So many technology books have been published this year, and I have had the pleasure of reading several dozen of them. Many were about AI (to no one’s surprise) and not all of those were very good (to no one’s surprise). But all those that make the list here were real page-turners worthy of your holiday reading time. A note of thanks to publishers who were able to send me advanced copies.
10. Crypto Confidential
A jaw-dropping testimony of life inside a crypto business, where hype, deception and corruption are part of a normal day’s work.
Author: Jake Donoghue
Publisher: Flint
Release date: 22 August
Available: 256 page hardback £15
This is far from the best-written book in the world. It is clunky, sloppy and verbose. But the book’s writing quality belies its significance as one of the most interesting ever written on cryptocurrencies. This is a first-person, insider account of someone who quit his job to stake his future on the wild-west world of crypto. It is packed with mind-blowing testimony of what it takes to make a fast buck in the industry, from artificially inflating token prices to throwing huge sums of money at influencers to promote dodgy investments. The author, Jake Donoghue, deserves credit for the candour of his storytelling. There is no effort here to shower himself in glory for his own role in all the plotting and the scheming.
9. Devil in the Stack
How much do you really understand about the code behind what you use every day? This book walks you through how it all works.
Author: Andrew Smith
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Release date: 29 August
Available: 242 page paperback £10.58
As a journalist, I am forever trying to make sense of the endlessly-evolving tech industry, with new innovations launched and new frontiers broached every day. Which is what makes this book so glorious — about a man who seeks to learn how coding works, from a starting point of total ignorance, later in life and embarks on a journey to immerse himself in the industry until he begins to understand it, going as far as to learn to write his own software. It’s a journey well worth joining him on.
8. Code Dependent
So much of the AI story is told by CEOs. This book offers the perspective of those at the sharp end of building the technology.
Author: Madhumita Murgia
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Release date: 21 March
Available: 320 page hardback £17.99
The world’s biggest AI companies present their tools as all-powerful technologies for which no task is too great. But peer behind the glossy veneer of press releases and product demos, as Madhumita Murgia invites us to, and you find the tech is a little more pedestrian: armies of poorly-paid workers are perfunctorily tinkering with algorithms day and night to get them to work. Murgia shows the era of AI is not as utopian as it seems, and the AI leaders have left a lot of ethical questions unanswered. The book has an abundance of what folk on Fleet Street call ‘colour’ — long passages of scene-setting before you get to the point. Those with short attention spans may lose patience.
7. On the Edge
So much of success in the tech world boils down to an attraction to opportunity and an aversion to risk. Nate Silver teases out the mindset of the Valley kingmakers in careful, mathematical detail.
Author: Nate Silver
Publisher: Penguin
Release date: 13 August
Available: 576 page hardback £24.99
In an interview in 2012, Elon Musk said on his secrets to success: “I didn’t read actually very many general business books. But I liked biographies and autobiographies. I think those are pretty helpful.” In some ways, Nate Silver’s new book can be seen as a string of tech entrepreneur biographies rolled into one. He reduces things down to what he perceives as the essence of the entrepreneurial mindset that has made many folk in Silicon Valley so successful. If you want to emulate that mindset, look no further than here for clues. A half-decent editor, though, would have chopped this tome down a bit — some chapters can be skipped. And Silver does have a habit of inserting himself into every tale he tells.
6. The Tech Coup
The world’s biggest tech firms are now richer and mightier than many nation states. Marietje Schaake offers some much-needed remedies to keep their worst excesses at bay.
Author: Marietje Schaake
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Release date: 24 September
Available: 336 page hardback £22
There was once an era where we believed that Big Tech had shaped itself to enrich society. Nowadays it feels more like Big Tech is shaping society to enrich itself. Marietje Schaake walks us through all the ways the world’s largest tech businesses are undermining our national institutions while lobbying government to preserve their dominance. This book is the most powerful case yet to curtail their might. But: there is a common expression in tech circles: The US is good at innovating; the EU is good at regulating. Schaake, herself a MEP for a decade, can only be said to have reinforced this stereotype. This book is remorselessly critical of tech companies and sparing on praise. That lack of balance takes some of the potency out of her otherwise strong arguments to reign in Big Tech.
5. Gambling Man
A real page-turner on the life of a man in Japan with insatiable ambition.
