1. _“You Look Like a Thing and I Love You” by Janelle Shane
Hilarious, weird, and surprisingly informative. Shane plays with neural nets like they’re mischievous children. Great intro to AI quirks without hand-waving the tech.
2. _“Genius Makers” by Cade Metz
The Moneyball of deep learning. Metz dives into the characters — Hinton, LeCun, Ng — and the rivalries that shaped the AI boom. Like a Silicon Valley soap opera with GPUs.
3. _“Rebooting AI” by Gary Marcus & Ernest Davis
Smart critique from insiders who think we’re doing AI wrong. If you like contrarians who still respect the tech, this is your jam. Thought-provoking and readable.
4. _“Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans” by Melanie Mitchell
Mitchell’s book is like coffee with a brilliant friend who’s trying to explain what “intelligence” really means. More thoughtful than hypey, still very accessible.
5. _“The Alignment Problem” by Brian Christian
If you’re into the ethics, incentives, and long-term consequences of ML systems, this is essential. Christian brings a humanities brain to a technical field.
6. _“Weapons of Math Destruction” by Cathy O’Neil
How badly designed ML systems wreck lives. Feels less like a warning and more like a punch. Excellent for understanding the social consequences of flawed models.
7. _“Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms” by Hannah Fry
Fry’s a mathematician with a stand-up comic’s delivery. Each chapter tackles one sector — healthcare, justice, art — with clear-eyed curiosity.
8. _“Deep Learning: A Visual Introduction for Beginners” by Andrew Glassner
This one is technically a visual book, but his explanations are plain-English gold. Works surprisingly well in audio if you describe diagrams as concepts.
9. _“AI 2041” by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan
Short sci-fi stories + tech essays. It’s speculative but grounded — Lee’s essays explain how the fictional tech could actually work. Surprisingly immersive.
10. _“Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think” by James Vlahos
Focuses on conversational AI, voice assistants, and the future of human-computer interaction. Ideal for audio, obviously