The 4 Best Books to Prepare for AI (of the Hundreds I’ve Read)
Weber, Aristotle, Girard, Kripal
After interviewing dozens of leading AI experts and reading hundreds of books, these 4 books stood out as the most important for the AI-age. If you truly understand their insights, not only will you survive this revolution, you will thrive.
Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
Rene Girard’s Deceit Desire and the Novel
Jeff Kripal’s Secret Body
People today are mostly worried about AI taking their job or the bubble bursting, but Weber’s Protestant Ethic is going to show you the problem is much greater. The right comparison isn’t the dotcom bubble or 2008. It’s Darwin which shook the faith of an entire civilization or the industrial revolution which required two world wars to sort out. That’s the scale of the AI challenge and Weber’s text helps put that in view.
The next 3 books will teach you where to spend your time now in order to thrive in this radically new world order. I’ve already made major life decisions based on their insights to AI-proof my life and career. Why should we go looking for guidance in “outdated” works of philosophy? Because we need to rethink everything from the ground up from first principles. And if you are just stuck on learning how to prompt engineer or following the latest fads on X you are underestimating the size of the earthquake that is about to hit us by magnitudes.
These are the crucial insights each of these 4 texts have to offer us in the AI age…
What We Cover:
0:00 0. Introduction
1:42 1. Weber’s Protestant Ethic
5:41 2. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
9:48 3. Girard’s Deceit Desire and the Novel
14:25 4. Kripal’s Secret Body