Reading List

Books

Here are books I'm reading these days. 

• Nita A. Farahany
  The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

• Jade McGlynn
  Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin's Russia

• Gary Snyder
  The Practice of the Wild

• Flynn Coleman
  A Human Algorithm – How artificial intelligence is redefining who we are

• Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson
  The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty

• Andrew Chen
  The Cold Start Problem – How to start and scale network effects.

• Tony Fadell
  Build – An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

• Chris Bernhardt
  Quantum Computing for Everyone

• Jennifer Aaker, Naomi Bagdonas
  Humor, seriously

• John E. Doerr
  Measure What Matters – OKRs – The simple idea that drives 10x growth

• Camille Fournier
  The Manager’s Path – A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

• Heydon Pickering
  Inclusive Design Patterns – Coding Accessibility Into Web Design

• Gary Kamiya
  Cool Gray City of Love – 49 views of San Francisco.

• Thi Bui
  The Best We Could Do

• Margaret Cho, W. Kamau Bell and others
  The End of the Golden Gate – Writers on Loving and (Sometimes) Leaving San Francisco

• Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang
  An Ugly Truth – Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination

• Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, Jeremy M. Weinstein
  System Error – Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot.
  This book was recommended to me by Paul at the Stanford University bookstore. Thank you, Paul, it was worth reading!

• Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt
  How Democracies Die – What History Reveals About Our Future

• Thomas Rid
  Active Measures – The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare.

Papers

Here are papers I'm reading these days. 

• Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, Romeo Dean (Apr 2025): "AI 2027"

• Tara Matthews, Elie Bursztein, Lea Kissner, Stephan Somogyi, Kurt Thomas et al.  (Feb 2025): "Supporting the Digital Safety of At-Risk Users: Lessons Learned from 9+ Years of Research & Training", Association for Computing Machinery

• Laura Weidinger, John Mellor, Bernat Guillen Pegueroles et al. (June 2024): "STAR: SocioTechnical Approach to Red Teaming Language Models"

• Adly Templeton, Tom Conerly, Jonathan Marcus et al. (May 2024): "Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet"

• Kiho Park, Yo Joong Choe, Victor Veitch (Nov 2023): "The Linear Representation Hypothesis and the Geometry of Large Language Models"

• Trenton Bricken, Adly Templeton, Joshua Batson et al. (October 2023): "Decomposing Language Models Into Understandable Components" 

• Josh A. Goldstein and Girish Sastry and Micah Musser and Renee DiResta and Matthew Gentzel and Katerina Sedova (January 2023): “Generative Language Models and Automated Influence Operations: Emerging Threats and Potential Mitigations”

• Department for State for Science, Innovation and Technology UK (March 2023): "A pro-innovation approach to AI regulation"

• Yuntao Bai and Saurav Kadavath et al. (December 2022): “Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback”

• Ethan Perez and Sam Ringer and Kamilė Lukošiūtė et al. (December 2022): "Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluations"

• Deep Ganguli and Danny Hernandez et al. (June 2022): “Predictability and Surprise in Large Generative Models”, in Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, ACM 

• Annie Y. Chen and Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler and Ronald E. Robertson and Christo Wilson (April 2022): “Subscriptions and external links help drive resentful users to alternative and extremist YouTube videos”

• Deepak Kumar and Patrick Gage Kelley and Sunny Consolvo and Joshua Mason and Elie Bursztein and Zakir Durumeric and Kurt Thomas and Michael Bailey (June 2021): “Designing Toxic Content Classification for a Diversity of Perspectives”, in: USENIX Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) 2021. August 8–10, 2021

• Kurt Thomas and Devdatta Akhawe and Michael Bailey et al. (May 2021): “SoK: Hate, Harassment, and the Changing Landscape of Online Abuse”, in: Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 

• Ahmet Aktay and Shailesh Bavadekar and Gwen Cossoul et al. (November 2020): “Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports: Anonymization Process Description (version 1.1)”

• Herbert Lin (June 2019): “The existential threat from cyber-enabled information warfare”, in: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 75:4, 187-196 

• Sambasivan, Nithya and Batool, Amna et al. (May 2019): “‘They Don't Leave Us Alone Anywhere We Go’: Gender and Digital Abuse in South Asia”, in: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019), May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland UK 

• Md Amran Siddiqui, Alan Fern, Thomas G. Dietterich, and Weng-Keen Wong (January 2019):“Sequential Feature Explanations for Anomaly Detection”, in ACM Trans. Knowl. Discov. Data 13, 1, Article 1, 22 pages 

• Hai Jin, Li-Jun Hou, Zheng-Guo Wang (2018): "Military Brain Science – How to influence future wars", in: Chinese Journal of Traumatology, Volume 21, Issue 5, 2018, Pages 277-280

• Dario Amodei and Chris Olah and Jacob Steinhardt and Paul Christiano and John Schulman and Dan Mané (July 2016): “Concrete Problems in AI Safety”