Books to help you understand artificial intelligence

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve inevitably witnessed the alarm surrounding artificial intelligence: from concerns about computers developing elevated consciousness, to ChatGPT churning out college essays and precocious creative writing pieces (no comment).  

But amid all the noise, it can be hard to nail the fundamentals of understanding AI: what, exactly, is it? How will it shape our society and day-to-day lives? What about the ethics of it all? To help answer these questions and more, we’ve rounded up the best writing by tech experts and social scientists, plus a couple of novels that grapple with the implications of it all within imagined worlds of a (not-so-distant) future.