Season one Exploring AI
The Wonder Tools Book Group brings paid subscribers together to discuss ten of the most notable recent books about artificial intelligence—and what they mean for how we work, learn, create, and live.
Explore all 10 booksAI is changing faster than any one person can follow. Books give us room to slow down, compare perspectives, and ask better questions. This season moves from practical guides and skeptical critiques to philosophy, education, creativity, power, and human agency.
The complete season
Ten distinct ways to understand the promise, limits, and human stakes of AI.
Book 1
What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference
A sharp guide to separating useful AI from overblown claims—and recognizing where automated systems can cause real harm.
Book 2
A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future
A journalist’s wide-ranging tour of the people and companies building AI, the changes already underway, and the choices that remain open to us.
Book 3
How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
A humane argument for treating writing as a way of thinking, feeling, and connecting—not simply a product to be generated efficiently.
Book 4
A Guide for the Perplexed
A concise framework for understanding what today’s systems can do while keeping our attention on the more consequential technologies still to come.
Book 5
How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking
A philosopher’s case that AI reflects human intelligence, values, and limitations—and that looking carefully at the reflection can help us choose better futures.
Book 6
Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma
An insider’s account of how AI and synthetic biology may create extraordinary prosperity—and an urgent argument for learning to contain their risks.
Book 7
A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning
A pragmatic playbook for educators, covering assignment design, academic integrity, ethics, assessment, and the durable value of human learning.
Book 8
What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future
An optimistic vision of AI as a force that could expand individual capability through better tutors, researchers, advisers, and creative partners.
Book 9
A Primer on Being Human in an Artificially Intelligent World
An accessible, nontechnical primer connecting AI’s history and mechanics to its economic, cultural, and moral implications.
Book 10
A Guide for Thinking Humans
A lucid explanation of how modern AI works, why common sense remains elusive, and why people repeatedly overestimate machine intelligence.
Season sponsor
The Wonder Tools Book Group is sponsored by Shortform, whose detailed book guides make it easier to grasp key ideas and put them into practice.
Wonder Tools readers get a discount and can try it for free to explore the books you’ve been meaning to read.Join the conversation
The book group is part of the Wonder Tools paid-subscriber community. Join us for generous, practical conversations about technology and the future—no technical background required.
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