Yuval Noah Harari

Language is essentially glue.

It connects things.

It connected human beings for tens of thousands of years.

Now, as it frees itself from human beings, it can start connecting in ways which are, you know, way beyond our imagination.

In many ways, AI is language liberating itself, releasing itself from the control of human beings and starting to explore all the things that language can do when it's not tied to these packages of meat walking around on planet Earth.

Now, it's not consciousness.

We talked about it a bit earlier.

When the AI says, I love you, does it really feel anything?

One of the biggest discussions in human philosophy for thousands of years was what is the relationship between language and feelings, the reality beyond the language.

Now, this discussion will become, I think, maybe the most important discussion in the world because suddenly what we couldn't imagine for thousands of years, language is getting out of our control and starting to just do things in the world.

So one book about AI that I would recommend to read is Benjamin Labatut, The Maniac, which is a sort of fictionalist biography of John von Neumann, but also a very imaginative and powerful exploration of the origins of the AI revolution and of the potential consequences of it.

Another recommendation is basically any book by Franz De Waal,

I really like his first book, Chimpanzee Politics, which I've read like 20 years ago and completely changed my understanding, not so much of chimpanzees, but of human beings and of politics.

I would recommend Stefan Miller to, for instance, to read Chimpanzee Politics.

The main message there is that politics is not just about force.

If you think you can become the alpha male of the chimpanzee band by going around and just beating everybody, you will not survive long to learn from your mistake.

Another book that I would like to recommend is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which I think is maybe the best science fiction book of the 20th century, certainly the most prophetic, which also he wrote it in the 1930s against the backdrop of the rise of fascism and communism and so forth.

But he foresaw that maybe the most effective way

And even the most dangerous way to control human beings is not by sheer brute force and fear and terror, like in Orwell's 1984.

But actually, if you work with the pleasure principle and with human greed and desire, you can get further than if you just try to crush people and terrorize them all the time.