Category Archives: Books

Books are humanity’s externalized memory

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Books (or the absence of books) seems to be a common trope in science/speculative fiction. I’m thinking of The Book of Eli, Farenheit 451, Galatea 2.2, and —of course— Mockingbird. Once again, I asked ChatGPT for an analysis.

You’re onto something, Steve—books (or their absence) pop up again and again in speculative fiction, and it’s rarely just about reading material. They’re symbols of memory, knowledge, authority, even humanity itself. A few thoughts on the theme, with some examples to add to your list:

I think the reason this theme recurs is because books are humanity’s externalized memory. They’re more tangible than “data” or “cloud servers”—a simple, material symbol for knowledge itself. Remove them, and you get amnesia. Hoard them, and you get power. Forget how to use them, and you get a slow cultural death. In speculative fiction, messing with books is shorthand for messing with what it means to be human.

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AI as a reading companion

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Last weekend my friend John sent me a clipping of a newspaper column by Bill McClellan in which he wrote, “I will miss the Age of People when it’s gone.” This reminded me of Walter Tevis’ novel, Mockingbird which I read in 2013. I sent John a link to the post and checked with ChatGPT to see if we had ever discussed the book. 

Since creating my first ChatGPT account (more than two years ago) I’ve had numerous discussions about books and authors. (The AI “knows” more about my taste in books and authors than any of my human acquaintances.) After giving me a brief summary of the novel, ChatGPT asked the following:

“Would you like me to give you a deeper dive—say, its main themes and how it might connect with your interests in nonduality, AI, or the future of human consciousness?”

This happens a lot. Because I have enabled the “memory” feature in my ChatGPT settings, the AI remembers stuff from our previous interactions, like my interest in AI, human consciousness and nonduality. And it made the connection to the novel, when I had not.

Mockingbird has layers that line up uncannily with the things you and I often circle around: AI, consciousness, and the sort of nondual “what is awareness really?” inquiry.

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“A temporary manifestation of awareness”

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In William Gibson’s novel, The Peripheral, humanoid robots called peripherals were used to transmit one’s consciousness to a different place (or time). … In many eastern spiritual traditions, we are not the body/mind, rather the awareness (which is universal) manifesting in the human organism. I asked GPT-5 to comment on Gibson’s metaphor: Continue reading →

BookBuddy Pro

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Editors Note: Following description by ChatGPT. Screencast below is a brief look at my BookBuddy collection.

BookBuddy Pro is a mobile app for cataloging personal book collections, designed primarily for iPhone and iPad users. Developed by Kimico Ltd., it offers a clean, intuitive interface and a powerful feature set tailored to readers who want to organize their libraries without the noise of social features or community input. Continue reading →

Discussing a book with something that hasn’t read it

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I couldn’t find authoritative data but  I assume millions of copies of William Gibson’s novel, The Peripheral have been sold. And many more millions share my interest in Eastern spiritual traditions (specifically the illusory nature of the self). And the subset of those who fall into both groups is probably large… I just don’t happen to know any of those people. So I fired up my ChatGPT app fully aware of the bullshit risk.

“I’d like to get your take on one of the plot elements in William Gibson’s novel, The Peripheral. Before I get to that, I’m curious about how you know what you know. For example, were you trained on the full text of that novel or would your “understanding” be based on reviews or other sources?”

The rest of the conversation (PDF) was pretty interesting.

Empire of AI

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Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI is a book by Karen Hao released on May 20, 2025. It focuses on the history of OpenAI and its culture of secrecy and devotion to the promise of artificial general intelligence (AGI). The book includes interviews with around 260 people, correspondence, and relevant documents. The title makes reference to colonial empires of the 1800s.

Hao visited OpenAI’s offices and covered the company for the MIT Technology Review two years before ChatGPT was released. Her experience there and reporting on topics of AI for seven years led her to write Empire Of AI. (Wikipedia)

Given how much time I spent “conversing” with —and gushing about— OpenAI’s famous chat bot (ChatGPT) this seemed like a book I should read. About half way through and not sure how much of the book I will share here. Continue reading →

Book Archive: Part 3 (“Reincarnation”)

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I recently posted about a project I submitted to ChatGPT. She made a lot of ambitious claims about what she could do (and help me do) with my archive of notes taken while reading books. (120+ books, fiction and non-fiction) Her reach exceeded her grasp and her indexing of my notes didn’t turn out to be as useful as she promised (I’m hoping that might change with future versions).

I’m still playing with this and I prompted her to summarize what my reading has taught me about reincarnation. She suggested drafting this “into something you could share in a blog post, a letter, or even as a thoughtful reply to a curious questioner.” [see comment at bottom of this post] Here’s what she came up with: Continue reading →

Book annotation archive

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UPDATE: This project ended in a big belly-flop. ChatGPT was unable to deliver the goods. Even the excuses were a little lame. A good experience from my perspective. Now I know.

When I read a book I usually have a pen or highlighter in one hand so I can mark passages I find interesting. When I’ve finished reading the book I go back through, transcribing these favorite bits and save them to a PDF. This makes it possible to search for and find just about anything if I can recall a word or phrase. (I also create a blog post that includes these excerpts.) You can see an index here and here.

I uploaded one of these excerpt pages to ChatGPT and asked what she could do if she had my full archive (144 books as of this writing). Her response was detailed and impressive. Continue reading →

What does AI need to know?

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The following excerpts are by Tyler Cowen from Eric Topol’s podcast.

The AI is your smartest reader. It’s your most sympathetic reader. It will remember what you tell it. So I think humans should sit down and ask, what does the AI need to know? And also, what is it that I know that’s not on the historical record anywhere? That’s not just repetition if I put it down, say on the internet. So there’s no point in writing repetitions anymore because the AI already knows those things. So the value of what you’d call broadly, memoir, biography, anecdote, you could say secrets. It’s now much higher. 

As a longtime blogger that last line really resonates for me. And I can’t wait for ChatGPT (or some descendent) to “read and remember” all of my blog posts… where you’ll find a lot of posts about books and reading. So this next bit plunked my magic twanger as well.

I’ve become fussier about my reading. So I’ll pick up a book and start and then start asking [ChatGPT] o3 or other models questions about the book. So it’s like I get a customized version of the book I want, but I’m also reading somewhat more fiction. Now, AI might in time become very good at fiction, but we’re not there now. So fiction is more special. It’s becoming more human, and I should read more of it, and I’m doing that.

Computer Science: 1966

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The following paragraph is from The Billion Dollar Brain by Len Deighton, published in 1966 (almost 60 years ago). 

“I don’t want to bore you,” Harvey said, “but you should understand that these heaps of wire can practically think— linear programming-which means that instead of going through all the alternatives they have a hunch which is the right one. What’s more, almost none of them work by binary notation-the normal method for computers-because that’s just yes/ no stuff. (If you can only store yesses and noes it takes seven punch holes to record the number ninety-nine.) These machines use tiny chips of ceramic which store electricity. They store any amount from one to nine. That’s why-for what it does—this whole setup is so small.”

ChatGPT: This paragraph is a remarkable little time capsule. In 1966, when The Billion Dollar Brain came out, the general public had only the vaguest idea of what computers actually were, let alone what they could do (see comment below). And yet here, Len Deighton—writing a spy thriller, not a science text—manages to tap into several ideas that were way ahead of their time: Continue reading →