Daniel Petre

Steven Pinker's 500-page empirical survey of progress across 15 dimensions: health, wealth, equality, safety, knowledge, quality of life. Explicitly frames market economies and Enlightenment liberalism as the institutional sources of that progress. Has been criticized for cherry-picking metrics and underweighting catastrophic risks; the data itself is worth engaging with regardless.

Harari's concern — that humans may cede decision-making to opaque systems through preference rather than coercion — reframes the alignment problem as a cultural and political challenge, not only a technical one. Less rigorous than Bostrom or Russell, but more widely read, making it a useful lens for understanding public discourse.

How shared fictions such as money, nations and gods let humans cooperate at scale.

Churchill's first year as prime minister, from Dunkirk through the Blitz.

Kurzweil's optimistic counterpoint to the safety literature. His law of accelerating returns and the vision of intelligence explosion as fundamentally benign is the premise that alignment researchers are most directly arguing against. Reading it gives the other side of the debate its strongest formulation.

Twenty-one essays on today's challenges, from technology and politics to truth.

Hans Rosling was a global health professor, not an economist, which gives his data-driven case for human progress particular credibility. He shows, in meticulous detail, that almost every quantitative measure of human welfare has improved dramatically over the past century. He attributes this to global trade and economic development without being a polemicist.

Leonardo's life read through his notebooks, where art and science were one pursuit.

The gene from Mendel and Darwin to genome editing, beside a family's mental illness.

Early specialisation works only where rules are stable; elsewhere breadth wins.