommend in the year since we spoke. Read more nonfiction book recommendations on Five Books

Philosophers have a lot to add to debates about digital technology and the moral issues raised by its rapid rise, argues Carissa Véliz, a professor at the University of Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI. Here she talks us through books for the general reader that introduce some of the challenges of digital ethics, from concerns about privacy and bias to the threat to democracy and the future of humanity.  

The internet and digital technology are transforming not only the way African countries trade and conduct business but also how they cohere socially and politically. Mohammad Amir Anwar, Lecturer in African Studies and International Development at the University of Edinburgh, recommends books that investigate the opportunities for Africa from the growth of technology—but focus on specifics and avoid the hype.

Proselytes for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin extol them as a liberation technology to free us from big government. Sceptics insist that while they have been the source of useful technologies, as units of value, account and exchange, they will remain marginal. Here, digital currency expert David Birch chooses five books to help you understand the utopian roots of cryptocurrencies, the technology behind how they work, their functions and uses, and their broader place in the long history of money.