10 Books to Make You Rethink AI: 'Is The Tech We Use to Connect with Each Other Actually Isolating Us?' (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Atria Books; Del Rey; Knopf

With the explosion of AI in popular culture, chatbots and the resurgence of interest in movies likeHer,I am MotherandEx Machina, it’s important to consider what goes into creating artificial intelligence and its effects on people and the larger world. Does treating AI like a person encourage us to treat people like objects? Is the tech we use to connect with each other actually isolating us? Who is behind all the words a chatbot generates, and do their ideas and personality come through?

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W. W. Norton & Company

Ada is the daughter of David Sebelius, a computer scientist working on an early chatbot, ELIXIR, loosely modeled on MIT’s Eliza. Through Ada and David’s relationship, and Ada’s with ELIXIR, Moore teases out the ways that all tech, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence, is the sum of those who make it. It’s an extraordinary stunner about time, family, aging and memory, as tender as it is fascinating, and builds to an ending that still brings me to tears.

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Knopf

Klara is a solar-powered companion, who we follow from her time in a store window through her experiences as a friend to an ill child and beyond. With Klara, Ishiguro accomplishes the unusual — writing an AI who doesn’t mimic human thinking or worldviews for reader comfort. Klara’s perception of humans and the world itself is a perfect window for readers to examine who we are and what faith is. This elegant, contemplative book left me questioning how we treat not just each other but everything we create.

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Tordotcom

Chambers’s deeply kind, philosophical book uses an awakened robot and a tea monk suffering an existential crisis to talk about the nature of being. She writes beautifully about emotions, creation, consciousness and time. This rare speculative novel that makes you want to hug the world is an antidote for readers who have grown weary of the dystopian.

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S&S/Marysue Rucci Books

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Ecco

This kaleidoscopic novel about communication brims with ethical questions as five voices, all of which are part of an AI, track the development of machine consciousness and the texts that trained it. The voices, including fictional correspondence fromAlan Turing, meditate powerfully on connection, loneliness and technology-induced isolation, and demonstrate the pitfalls of a “move fast and break things” mentality.This is the novel I want every developer of artificial intelligence to read. The Alan Turing chapters are utterly haunting.

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G.P. Putnam’s Sons

Henry, suffering from agoraphobia, has been working on an AI in his home lab. Lily, Henry’s pregnant wife, has been keeping a secret. These things collide in a compulsively readable mashup of thriller and horror. With clear nods toFrankenstein, this tight novel takes place over a single day. Nested in that day are complex questions about power, AI’s role in romantic partnership, the ethics of creation and control through isolation.

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The stories in this collection are elegant, wide-ranging and as full of wonder as they are discomforting. “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” in particular is an insightful look into the nature of caring, connection and our longstanding desire to outsource childrearing.

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Solaris

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Del Rey

In a post-nuclear apocalypse San Francisco, Rick Deckard works as a bounty hunter chasing escaped androids. While the novel that inspiredBlade Runnerdiffers from its film adaptation, its central questions remain. How do we know what’s human? Where’s the line between real and virtual? What motivates physical relationships between machine and human? In one of the most influential works in science fiction, part of what remains striking is Dick’s focus on the everyday grind, and how it leads us into accepting things we wouldn’t otherwise.

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Soho Press

In a future Japan where the elderly vastly outnumber their caretakers, artificial intelligences are used to fill the gaps. The AI inPlum Rainsspur fascinating questions about care, altruism and the nature of connection. Romano-Lax uses history and culture to draw a direct line to our tech imaginings.Plum Rainsleaves you wondering if it’s possible for an AI to be better at humanity than humans.

source: people.com