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February 2026
A Reading List About AI
Things I have found interesting and useful, from a practitioner who works with AI daily and wants to help you cut through the noise.
This is a curated collection of what has shaped my thinking about AI over the past several years. It includes nonfiction and fiction, articles, podcasts, books, documentaries, television, and film. I maintain it for my clients at Paramis and for anyone building AI literacy who wants a starting point that is not a social media feed. The list is deliberately selective. I am not trying to cover everything. I am pointing to the sources that have been consistently thoughtful, consistently right, and consistently worth the time. The fiction is here because understanding AI requires more than technical fluency. It requires imagination about where this goes, and storytelling has always been how humans rehearse the future.
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Where to Start
The list is organized by format, not difficulty. If you are brand new to AI and want an accessible entry point, start with the documentaries and Ethan Mollick's writing. Both will give you a solid foundation without assuming any technical background. If you are already using ChatGPT or Claude daily and want to think more deeply about where this is heading, skip ahead to the fiction or the long-form essays by Leopold Aschenbrenner and AI 2027. Follow whatever pulls you in.
Nonfiction
Newspapers, Magazines, and Long-form Articles
Ethan Mollick
Virtually all of his posts are highly readable and very enjoyable. Sign up for his mailing list. He is simply the best.
Wired Magazine
WIRED magazine currently maintains an excellent staff who write thoughtfully about AI from multiple perspectives.
Tim Urban
Two longform articles that do a superb job explaining superintelligence. I do not endorse Tim Urban's political views. This is simply a great explainer.
AI 2027 Project
A troubling but credible scenario sketch of what might unfold once we attain AGI in just a few years. A must-read, because things are happening very fast.
Leopold Aschenbrenner
A concise essay series arguing that today's foundation-model scaling puts AGI on track for the late-2020s, with a fast follow-on to super-intelligence, intense U.S.-China security competition, and an urgent need for hardened alignment and containment measures. Another must-read, written by a former OpenAI safety researcher.
Thomas S. Kuhn
Origin of the term "paradigm shift." Shows how normal science hits anomalies, then flips wholesale to a new worldview, a useful lens for today's AI upheaval.
Podcasts
The New York Times
Two reporters explore tech's cutting edge every week and translate it for regular humans.
The New York Times
Recurring episodes where Ezra Klein interviews leading AI researchers and policy thinkers, offering accessible, deeply reported conversations on AI's societal impact. Note that most episodes are not about AI.
Formerly The AI Breakdown
A fast daily update that digs into the latest releases, news, and implications with a realistic, industry-savvy host.
Books
Ethan Mollick
An influential and approachable book about integrating assistants into your life. The calmest and most practical guide for introducing people to generative AI.
Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil's predictions in 1999 in The Age of Spiritual Machines about how and when we build to AGI (he predicts 2029) were unique at the time, and the technical progress he describes has proven correct so far. This sequel to 2005's The Singularity is Near talks about where he thinks we will go next.
Documentaries
PBS
Eight-part PBS series that breaks down AI's benefits, risks, and societal impacts. Very good and broad introduction to the world of artificial intelligence.
Jeff Orlowski
A sobering look at how social media exploits us, problems AI will likely magnify.
Miles O'Brien
A concise overview of how AI works, where it is heading, and why it matters. Great general introduction.
Fiction
Books
Max Brooks
Not a book about AI, but an interesting book about how society reacts to transformative change. In this case, it is a zombie invasion. Max Brooks (Mel's son!) is brilliant and models this book after Studs Terkel's "The Good War." The book is different (and so much better) than the film!
Stanislaw Lem
Presented as lectures by a superintelligent computer, this short novel offers a profound, early meditation on AI consciousness, evolution, and humanity's future.
William Gibson
The seminal cyberpunk novel that coined "cyberspace," exploring emergent AIs, virtual reality, and corporate power in a gritty near future matrix.
Neal Stephenson
A high octane satire that introduced the "Metaverse," viral code, and memetic hacking. Hugely influential on modern tech culture.
Neal Stephenson
Follows a girl whose interactive AI powered book educates and guides her, exploring nanotechnology, societal stratification, and personalized learning. Super interesting relative to AI and education.
Television
Charlie Brooker
A dark anthology on technology and human nature. Start with Season 6, Episode 1 ("Joan Is Awful") if you want the least depressing entry. I did a research event with ChatGPT to rate the plausibility of the technologies you see in the first few episodes of the show, as you are interested.
Apple TV+
A mystery-thriller series starring Rashida Jones that shows plausible domestic interactions with humanoid assistants. Slow moving, interesting enough. Based on the book A Dark Manual by Colin O'Sullivan.
Netflix
Russian sci-fi drama about advanced domestic robots and drone tech that feels very plausible and very near-term, especially the surveillance technologies.
Movies
Stanley Kubrick
For me, this is still the most accurate depiction of near-term AI capabilities. We are likely already at this point, in capability. Developed alongside Arthur C. Clarke's novel of the same name.
Ridley Scott
Imagines sentient (but not superintelligent) humanoids and the techno-capitalist world they inhabit. Based on Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Steven Spielberg
A kinetic thriller in which Precrime predicts murders before they happen; its fugitive chief must expose the system's flaws and reassert free will. Based on Philip K. Dick's 1956 short story "The Minority Report."
Spike Jonze
A wistful near-future romance in which a lonely writer falls for his operating-system assistant, probing how voice-based AI can meet (and strain) human emotional needs.
Alex Garland
A taut chamber thriller in which a young coder is invited to give a Turing-style test to Ava, a beguiling humanoid android, sparking a game of manipulation and escape. An original screenplay (not adapted from a specific novel) that riffs on Alan Turing's 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" and long-standing "Frankenstein" creator-creation themes.
A Note on Sources
I do not recommend relying on social media or mainstream news coverage for AI literacy. The signal-to-noise ratio is too low. Most mainstream reporting either overhypes capabilities or repeats surface-level talking points. Social media is worse: it incentivizes hot takes, engagement bait, and confident speculation from people who are not building anything.
The sources on this list are here because they have been consistently thoughtful, consistently ahead of the curve, and consistently useful to me as a working practitioner. Ethan Mollick has been right about more things, more often, than anyone else writing publicly about AI. Leopold Aschenbrenner's analysis of the scaling trajectory has held up remarkably well. The podcasts listed here translate technical developments into plain language without dumbing them down. And the fiction on this list does something nonfiction cannot: it makes you feel what it might be like to live in the world these technologies are creating.
This list will grow. If you think something belongs here, I am always interested to hear about it.
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Glossary
- Generative AI
- AI systems that create new content (text, images, code, audio) rather than just classifying or predicting. ChatGPT, Claude, and Midjourney are examples.
- AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)
- A hypothetical AI system that can perform any intellectual task a human can. Current AI is narrow, meaning it excels at specific tasks but cannot generalize across all domains. AGI would close that gap.
- Superintelligence
- AI that surpasses human cognitive ability across virtually every domain, including scientific creativity, social skills, and general wisdom.
- Foundation model
- A large AI model trained on broad data that can be adapted to many tasks. GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini are foundation models.
- Alignment
- The challenge of ensuring AI systems pursue goals that humans actually want, rather than optimizing for something unintended.
- Paradigm shift
- A fundamental change in the basic concepts and practices of a discipline. Thomas Kuhn coined the term in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
- Vibe coding
- Writing software by describing what you want to an AI coding assistant rather than writing the code yourself. The human directs, the AI produces.