Whoa this was only four months ago. I started or finished all of 'em.

1. “AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future,” by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan (2021) This is a shit book in which a shit futurist makes his shit buddy write shit science fiction based on his wild flyers of what he thinks the future might hold. Why does he think this? Because he's a futurist and you're not, shuttup.

2. “The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race,” by Walter Isaacson (2021) This is the book that made me realize I hate Walter Isaacson. It's slow and dumb and is all about plucking heroes out of process. If you read "The Gene" by Mukherjee you'll learn about gene editing and the future of the human race. If you read this you'll get a puff piece about Jennifer Doudna.

3. “Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed,” by Ben Rich and Leo Janos (1994) Read this years ago. It's Ben Rich trying real hard to be "I'm as good as Kelley Johnson." He's not.

4. “Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code,” by Ruha Benjamin (2019) This is a cliff's notes of #8 for people who don't want facts and mostly want to be angry and black.

5. “Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity,” by Scott Galloway (2020) Scott Galloway has a reputation for being laughably wrong all the time. This book is a perfect exemplar as to why. He starts out with a useful frame: Amazon's business expanded as much in the three months of COVID as it had in the previous five years, therefore COVID can best be viewed as a 5-year acceleration of all technological trends. Except the obvious parallel there is wartime - humans invented radar, jet engines and nuclear weapons in the space of a presidential administration because we were hell-bent on survival - without observing that, oh, maybe there might be changes to the narrative due to the massive impact of COVID. Fundamentally this is a book that says "this time it's different" while insisting you carry on as if it was all exactly the same.

6. “Terra Ignota,” a quartet of novels by Ada Palmer (2016-2021) I gave the first book four hours of audiobook. It's written in this cloying imitation of Olde English and has nothing to do with anything.

7. “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s FB -2.43% Battle for Domination,” by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang (2021) This is a not-very-illuminating summary of information readily available elsewhere.

8. “Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy,” by Cathy O’Neil (2016) This book is dope and everyone should read it. O'Neil makes the point that algorithms are opinions enshrined in equations while also pointing out that the difference between a good algorithm and a bad algorithm is (1) the good algorithm is transparent while the bad algorithm is opaque (2) the good algorithm is trainable while the bad algorithm is immutable. her example of a good algorithm is "moneyball" baseball whereby the baseball team may have its algorithms to determine the composition of its ideal costs-benefits baseball team, but at the end of the season the results can be compared with the hypothesis and the model refined. Her example of a bad algorithm is facial recognition technology whereby African Americans are less likely to be recognized as humans because Google's training data is a bunch of white researchers which nobody knows until it's been rolled out and when the problem is discovered Google refuses to disclose why or do anything to fix it.