Books That Changed How You Think About Technology

[CaptainStatic56]

Not technical books necessarily. Books that gave you a framework, a metaphor, a historical parallel, or a way of thinking about technology and its effects that stuck with you and changed how you see things.

Could be fiction, history, sociology, philosophy, biography, anything. One recommendation with a sentence on what it changed.

[Totally]

The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. Whether or not you buy the neuroscience argument, the historical section on how previous reading technologies changed cognition is genuinely unsettling in the context of what comes next

[NovaPrime68]

Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford. Written in 1934 and still the best account I have read of how technologies create the conditions for the technologies that follow. The clock argument alone is worth the price

[SašaJelenič]

The Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand. Changed how I think about timescales. The AI acceleration discourse looks completely different when you consider what decisions we are making on behalf of people a thousand years from now

[Blake_73]

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. His first novel and his least read. About automation displacing skilled workers in a post-war America that maps uncomfortably onto right now. More accurate than most contemporary AI prediction

[Louise]

The Dream Machine by M Mitchell Waldrop. Biography of JCR Licklider and the origins of personal computing. The vision of human-computer symbiosis articulated in the 1960s is still more interesting than most contemporary AI discourse

[ParallelSelf50]

Seeing Like a State by James C Scott. Not about technology directly but the concept of legibility, how states and institutions simplify complex systems to make them manageable and in doing so destroy what made them work, is applicable to every AI deployment I have ever seen

[Kieran88]

Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. Very short, apparently abstract, changed how I think about competition and what companies and technologies are actually optimising for