Author: Lionel Barber
Publisher: Penguin
Release date: 3 October
Available: 416 page hardback £27.16
No good business book list is complete without a biography. And this is comfortably the best published this year. It chronicles the life of the SoftBank founder — the man behind WeWork, Jack Ma’s Alibaba and the UK’s ARM — from his early days growing up in a poor Japanese pig-farming family, to his ambitions to study in the US, to briefly becoming the richest man on the planet. Masayoshi Son is part-genius, part-bulshitter, part-visionary, part-megalomaniac, part-speculator, and Lionel Barber perfectly captures this unusual admixture in this compelling read, from the adrenaline-infused highs to the brink-of-collapse lows. Parts of the book are repetitive — we are reminded of Son’s Korean heritage more than a dozen times. And there is little comparison with other billionaire investors, leaving one unanswered question: is Son’s character idiosyncratic, or is it simply the sine qua non of all who make a fortune in tech? (Hint: see Nate Silver above).
4. AI Snake Oil
By now, everyone’s heard of what AI is good at. This book shines a much-needed spotlight on the many things it’s not so good at.
Author: Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Release date: 24 September
Available: 360 page hardback £18.29
So many companies decided that 2024 was the year to rebrand as an ‘AI’ company. That’s all well and good for the ones who devoted huge R&D spend to transform their operations. But for some, the sum-total of their ‘AI strategy’ was to be known as a business that had an AI strategy. This book provides a much needed inoculation against all the misinformation, hyperbole and misconceptions which become rife with any nascent technology. Before you decide to contract with a new AI company, I urge you to read it.
3. How AI Ate the World
If you want to understand AI without enduring the waffle, flim flam or downright deception by the industry, this is the best guidebook out there.
Author: Chris Stokel-Walker
Publisher: Canbury Press
Release date: 9 May
Available: 280 page paperback £14.99
More books have been published about AI in 2024 than ever before — and that’s before you get to the ones written by AI. So it can be hard to figure out which are worth your time. I proffer this by Chris Stokel-Walker as one of the best out there. It is short, gloriously succinct and yet manages to cover all four bases of the history, technology, business and politics of AI in page-turning detail. I can’t think of anything it missed. Do yourself a favour: avoid the second-rate AI books and give this comprehensive one a try. It is the ideal primer for those new to the industry. There is only one problem with this book, however. It commits the ultimate journalistic crime of copy-pasting a section straight from ChatGPT — which I disliked as much for the unoriginality of the words themselves as for their use as an explanatory device. As Stephen Fry quipped at a recent speech he gave on the technology: “The very small window of time in which it was amusing and instructive for speakers to use AI as an entertaining trick for talks concerning AI has thankfully passed.”
2. Innovation for the Masses
Governments everywhere say they want to build a high-tech economy. This well-researched book shows how that project can improve society.
Author: Neil Lee
Publisher: University of California Press
Release date: 22 February
Available: 248 page hardback £18.99
“We’re building the next Silicon Valley”. Ever heard a politician say this? I have far too often, and my groans grow longer each time. Why attempt to copy the Valley anyway? For one thing, its specific combination of characteristics may not be replicable, so the effort could prove a waste of time. For another, as a recent trip to San Francisco brought home, there is so much homelessness, poverty and substance abuse in a region packed with trillion dollar tech firms, the stark trade-offs of this economic model make it pretty unattractive. In this book, Lee strips away the slogans and instead looks across Europe to find examples of where a high-tech economy is working well for everyone: creating innovation, wealth and distributing it more evenly across a populace. Politicians everywhere should give it a read.
1. The Everything War
Think you know Amazon? You may have to think again after reading this mind-blowing deep-dive into how it really operates behind closed doors.
Author: Dana Mattioli
Publisher: Penguin
Release date: 25 April
Available: 416 page hardback £22
How do you turn a concept into a trillion-dollar business? In an ideal world, this would involve a high-quality product, a canny business model, a hard-working team and a loyal customer base. Dana Mattioli’s new book on Amazon suggests several less admirable traits may also be part of the mix. I was gobsmacked to read some of the secretive practices that appear to have become commonplace within the tech giant, according to her reporting — ranging from the suspect to the downright reprehensible (no spoilers). There are few people left on the planet that have not been touched by Amazon in some way or other, and for that reason this book is essential reading.
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