A few weeks ago someone asked me to point them towards a few resources they could use to learn about AI. I got a bit carried away, coming up with a few more than a few. I thought I’d share here as well.
Note: I subscribe to many more podcasts, newsletters, and RSS feeds, some of which also deal with topics around AI, but these are the ones that I pay the most attention to i.e. these are not the final word. And, the sources below, with a few exceptions, tend to be more optimistic about AI.
Podcasts
- Making Sense podcast, filtered for AI.
- Future of Life Institute podcast (scroll down, then use the filter feature to limit the episodes to those on AI).
- a16z podcast and articles on AI (a16z is a venture capital firm and tends to lean towards techno-utopia i.e. not very critical about technology).
- 80 000 Hours podcast, filtered for AI (80 000 Hours is a non-profit focused on career guidance and decision-making).
- Last Week in AI (incredible overview of the weeks news in all things AI, often technical).
- The Cognitive Revolution (fantastic deep dives into specific companies and technologies, sometimes technical).
Blogs
- Donald Clark – Plan B (a no-nonsense approach to exploring questions around AI in education).
- Future of Life Institute blog posts.
- Stephen Downes commentaries (Downes writes short commentaries on a LOT of things related to education, so you may need to scroll around a bit…I’ve found that search on his site doesn’t always work well).
- Tech Talks AI research papers (summaries of AI research that are very clear).
- The Decoder (popular news about AI).
- Jisc resources on AI (Jisc is a non-profit agency in the UK, focused on tertiary education, research and innovation).
- Urban, T. (2015, January 22). The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 1. Wait But Why.
- Urban, T. (2015, January 27). The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 2. Wait But Why.
- Wonke blog, filtered for AI (Wonkhe is a popular higher education blog).
Books (only the ones I’ve read…there are obviously many more)
- Agrawal, A., Gans, J., & Goldfarb, A. (2018). Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence.
- Aoun, J. E. (2017). Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
- Barrat, J. (2013). Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era.
- Marcus, G., & Davis, E. (2019). Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust.
- Mitchell, M. (2019). Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans.
- Mollick, E. (2024). Co-intelligence: Living and working with AI.
- Russell, S. (2019). Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control.
- Tegmark, M. (2018). Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
- Topol, E. (2019). Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again.
Newsletters
- Ethan Mollick on Substack (“Translating academic research into mostly useful insights, with some ephemera on the side. Mostly AI stuff recently”).
- SAIL Sensemaking AI Learning (“explores trends in human and artificial cognition, focusing on how sensemaking and learning are impacted by AI”).
- Gary Marcus on Substack (Gary Marcus is a reliable voice in the noise around AI critique).