AI Book Club: A Human in the Loop
This book club focuses on reading and discussing popular books about AI, with an emphasis on how humans, specifically tech writers, might steer and guide AI systems toward the outcomes they want.
The selection covers general interest books on AI rather than engineering-heavy texts or books specifically focused on technical communication. As shown in the schedule below, these are popular titles targeting a broad audience.
However, regardless of their popular focus, these books are a good catalyst for thinking about AI, and there might be many themes and takeaways that will likely apply to whatever you’re interested in. The human-in-the-loop theme encourages us to look for ways to stay relevant at a time when AI becomes increasingly intelligent and self-directed.
Upcoming reading schedule
The following tables list the upcoming reading schedule. The descriptions are extracts from the book summaries on Amazon. More details for the notes and discussion links will be added as the meeting date approaches.
| Meeting date | Book and description | Notes |
|---|---|---|
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Dec 14, 2025  |
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick "In Co-Intelligence, Mollick urges us to engage with AI as co-worker, co-teacher, and coach. He assesses its profound impact on business and education, using dozens of real-time examples of AI in action. Co-Intelligence shows what it means to think and work together with smart machines, and why it's imperative that we master that skill. / Mollick challenges us to utilize AI's enormous power without losing our identity, to learn from it without being misled, and to harness its gifts to create a better human future. Wide ranging, hugely thought-provoking, optimistic, and lucid, Co-Intelligence reveals the promise and power of this new era." |
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Jan 18, 2026  |
God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O'Gieblyn "For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our understanding. The rise of science and Descartes's division of mind from world made materialism our ruling paradigm, in the process asking whether our own consciousness — i.e., souls—might be illusions. Now the inexorable rise of technology, with artificial intelligences that surpass our comprehension and control, and the spread of digital metaphors for self-understanding, the core questions of existence—identity, knowledge, the very nature and purpose of life itself—urgently require rethinking." |
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Feb 22, 2026  |
AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan "Long before the advent of ChatGPT, Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan understood the enormous potential of artificial intelligence to transform our daily lives. But even as the world wakes up to the power of AI, many of us still fail to grasp the big picture. Chatbots and large language models are only the beginning. / ... Lee and Chen join forces to imagine our world in 2041 and how it will be shaped by AI. In ten gripping, globe-spanning short stories and accompanying commentary, their book introduces readers to an array of eye-opening settings and characters grappling with the new abundance and potential harms of AI technologies like deep learning, mixed reality, robotics, artificial general intelligence, and autonomous weapons." |
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Mar 15, 2026  |
Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang "In Breakneck, Wang blends political, economic, and philosophical analysis with reportage to reveal a provocative new framework for understanding China―one that helps us see America more clearly, too. While China is an engineering state, relentlessly pursuing megaprojects, the United States has stalled. America has transformed into a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad" |
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Apr 19, 2026  |
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams "Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade―told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us." |
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May 17, 2026  |
Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark "How will Artificial Intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology—and there’s nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who’s helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial." |
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Jun 21, 2026  |
The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI by Dr. Fei-Fei Li "The Worlds I See is a story of science in the first person, documenting one of the century’s defining moments from the inside. It provides a riveting story of a scientist at work and a thrillingly clear explanation of what artificial intelligence actually is―and how it came to be. Emotionally raw and intellectually uncompromising, this book is a testament not only to the passion required for even the most technical scholarship but also to the curiosity forever at its heart." |
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Jul 19, 2026  |
The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes "Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. As Hayes shares, “Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.”" |
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Aug 16, 2026  |
Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart by Nicholas Carr "A celebrated commentator on the human consequences of technology, Nicholas Carr reorients the conversation around modern communication, challenging some of our most cherished beliefs about self-expression, free speech, and media democratization. He reveals how messaging apps strip nuance from conversation, how “digital crowding” erodes empathy and triggers aggression, how online political debates narrow our minds and distort our perceptions, and how advances in AI are further blurring the already hazy line between fantasy and reality." |
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Sep 20, 2026  |
Pure Human: The Hidden Truth of Our Divinity, Power, and Destiny by Gregg Braden "Scientists, engineers and philosophers alike warn us that without a radical shift in our thinking, we are on track to be the last generation of pure humans that the world will know. Within a single generation we will devolve into a hybrid species of synthetic bodies, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and computer chips that limit our ability to think, to love, and to adapt to the conditions of the emerging world in a healthy way. In doing so we will also lose our capacity for emotion, empathy, intimacy, and forgiveness—the very qualities that we value and cherish in our humanness." |
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Oct 18, 2026  |
The Age of AI: And Our Human Future by Henry A Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, Daniel Huttenlocher "In The Age of AI, three leading thinkers have come together to consider how AI will change our relationships with knowledge, politics, and the societies in which we live. The Age of AI is an essential roadmap to our present and our future, an era unlike any that has come before." |
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Nov 15, 2026  |
Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future by Reid Hoffman, Greg Beato "Superagency offers a roadmap for using AI inclusively and adaptively to improve our lives and create positive change. While acknowledging challenges like disinformation and potential job changes, the book focuses on AI’s immense potential to increase individual agency and create better outcomes for society as a whole." |
Previous meetings and recordings
The previous meetings include recordings, notes, and other resources. They’re listed in order of most recently completed meetings.
