My Reading List - by a Rational Sanguine Futurist who is Working to be a Wizard

Sanguine - optimistic or positive, especially in an apparently bad or difficult situation.

"Ever since I learned about the nuclear arms race at age fourteen, I’ve been concerned that the power of our technology was growing faster than the wisdom with which we manage it. ... I made a New Year’s resolution for 2014 that I was no longer allowed to complain about anything without putting some serious thought into what I could personally do about it." Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

I saw this article: Rajeev Suri: What the Nokia CEO reads on his way to work. “I’m reading Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku. I’m also trying to read The Singularity is Near by Raymond Kurzweil and Machine Learning for Dummies by John Paul Mueller and Luca Massaron. Physics and robotics have an impact on our business. If you want to predict the future better, you need to understand this stuff.” https://www.ft.com/content/25ea942a-737b-11e6-bf48-b372cdb1043a?mhq5j=e1

Author's Note: I consider myself a Rational Sanguine Futurist who is trying to be a Wizard. I am more in agreement with Kevin Kelly’s vision of the future than Ray Kurzweil. 

Dr. Ian Morris - in his book Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the future – wrote: “The twenty-first century is going to be a race. In one lane is some sort of Singularity; in the other, Nightfall. One will win and one will lose. There will be no silver medal. Either we will soon (perhaps before 2050) begin a transformation even more profound than the industrial revolution, which may make most of our current problems irrelevant, or we will stagger into a collapse like no other.”

I am working that the problems of communication, transportation and energy will become irrelevant. That is one reason I developed a presentation: Transforming Transportation With Self-Driving Cars & Drones in the Next 20 Years Like We Transformed Computers and Communications in the last 20 Years - and wrote this blog https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/transformation-rise-autonomous-vehicles-2016-state-av-doug-hohulin

About 5 years ago, I set a goal to read 50 books a year. It was one of the best decisions I made. Here is my Top Reading List. 

• AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee
• The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity Hardcover – by Byron Reese
• We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1) by Dennis Taylor
• “The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future.” And “What Technology Wants” by  Kevin Kelly
• "Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension" and "The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date" by Samuel Arbesman
• “The most human human” by Brian Christian –“what Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us about Being Alive.
• Infinite Progress: How the Internet and Technology Will End Ignorance, Disease, Poverty, Hunger, and War - Byron Reese
• The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future - Peter Thiel , Blake Masters
• The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies Brynjolfsson, Erik; McAfee, Andrew
• Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think ; and Bold: How to Go Big, Make Bank, and Better the World - Steven Kotler, Peter H. Diamandis
• Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris.
• Dreams of Other Worlds: The Amazing Story of Unmanned Space Exploration by Chris Impey and Holly Henry; Beyond: Our Future in Space; How It Ends: From You to the Universe by Chris Impey
• The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves; Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley
• Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark
• Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future First by David Grinspoon 
• The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World by Charles C. Mann

Author's Note: I find that many times authors reference other books and quote sections from other books. According to google, there have been about ~129 million books written (2010) +~2M more per year. I wonder if you could create a “Connectome” of how each book references and quotes other books (strong and weak connections), what insights you would find and new books you would discover? When I am reading a book I especially like, I usually learn about other books that I find very valuable and interesting.

https://www.worldometers.info/books/

My new favorite book is The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World by Charles C. Mann

Here is an article he wrote that covers some themes of the book

Can Planet Earth Feed 10 Billion People? - Humanity has 30 years to find out

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/charles-mann-can-planet-earth-feed-10-billion-people/550928/

Here is a talk he gave on the book The Wizard and the Prophet

https://longnow.org/seminars/02018/jan/22/wizard-and-prophet/

Civilization’s health hangs on how we manage food, water, energy, and climate. Two conflicting visions dominate how we think about them. Each vision had an original creator and exemplar—the “prophet” William Vogt, author of Road to Survival, and the “wizard” Norman Borlaug, mastermind of The Green Revolution in agriculture. The prophet says to repent and cut back on everything; the wizard says that clever enough innovation can always find a way forward. Examine both visionaries and their visions closely, and a way to proceed emerges that combines alert caution with bold invention.

In the book "The Rolling Stones" by Robert Heinlein where he writes: “Every technology goes through three stages: first, a crudely simple and quite unsatisfactory gadget; second, an enormously complicated group of gadgets designed to overcome the shortcomings of the original and achieving thereby somewhat satisfactory performance through extremely complex compromise; third, a final stage of smooth simplicity and efficient performance based on correct understanding of natural laws and proper design therefrom.”

I believe AI, computation, communication, energy and transportation are going through these stages right now.

I may write a blog will explore some of the different type Devices and how they are similar to the kingdoms of life:

1. Bacteria – RFID (replacement for barcodes) 5-10 trillion devices per year
2. Archaea – Sensors/MEMS
3. Protozoa - Wearables
4. Chromista – Computers
5. Fungi - Games and Entertainment
6. Plantae - Cell Phones 
7. Animalia – robots, self-driving cars, drones, T300 

I believe we are in the middle of a new Cambrian Explosion of Technology as I highlighted in this blog

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/let-light-5g-internet-things-tree-life-doug-hohulin

Similar to the book: The Wolf in the Parlor: How the Dog Came to Share Your Brain by Jon Franklin, we may find an “AI in the Parlor” in the near future.

