Books by Stuart Russell

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.

Advances in artificial intelligence pose a myriad of ethical questions, but the most incisive thinking on this subject says more about humans than it does about machines, says Paula Boddington, philosopher and author of a recent AI ethics textbook. We first spoke to Paula in 2017—a long time ago in a fast-moving field. This week we caught up with her to find out what’s happened since then and which new books have taken the conversation over ethics and AI further.

The urgency of the challenges facing society has led to a wonderful supply of books by leading thinkers on a variety of pressing topics. Economist Diane Coyle, a professor at the University of Cambridge and co-director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, recommends her top five economics books of 2019.

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