What books are you reading (or listening to) these days?

I've been reading more lately because i'd like to think of myself as a lifelong learner... but also partially because I had a bunch of credits piling up in Amazon's audiobooks app (so technically I'm not reading, I'm listening).

Recently it's been Range by David Epstein and Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey. Greenlights was partly just fun, partly curiosity about how a celebrity writes a book. McConaughey reads it himself, and honestly, it's cool to hear where he puts his own emphasis on certain words + sentences because he's the one who wrote them.

One chapter in Range stuck with me though. There's a section about "centaur chess"... after Kasparov lost to Deep Blue (IBM's chess supercomputer), they started running tournaments where humans play with computer assistance. The surprising result: the winners weren't the best grandmasters, and they weren't the strongest computers. They were average players with the best process for working with the machine. A mediocre player who knew how to use the computer well beat both grandmasters and supercomputers playing alone.

That feels like exactly where we are with AI right now. The game isn't "how good are you at marketing" or whatever your domain is anymore. It's "how good are you at working with this superhuman teammate." And how good are you at understanding, building, + utilizing the new, A.I teammate.

Anyways, two things I'm curious of:

1. Any Systems Thinking book you'd recommend. (Since systems thinking is essentially the core/foundation of everything we do here.)

2. Any book outside your usual lane that helped you in ways you weren't expecting. Something you picked up deliberately or not, and it ended up shifting how you think.

Curious what everyone is reading these days.

Cheers!

Shawn

29 comments

What books are you reading (or listening to) these days?