Other good books and sources of info

• Mary Meeker INTERNET TRENDS - CODE CONFERENC (KPCB)            
• SOFTBANK Next 30-Year Vision June 25, 2010 Chairman & CEO Masayoshi Son
• Dr. Janusz Bryzek Chair, TSensors Summit Vice President, MEMS and Sensing Solutions, Fairchild Semiconductor
• The Creative Destruction of Medicine, The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands - Eric Topol
• The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism– Jeremy Rifkin
• IWPC Conf: Building Blocks Towards an Internet of Connected Things (IoT)
• Enchanted Objects- David Rose
• Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation - Tyler Cowen
• Connectome, Dr. Sebastian Seung
• How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed - Ray Kurzweil,
• Glass Gage, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains - Nicholas Carr
• Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better- Clive Thompson,
• Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 - The Future of the Mind - Michio Kaku,
• Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy - McKinsey Global Institute
• Nexus (The Nexus Trilogy Book 1) ; Crux; Apex by Ramez Naam
• Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Sch?nberger
• Chips, Clones, and Living Beyond 100: How Far Will the Biosciences Take Us by Paul J. H. Schoemaker Joyce A. Schoemaker
• "The Future X Network: A Bell Labs Perspective" by Marcus K. Weldon; MT5009
• Dr. Jeffrey Funk; How and when New Technologies Become Economically Feasible and thus what Types of New Products and Services Should be Introduced?; Exponential Change: What drives it? What does it tell us about the future? (2014) https://www.slideshare.net/Funk98/when-do-new-technologies-become-economically-feasible

Here is my digital health, medicine, genetics reading list

• The Creative Destruction of Medicine, The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands - Eric Topol
• The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer by Robert Wachter
• Connectome, Dr. Sebastian Seung
• How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed - Ray Kurzweil,
• “The most human human” by Brian Christian –“what Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us about Being Alive.
• The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis - Thomas Goetz
• The Wolf in the Parlor: How the Dog Came to Share Your Brain by Jon Franklin
• DNA USA: A Genetic Portrait of America; Adam's Curse: A Future without Men; The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry by Bryan Sykes
• Bad Science; Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients by Ben Goldacre
• DNA: The Secret of Life Kindle Edition by James D. Watson
• The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer Paperback by Siddhartha Mukherjee
• Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End; The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right; Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science; Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande
• Genes, Chromosomes, and Disease: From Simple Traits, to Complex Traits, to Personalized Medicine by Nicholas Wright Gillham
• “Anticancer, A New Way of Life” by David Servan-Schreiber MD PhD
• The Philadelphia Chromosome: A Genetic Mystery, a Lethal Cancer, and the Improbable Invention of a Lifesaving Treatment by Jessica Wapner
• p53: The Gene that Cracked the Cancer Code by Sue Armstrong -- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
• Survival of the Sickest: The Surprising Connections Between Disease ; Longevity and Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives--and Our Lives Change Our Genes by Sharon Moalem
• Biocode: The New Age of Genomics Kindle by Dawn Field
• What is Life?: How chemistry becomes biology by Addy Pross
• The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum by Temple Grandin , Richard Panek
• The Other Brain: From Dementia to Schizophrenia, How New Discoveries About the Brain are Revolutionizing Medicine and Science by R. Douglas Fields

Other good science books

• The Unknown Universe: A New Exploration of Time, Space and Cosmology by: Stuart Clark
• Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions Written by: Brian Christian , Tom Griffiths
• The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics: A Math-Free Exploration of the Science That Made Our World by: James Kakalios
• Drinking Water: A History by: James Salzman
• Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time-and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything by: George Musser
• The Science of Energy: Resources and Power Explained Written by: The Great Courses by: Professor Michael E. Wysession
• Einstein's Relativity and the Quantum Revolution: Modern Physics for Non-Scientists by: The Great Courses by: Professor Richard Wolfson
• At the Edge of Uncertainty: 11 Discoveries Taking Science by Surprise Written by: Michael Brooks
• Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner
• Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks Written by: Ben Goldacre
• Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong by Robert Bryce

Inspirational – History books

• Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by: Margot Lee Shetterly
• Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide by Michael B. Oren
• Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Michael B. Oren
• War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots by Ian Morris
• The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution by James Hannam
• The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman
• Still Alice by Lisa Genova 

Books for Fun

• Rendezvous with Rama by: Arthur C. Clarke
• Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8th (Pacific War), One Second, One Year After William R. Forstchen
• The Rolling Stones, The Door into Summer, Have Space Suit - Will Travel, Space Cadet, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
• The Constantine Codex by Paul L. Maier
• Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank