AI Policy: A New Reading List

The purpose of this reading list is to place AI policy, safety, alignment, and desire back within its political and philosophical lineages. Much good work has been done by EA-aligned bodies, but we believe the atomistic, computable way of thinking this approach takes and its popularity within the field risks leading us down dead ends in AI design and into traps a broader approach would reveal.

A.J. Ayer

Language, Truth, and Logic

Adam Smith

Theory of Moral Sentiments

Wealth of Nations

Alasdair Macintyre

After Virtue

Amitav Ghosh

The Great Derangement

Benedict Anderson

Imagined Communities

Benjamin Bratton

The Stack

Brian Christian

The Alignment Problem

Bruno Latour

Facing Gaia

Cal Newport

Deep Work

Celeste Friend

Overview of the Social Contract Theory

Charles Taylor

Sources of the Self

Chris Miller

Chip War

David Hume

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

A Treatise of Human Nature

Donna Haraway

The Cyborg Manifesto

Donna Haraway

Staying with the Trouble

Eric Reiss

The Lean Start Up

Ernest Gellner

Nations and Nationalism

Eugene McCarraher

The Enchantments of Mammon

Francis Fukuyama

Political Order and Political Decay

The End of History

Franklin Perkins

Liebniz and China: A Commerce of Light

George Berkeley

De Motu

Principles of Human Knowledge

Three Dialogues

Graciela De Pierris and Michael Friedman

Kant and Hume on Causation

Immanuel Kant

Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals

Isaiah Berlin

Three Critics of the Enlightenment

The Proper Study of Mankind

J.L. Mackie

Inventing Right and Wrong

Jacob Steinhardt

Future ML Systems Will Be Qualitatively Different

More is Different For AI

James C. Scott

Seeing Like A State

James McBride

Ways of Being

JJ Rousseau

On the Social Contract

JL Austin

How to do things with words

John Locke

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Two Treatises of Government

John Stuart Mill

Utilitarianism, On Liberty

Joseph Butler

Fifteen Sermons

Jurgen Habermas

Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Theory of Communicative Action

Mary Midgley

Science as Salvation

Evolution as Religion

Mary Wollestonecraft

Vindications of the Rights of Women

Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno

Dialectic of Enlightenment

Mircea Eliade

The Myth of the Eternal Return

Paul Christiano, OpenAi

Learning From Human Preferences

Peter Singer

The Most Good You Can Do

Practical Ethics

Peter Turchin

End Times

Plato

Crito

Ring of Gygas

Quinn Slobodian

Globalists

Rene Girard

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

All Desire is A Desire For Being

Richard Ngo

AGI Safety From First Principles

A Short Introduction to Machine Learning

Richard Sutton

The Bitter Lesson

Rishi Bommasani et al

On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models

Robert Filmer

Patriarcha

Roberto Calasso

The Unnameable Present

Robin Hanson

The Age of Em

Rudolph Carnap

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

Scott Alexander

Biological Anchors: A Trick That Might or Might Not Work

Sebastian Mallaby

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Art of Disruption

Shosana Zuboff

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

St Augustine

Confessions

Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer

Leviathan and the Air-Pump

Stuart Russell

Human Compatible

Susan Nieman

Evil in Modern Thought: An alternative history of philosophy

Thomas Hobbes

Leviathan

Thomas Nagel

What is it like to be a bat?

Timothy LeCain

The Matter of History

Vaclav Smil

Energy and Civilisation: A History

Wendell Berry

In Distrust of Movements

Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer

William MacAskill

What We Owe The Future

WVO Quine

Two Dogmas of Empiricism