From Kai Fu Lee to Harari - Best books about AI

The authors of this article, Filip Tichý (Partner at Grant Thornton Slovakia) and Jakub Chudík (Co-Founder at Assetario), take you through the world of artificial intelligence in the AI Breakfast series. This article was written without the use of AI.

Christmas is approaching and therefore we decided to bring you some book tips for the best books about AI.

In Filip's case, his interest in AI initially came mainly from the books. I've always read a lot of non-fiction, mostly history, politics, business and biographies. About 6 years ago I registered a new topic in business literature (on Amazon) and bought AI Superpowers by Kai Fu Lee. I was immediately fascinated by the topic of AI and since then I've been reading everything interesting about AI that I can get my hands on. Some time has passed, and AI has become a prominent topic, that is widely written and talked about.

Jakub got into AI through school and YouTube videos. I remember when I decided to do my senior thesis in high school on neural networks. I knew practically nothing and also nothing practical, so I had to study a lot from online tutorials and YouTube videos. At MIT, of course, we had textbooks, but since the professors did a lot of research, they tended to teach from PowerPoint slides. Over time, however, I've discovered awesome books on AI and online communities focused on developing practical skills.

These are, in our opinion, best AI books split into basic categories:

The best book to introduce the topic of AI: Kai Fu Lee - AI Superpowers

The already mentioned book, which also got us interested in this topic. It very accurately and interestingly explains how this technology came into life and how it works. It brings an interesting perspective on the rivalry in AI development between the USA and China (= the two "AI Superpowers"). Given the very positive portrayal of China as an AI superpower, this book tends to be labelled also as a Chinese propaganda; I certainly wouldn't be so harsh to call it so. While at the time of the book's release the AI Superpowers rivalry was more of a draw, the scales have since shifted to the US side. Last but not least, the book provides a very positive and inspiring outlook on the future symbiosis of humans and AI.

The AI best book from a philosophical and political perspective: Kissinger, Schmidt, Huttenlocher - Age of AI (resp. Youval Noah Harari - Nexus)

This book is based on Henry Kissinger's brilliant essay: "How the Enlightenment Ends". Kissinger (RIP) is one of my favourite authors, it is truly fascinating to have a 90-something intellectual and historian share his perspective on the new transformative technology. In the book, the authors reflect on how, since the Enlightenment, a man and his reason have been the source of knowledge and understanding. With the rise of AI, technology will then come up with new ideas and innovations that humans will not be able to explain, understand or replicate. Moreover, the book offers an interesting insight into the impact of AI on society, politics, wars and business. And by the way - there's another book on AI coming out, which Kissinger co-authored, before he died. We can't wait. 

Update: we started to write this article during the summer of 2024. After reading Youval Harari's Nexus, which came out in September, we must also include this excellent book in this category. It introduces a lot of new ideas about AI, and its new perspective makes it distinctly different from the multitude of other AI books. The central idea of the book is: "Information" doesn't equal “Truth." The main role of information is not to represent the truth, but to connect. From this perspective, it is consequently not true that the more information and data, the better the AI. Quite the contrary. We are being drown with too much information that is harmful, and AI is massively magnifying this negative trend. Other interesting novel ideas from Nexus include:

• Democracy is a conversation between people, which in large communities (states) is made possible by the media. AI will significantly weaken this ability to "hold a conversation"
• AI will be dangerous not only for democracy, but also for dictatorial regimes themselves
• AI could trigger a new wave of colonization (just as Harari believes the original colonization was also driven by the technological revolution of the time)
• Silicon Curtain - dividing the world according to which AI is used by whom (American or Chinese)

The best AI book about ethics: Nick Bostrom - Superintelligence

Superintelligence, by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, is a more difficult, almost academic, read. In this book he goes into an in-depth theory about the concept of so-called AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) or "Singularity" or, as the book's title suggests, "Superintelligence". Superintelligence is the hypothetical possibility that the development of AI will move to a level vastly beyond the ability of humans to comprehend, it will be capable of self-development, and we will see a technological explosion completely beyond the control or imagination of humans. This is a fascinating topic, and there is intense debate in scientific (and technological) communities about when, or if ever, AGI could occur. Potential superintelligence will, of course, bring a lot of ethical risks and questions, and that is what this book is about. But not in the form of abbreviated and bombastic scaremongering, but in the form of deep academic reflections.

Best short story about AI: Kai Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan - AI 2041

Novels aren't exactly our kind of genre, but when Kai Fu Lee (along with a well-known Chinese sci-fi author) published a series of 10 short stories about what forms AI might evolve into in the future, we read it right away. Each short story describes what the use of autonomous vehicles, deep-fake videos, personalized learning, and more will (maybe) look like in 2041, as well as the impact these technologies will have on people. Each short story is then accompanied by an expert essay on where technological developments in the given field of AI research are headed. In addition to interesting possible future AI products, the stories make interesting speculations about what the world and society will look like in the age of AI.

The best book about AI and business: Iansiti, Lakhani - Competing in the age of AI

Our "AI Breakfast" articles are primarily about combining AI and business. This section of literature, as well as in professional journals, is very rich nowadays. We regularly read articles on AI and business from the Harvard Business Review or the Economist, which are also excellent. From books, we would probably single out Competing in the age of AI. In it, the authors present an interesting concept of the so-called "total AI company". In this company, the complete operational activities are carried out by artificial intelligence. People are in it solely to conceptualize and identify new activities and patterns, code them, and then monitor, maintain and evaluate them. This book accurately demonstrates the beauty of a business model built on AI, describes several well-known cases of successful AI transformation, and gives guidance on how to build an "AI core" in your business.

The best book about AI from a pessimistic to catastrophic perspective: Mustafa Suleyman - The coming wave

The founder of DeepMind wrote his famous book The Coming Wave, where he points out that a major problem with the AI debate and trend is the critical underestimation of AI containment - how AI will be controlled, what precautions and preventive measures will used to mitigate or eliminate negative impacts. He equates all important technologies to big waves. He sees the combination of AI and synthetic biology as the most dangerous one. A must-read for AI pessimists but also optimists.

Technical AI literature

The best technical content for an AI beginner

If you want to learn more about AI but don't necessarily want to spend time on the technical details, we definitely recommend a course from one of the pioneers of AI and co-founder of Coursera: Andrew Ng https://www.deeplearning.ai/courses/ai-for-everyone/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=andrew-website 

If you already know a bit about AI and want to learn more about neural networks, be sure to check out https://course.fast.ai/ 

The best book about AI programming: Sebastian Raschka - Machine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn

 AI is technically a very broad topic, from predicting Amazon customers' buying behaviour, to predicting future stock prices, to recognizing signs/pedestrians/cars in autonomous car navigation, to synthesizing sound or spoken word, all the way to LLMs that understand and generate syntactically correct text in human language. Many everyday AI cases can be solved with an existing algorithm from the Scikit-Learn library. Complex AI is based on neural networks, which are programmed in one of two main frameworks: Pytorch or Tensorflow. This book is "as practical as they come". On top of that, the authors have prepared a repository with code and exercises, so you can practice and improve your new knowledge and skills extremely quickly and easily.

The best book about data analytics: Thomas Nield -  Essential Math for Data Science

Essential skills for data analysts are mathematics and the tools to apply it to data stored in files and databases through code in languages such as Python, R or SQL. You will definitely cover basic math using this book. 

A short read about practical AI: John Myles White - Bandit Algorithms for Website Optimization 

If you want to know more about how websites are optimized thanks to every single visitor, then we definitely recommend this handy, short read about bandits, a group of algorithms that continuously improve based on real user feedbacks.