Editor’s Note
The following is our reading list for the new podcast series, “The Politics of AI.” We’re making it public here for a few reasons. We want you to read (see: suffer) along with us. In addition, we are looking forward to our Catholic AI Summit, preparing to make a more definitive word on our AI moment by addressing the leading thinkers and developers of AI head-on. Finally, this is a start to creating a shared list of texts that we can base our understanding of the philosophy behind AI systems, the political implications, and what we are to do.
This list is in no particular order, and the groupings are not to be taken as absolute. There is a great deal of overlap between the different “camps.” We will be adding to this list as we go.
Frontier Labs
Dario Amodei, “The Adolescence of Technology.”
Dario Amodei, “Machines of Loving Grace.”
Dario Amodei, “We Must Pace the Frontier.”
Anthropic, “Advanced AI Framework.”
Anthropic, “Claude’s Constitution.”
Anthropic, “When AI builds itself.”
Anthropic, “Scenarios for our economic future.”
OpenAI, “Planning for AGI and Beyond.”
Deepmind, Morris, et al., “Levels of AGI for Operationalizing Progress on the Path to AGI.
Leopold Aschenbrenner, “Situational Awareness.”
The Hugging Face Incident
METR report, “Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident”
Effective Altruism/AI Safety
Yudkowsky, Soares, If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies.
Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
Nick Bostrom, Deep Utopia.
Nick Bostrom, “Letter from Utopia.”
Peter Singer, The Most Good You Can Do.
Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, Morality.”
FLI, “Pro-Human Declaration.”
Max Tegmark, Life 3.0.
William MacAskill, What We Owe The Future.
Toby Ord, The Precipice.
Joseph Carlsmith, “Is Power-Seeking AI an Existential Risk?”
AI Warfare + Politics
Alexander C. Karp, Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic.
Paul Scharre, Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War
Katrina Manson, Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare
White House, “America’s AI Action Plan.”
Effective Accelerationists
Marc Andreessen: “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”
Marc Andreessen, “Why AI Will Save the World.”
Beff Jezos, “Notes on e/acc principles and tenets”
Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
Reid Hoffman, Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future
Mechanistic Interpretability
Scott Alexander, “God Help Us, Let’s Try To Learn About Mechanistic Interpretability Techniques.”
Chris Olah, “Mechanistic Interpretability, Variables, and the Importance of Interpretable Bases.”
Dario Amodei, “The Urgency of Interpretability.”
Catholic
Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas.
Vatican, “Antiqua et Nova.”
Andrew Willard Jones, “The Humane and the Technocratic.”
New Polity, Issue 6.2–3.
New Polity, Issue 7.3.
Elizabeth Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy.”
Pope Benedict XVI, “Deus Caritas Est.”
Pope Francis, “Address at the G7 Session on Artificial Intelligence.”