Blaise Agüera y Arcas - What Is Intelligence?: Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds (2025) {600pp / 17h07m} [Goodreads link]
With the on-going hype around LLMs and AI, the topic of what intelligence actually is continues to be interesting. The current book in written by a Princeton-educated American researcher currently working at Google. Here, Blaise Agüera y Arcas takes up the idea that prediction is fundamental not only to intelligence and the brain, but to life itself - and explores the wide-ranging implications. These include radical new perspectives on the computational properties of living systems, the evolutionary and social origins of intelligence, the relationship between models and reality, entropy and the nature of time, the meaning of free will, the problem of consciousness, and the ethics of machine intelligence. While perhaps trying to sell the idea that Google is on the right track a bit too overtly, useful insights might still be gained.
Stanislas Dehaene - Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (2007) {388pp / 13h45m} [Goodreads link]
Reading about reading. What would a book club focused on improvement in the here and now be without having considered a book on reading? Stanislas Dehaene is a French author and cognitive neuroscientist whose research centers on a number of topics, including numerical cognition, the neural basis of reading and the neural correlates of consciousness. These days he holds a professorial position at the Collège de France. This book, recently released as an audiobook, focuses on explaining how reading has evolved, and how we process language. While the original publication was a while ago now, the title being recently released as an audiobook might be an indication of the content still being relevant.
Yuval Noah Harari - Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (2024) {528pp / 17h28m) [Goodreads link]
Alternatively | Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011) {512pp / 15h18m) [Goodreads link]
Suggested by Osa. Harari's book Sapiens made quite a bang when it reached public awareness. For those being long-time participants of this book club, it's perhaps something of a The Dawn of Everything, but focused on the evolution of the current-day human (the Sapiens) in competition with other human-like creatures on an perspective of 70,000 years instead of on the cultural evolution of the prevailing species. It thus also offered a new narrative of history, and so also changed how we look at ourselves and the future. The original book was so successful that the author spent the following decades expanding, and re-hashing, the same and similar ideas - but with different foci. Nexus is the latest version, focused on information networks - and how they are used and misused. While surely very interesting, one might keep in mind that Harari is foremost a historian and hence it might be that reading his original work will lead to the most insights while minimizing the exposure to less informed writings.
Johan Norberg - Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages (2025) {508pp / 15h30m} [Goodreads link]
A while back we had Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp on our list, which is also a book on societal collapse. We didn't pick it, mostly because the author was a bit unknown. Johan Nordberg does perhaps not suffer from not being known, as he's a Swedish author that has been devoted to promoting economic globalization and what he describes as classical liberal positions for quite some time. In his latest book, which is a 2025 book of the year in the history section according to the Economist, Nordberg tries to find commonalities between the falls of golden ages in the past. For those having read other books about progress, in this book club or elsewhere, this book ought be an interesting comparison.
Kenneth Rogoff - Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider's View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead (2025) {360pp / 12h57m) [Goodreads link]
Written by a financial economist with education from Yale and a PhD from MIT, currently at Allied Social Science Associations and having held the position of Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund quarter of a century ago. Drawing in part on his own experiences, including with policymakers and world leaders, the author animates the remarkable postwar run of the dollar and the challenges it faces today from crypto and the Chinese yuan, the end of reliably low inflation and interest rates, political instability, and the fracturing of the dollar bloc. He argues that it cannot be taken for granted that the Pax Dollar era will last indefinitely, not only because many countries are deeply frustrated with the system, but also because overconfidence and arrogance can lead to unforced errors. Rogoff shows how America’s outsized power and exorbitant privilege can spur financial instability - both outside and inside the US.
Gardiner Harris - No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson (2025) {464pp / 14h23m} [Goodreads link]
In our book club, we have yet to read about the business of medicine. This recent publication - from the spring of 2025 - may or may not be a good place to start. Perhaps something of a human vs corporate evil book. Nevertheless these kinds of works often not only detail how things work but also offer insightful contrasts between presentation and reality.
Vali Nasr - Iran's Grand Strategy: A Political History (2025) {408pp / 11h09m} [Goodreads link]
With Iran in MSM... Written by a western scholar with a PhD from MIT but with roots in Iran, this book attempt to build a deeper understanding of Iranian politics - attempting to amend, or even overturn, the simplistic portrayals offered by consumer media. Regardless of actual level of truth content, this book surely broadens the understanding of western narratives about the middle east.
Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff - The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life (1991) {512pp / 17h02m} [Goodreads link]
Dixit is a name I've heard in the context of game theory several times, and this book is praised by many. The focus of the book is to explain game theory in a readable way. The drawback with this title is its age; even if the theory itself has not evolved much since its publication, it's always nice with examples and anecdotes that are from the present. I'd definitely read it.
Erez Yoeli and Moshe Hoffman - Hidden Games: The Surprising Power of Game Theory to Explain Irrational Human Behavior (2022) {368pp / 10h41m} [Goodreads link]
A more recent work from two MIT economists that aim to reconcile classical and behavioral economics - two schools of thought and observation that often predict quite contrary things. This is a fun introductory read to game theory: Technical details are kept at a minimum, and the authors offer game theoretic explanations to amusing stuff like the sex ratio of humans, vengeance and indication. Certainly a book club book.