| Meeting date | Book and description | Notes |
|---|---|---|
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Nov 16, 2025  |
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari "Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence." |
Meeting recording |
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Oct 19, 2025  |
Hands-On Large Language Models: Language Understanding and Generation by Jay Alammar and Maarten Grootendorst "AI has acquired startling new language capabilities in just the past few years. Driven by rapid advances in deep learning, language AI systems are able to write and understand text better than ever before. This trend is enabling new features, products, and entire industries. Through this book's visually educational nature, readers will learn practical tools and concepts they need to use these capabilities today. / You'll understand how to use pretrained large language models for use cases like copywriting and summarization; create semantic search systems that go beyond keyword matching; and use existing libraries and pretrained models for text classification, search, and clusterings." |
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Sep 21, 2025  |
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI by Karen Hao "[Hao] realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations?" |
Meeting recording |
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Aug 17, 2025  |
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee "...Lee argues powerfully that because of the unprecedented developments in AI, dramatic changes will be happening much sooner than many of us expected.... Most experts already say that AI will have a devastating impact on blue-collar jobs. But Lee predicts that Chinese and American AI will have a strong impact on white-collar jobs as well. Is universal basic income the solution? In Lee's opinion, probably not. But he provides a clear description of which jobs will be affected and how soon, which jobs can be enhanced with AI, and most importantly, how we can provide solutions to some of the most profound changes in the future of human history." |
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Jul 20, 2025  |
Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World by Parmy Olson "In Supremacy, Olson, tech writer at Bloomberg, tells the astonishing story of the battle between these two AI firms [ OpenAI and DeepMind], their struggles to use their tech for good, and the hazardous direction they could go as they serve two tech Goliaths whose power is unprecedented in history. The story focuses on the continuing rivalry of two key CEOs at the center of it all, who cultivated a religion around their mission to build god-like super intelligent machines: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind." |
Notes and discussion |
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Jun 15, 2025  |
The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI by Ray Kurzweil "Kurzweil brings a fresh perspective to advances toward the Singularity — assessing his 1999 prediction that AI will reach human level intelligence by 2029 and examining the exponential growth of technology — that, in the near future, will expand human intelligence a millionfold and change human life forever. Among the topics he discusses are rebuilding the world, atom by atom with devices like nanobots; radical life extension beyond the current age limit of 120; reinventing intelligence by connecting our brains to the cloud; ... and the growth of renewable energy and 3-D printing." |
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May 18, 2025  |
The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman "In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how these forces will create immense prosperity but also threaten the nation-state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into disaster, we face an existential dilemma: unprecedented harms on one side, the threat of overbearing surveillance on the other. / How do we ensure the flourishing of humankind? How do we maintain control? ... / This groundbreaking book from the ultimate AI insider establishes 'the containment problem'—the task of maintaining control over powerful technologies—as the essential challenge of our age." |
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Apr 20, 2025  |
More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner "More Than Words argues that generative AI programs like ChatGPT not only can kill the student essay but should, since these assignments don't challenge students to do the real work of writing. To Warner, writing is thinking—discovering your ideas while trying to capture them on a page—and feeling—grappling with what it fundamentally means to be human. The fact that we ask students to complete so many assignments that a machine could do is a sign that something has gone very wrong with writing instruction. More Than Words calls for us to use AI as an opportunity to reckon with how we work with words—and how all of us should rethink our relationship with writing." |
Meeting recording |
Book club details
The following sections provide more detail about how the book club works.
