Curated Reading on AI
One of the hardest things about being a CEO in the AI era isn’t the technology itself — it’s the firehose of information about the technology. There’s so much being written about AI right now that it’s almost impossible to separate the signal from the noise. Hot takes, doomsday predictions, breathless hype, vendor pitches dressed up as thought leadership — it’s exhausting.
So I thought I’d do something useful and share periodically a curated basket of the most interesting reading I’ve done. Think of it as the reading list I’d hand to a fellow CEO who said, “I know I need to get smarter about AI — where do I start?”
This first batch is a bit of a catch-up, but it’s a strong starting point. Here goes.
The Big Picture: Hope and Fear from the Same Person
Start with these two essays from Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic (the company behind Claude). Read them as a matched pair — they’re essentially the optimist and pessimist cases from someone who understands AI as deeply as anyone on the planet.
- Machines of Loving Grace (October 2024) — Amodei’s case for AI’s transformative upside. How AI could compress a century of medical progress into a decade, address poverty, strengthen democracy. Long but worth every minute. This is the essay that made me think, okay, this really is different from every other tech wave.
- The Adolescence of Technology (January 2026) — The companion piece, and it’s sobering. Amodei confronts the real risks: national security, economic disruption, democratic erosion. The title comes from the movie Contact — how does a civilization survive its own technological adolescence without destroying itself? A question worth sitting with.
The Software Factory: What AI Is Doing to Developers
This cluster of posts is the best thing I’ve read on how AI is actually changing the work of building software — and by extension, all knowledge work.
- The Five Levels: From Spicy Autocomplete to the Dark Factory — My friend Dan Shapiro (CEO of Glowforge, who also inspired our Chatgipity platform) created a memorable analogy framework modeled on the five levels of autonomous driving. Level 0 is “spicy autocomplete.” Level 5 is the “Dark Software Factory” where AI builds software autonomously. It’s the clearest mental model I’ve seen for understanding where we are and where this is headed.
- Michael Bernstein’s counterpoints — My colleague Michael offered some thoughtful shaping of Dan’s framework that’s worth reading alongside it. Not disagreement so much as nuance around the edges.
- Simon Willison’s amplification — Willison, one of the most respected voices in the developer community, picked up Dan’s post and extended the thinking around automation. If you follow only one technical blogger on AI, it should probably be Simon.
- Something Big Is Happening by Matt Shumer — Related to the above but pushes further into societal territory. Shumer starts getting into the employment implications of what happens when AI can do more and more of what knowledge workers do today. Provocative and worth reading even if (especially if) you’re skeptical.
The Longer View: Employment, Society, and the Pace of Change
- This thread is a more rational, long-term view of the employment question. Less alarmist than most of what you’ll find, and grounded in historical precedent. A useful counterweight if the Shumer piece made you nervous.
- 2028 GIC — This one is fiction, and it’s poignant. It imagines the societal impacts we could see from AI in the near term. I’ll be honest — as a piece of speculative writing, it hit me harder than most of the non-fiction. If nothing else, it reinforces my view that things are happening really quickly, probably more quickly than both individual humans and human institutions like governments will be able to keep pace and react to. That’s not a reason to panic. But it is a reason to pay attention.
More to Come
I’ll do these roundups periodically. If you’re reading something great about AI that you think I should see, send it my way.