Watch this video on YouTube. And for those who insist reading on your phone is the same as reading a book. It’s not. “Reading on a phone or tablet is generally passive scrolling, often interrupted by messages and alerts. When we read on screens we tend to skim and when we skim, we’re more susceptible to misinformation.”
Category Archives: Books
“He’d never wanted kids”
“He’d never wanted kids. Outside of priority boarding on an airline, he couldn’t see the upside to them. They took over your life and filled you with terror and weariness and people acted like having one was a blessed event and talked about them in the reverent tones they once reserved for gods. When it came down to it, though, you had to remember that all those assholes cutting you off in traffic and walking the streets and shouting in bars and turning their music up too loud and mugging you and raping you and selling you lemon cars—-all those assholes were just children who’d aged. No miracle. Nothing sacred in that.”
—Mystic River (Dennis Lehane)
Books are humanity’s externalized memory
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.
AI as a reading companion
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.
“A temporary manifestation of awareness”
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
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
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
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”)
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
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