Sixth Group of Books I Read in 2025

Reading Period: September 25 - Present

1. Reinforcement Learning (P), by Richard Sutton

Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/739791.Reinforcement_Learning

    According to Goodreads, this is my 500th book. Wow. Also, over the last few months I finally made it through a series of technical ML books (Linear Algebra Done Right, Deep Learning, and Reinforcement Learning), of which I had been wanting to finish for years. For maybe a moment, I should probably reflect on the fact, and celebrate, that I have turned into quite the literature power user. In some sense it seems fitting to end the first 500 on this book, as now all of my reading goals to date are basically accomplished. 

    Five and a half years years ago, I wrote down a list of life goals: 100 mile ultramarathon, watch 1,000 movies, read 500 books, publish a book, get married, have kids. Now only the last two are outstanding, and as I am engaged, it seems those are not far off either. Reading has transformed me as an individual, and I consider it central to my identity and my success. Fiction has expanded my horizons and worldview, and while I've learned a bit from school and work, I've learned far more from the world of nonfiction. In some sense the CFA curriculum, where I was forced to read finance textbook after finance textbook, is a greater contributor to my current reading ability (I can literally just crush a book like Reinforcement Learning in a week). But regardless, this muscle is still extraordinary to me.

    Now, onto the book. It's is fairly old (originally published in 1998), but Richard is a legend. There are likely two "buckets" of AI that are going to transform the world forever, deep learning and reinforcement learning. In my opinion, advancements in reinforcement learning are way more powerful, scary, and transformative. Even with modern neural nets, it took RLHF to spark broad usefulness. As we undertake the age of autonomous agents interacting with their environment, the sheer "bitter lesson" could soon be that humans can't compete. Overall, this was a great intro into the state of the RL world 27 years ago. It's worth the overview, although given all the advances since it's probably nearing the end of its comparative advantage. Still worth the read now, and maybe for the next couple years.

2. Artificial You (A), by Susan Schneider

Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44526011-artificial-you

    Very good book. Susan is one of the most well-known figures in the realm of AI consciousness, and she has more prestige than nearly anyone in the field. I quoted her multiple times in my own book, and a lot of our arguments are the same. There was a lot of discussion of personhood in this, particularly the idea that if you "upload" yourself to a computer, there's certainly a likelihood that this "upload" is not conscious and you basically just killed yourself. Susan spends a lot of the book arguing that brain uploading may not be the positive immortality it sounds like and that the transhumanist community may be making a critical mistake in thinking so (which in the future could have drastic consequences). Overall very accessible and straightforward read.