Reading pace
We read one book a month, as listed in the schedule below. This pace ensures that engaging in the club encourages you to step away from daily minutiae and spend time with the printed page. The meetings take place online through Google Meet, with recordings posted afterwards. There’s also a Slack workspace for online chat, and an email group for announcements.
Although AI news seems to change daily, giving the impression that books are too slow to keep up, the core issues and themes have much more longevity. Books elevate our thinking and engagement with these topics, allowing us to explore them in depth rather than just keeping up with the latest model release or news headlines.
There’s no cost to join the book club (except buying the books), and you can attend as few or many meetings as you like. You can read (or listen to) part or all of the books, and participate as much or little as you like. The meetings take place online on the third Sunday of each month at 10am Pacific Time.
Recording
Each book club is recorded, using Google Meet as the platform. The recordings are uploaded to YouTube and shared on this site. See the Meeting Recording links in the table below or view this ai-book-club category on the site.
If you don’t want to be recorded or have the recording shared on YouTube, this isn’t the book club for you. By joining the book club, you consent to the recording. If you need me to edit out part of the conversation, though, let me know and I will try to make the edit. In general, avoid saying things you don’t want recorded.
Monthly meeting days and times
The meetings are usually the third Sunday of the month at 10am Pacific Time. I realize that meeting on a Sunday might not work for many people — that’s okay. This is a book club, not a work webinar. The primary discussion focuses on the substance of these books. Falling on a Sunday, only those who truly want to engage in the reading and discuss these topics will likely join, and that’s all right. If you can’t join the meetings, you can watch or listen to the recordings.
Slack forum for online discussion
A Slack workspace is set up for online discussion. Go to one of these links:
- Already a workspace member? Go to https://aibookclubtechcomm.slack.com
- Need to join the workspace? Go to aibookclubtechcomm
The Slack workspace is used to chat, share info or other thoughts, etc. Feel free to introduce yourself in the Slack and ask questions. However, the main interaction will be with the monthly meetings.
Note that the Slack workspace resets every 30 days. Unfortunately, the costs to maintain messages beyond the 30-day window are astronomical. So if you don’t see many Slack discussions, it doesn’t mean the group is inactive. It just means the messages have reset.
Email list for notifications
In addition to Slack, there’s an email list you can join to receive announcements, information, and other details. I post the same info on Slack, but email can be easier for many people to receive info.
Google Meet for the meetings
For the monthly meetings, we use Google Meet. If you use Google Calendar, you can join this Google Group and the meetings should automatically appear on your calendar. Otherwise, you can copy the event to your Google Calendar through this link or by clicking this button:
How do I join the book club and get started?
- Join the email list.
- Join the Slack group.
- Join the Google Group or manually add the event to your calendar.
- Order the books and start reading.
FAQ
- Who’s the audience for this book club?
- Mostly people working in tech comm who want to deepen and broaden their knowledge of AI, but who aren’t looking to dive into the technical details of AI as an engineer might. These books fall more within a general interest category for technology and AI.
- How did you come up with the book list?
- I look for books that are both popular and highly rated, so preferably books that have hundreds of reviews and average at least 4 stars.
- What are the meetings like?
- The meetings are interactive and discussion-based, as you might expect from any book club. To prepare for the book club meetings, I provide a notes document that summarizes the book’s themes and also presents some questions for discussion.
- Can I recommend a book?
- Sure, post your book recommendations either to the Slack group or to me directly via the contact form here.
- I’m not a technical writer – can I still join?
- Sure, you don’t need to be a technical writer. I only added this facet to try to ground what is a broad domain (AI) with a more immediate and practical perspective.
- Isn’t this field changing too fast for books?
- Perhaps. However, many of these authors are wrestling with topics that go beyond the daily news headlines and which speak to long-term transitions in the way we think and work. Additionally, reading gives you space from the chaos and frenetic pace of the Internet news cycles.
- I’m not sure if I have time to read books.
- There’s a mental health benefit to reading long-form content instead of scrolling through bite-sized information nuggets. Reading books provides deeper engagement and a more satisfying experience for the brain. It takes time to read a 300-page book. That reading patience will offset a world where we’re saturated with short-form content that reduces and fragments our attention spans.
About Tom Johnson
I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.
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