The Exec X AI 2025 Summer Reading List

Four Books That Decode the Future

If like most of us, you've found yourself drowning in headlines about AI revolutions, ethics, and existential risk, these books will help you to recalibrate.

They pushed me to think more critically, more deeply—and, I hope, more constructively—about the future we're shaping. No hype. Just sharp, necessary thinking.

If they do the same for you, it'll have been time well spent.

Got a book you want to recommend? You've probably read books about tech and AI that blew your socks off. Post them below in the comment box. I'm all for book recommendations and many of our readers are too.

1. The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian

📕 Buy on Amazon

Brian Christian's book is an outstanding critique about what is wrong with machine learning algorithms, and how researchers and data scientists have been working overtime to correct "the alignment problem" — essentially the concept that gives humans agency over the work that we delegate to AI and robots.

Its the single most important book I've read on how to judge whether an AI system could be inherently flawed, or a beautiful and improved upgrade of its predecessor.

To cap things off within his epilogue, Christian quoted Bertrand Russell (and the quote was brilliantly positioned) to encapsulate the core message:

2. Technology Is Not Neutral by Dr. Stephanie Hare

📕 Recommended listening to Dr. Hare narrate it on Audible (alternatively buy it on Amazon)

"We kill people based on metadata… we are embedding our values in the technology"

This is the book that should be first on the reading list for every course in law, business management, computer sciences, and all post-graduate courses.

Technology is not Neutral is one of the most underrated pieces of deep research ever published about the intersection of AI and ethics. Its vital for anyone with an opinion about AI to read it.

For that reason, I keep recommending it at every opportunity to law students, professionals, and anyone who wants to skill up on how AI will affect their lives, professionally and personally.

I'll end this review with a prediction: you'll develop a headache after finishing this book from both, the knowledge you acquired, plus the realisation of what you didn't know about AI and ethics.

3. Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

📕 Buy on Amazon

Wynn-Williams was Facebook's director for public policy before the company morphed into Meta. She wrote a tell-all memoire that Meta tried to ban.

Wynn-Williams focussed on the disorganised, centralised command and control structure she experienced at the top of Facebook. She fought hard and intervened to save lives at times when overpaid executives, who'd gotten rich on stock options said they no longer cared about the outside world.

It's a sobering tale about how power corrupts. It demonstrated why tech leadership teams must be diversified and emotionally mature.

The book is an abject warning for all tech leaders to be cognisant about how their actions and decisions affect millions of people.

Wynn-Williams also shared deeply personal and sensitive experiences as a woman climbing the ladder of a male-dominated industry.

Wynn-Williams experienced unacceptable sexism, and learned first hand from other women at the company how diversity, inclusion, and allyship were thrown around to cover up institutionalised sexism and gender-biased performance reviews.

As a man, it was earth-shattering to reflect on. But it will be a very familiar tale for the millions of women who still to this day, suffer the brunt of outdated generational attitudes regarding women in the workplace.

Meta's spokesperson, Andy Stone, publicly stated that the book should not have been published, criticising its contents as "false and defamatory," reports The Guardian.

I won't steal Wynn-Williams' thunder. You need to read her accounts of the misogyny and salacious attitudes that she alleges that she was unfortunate enough to witness and experience. This book is a once-in-a-generational tell-all that pays homage to the #MeToo movement.

4. Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari

📕 Buy on Amazon

Prior to buying it I read other readers' reviews. Many said Harari rehashed a lot of the knowledge and insight from his earlier works such as Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. I wasn't at all deterred.

Harari is one of the most prominent philosophers of his generation. Nexus took me to the absolute extremes of dystopia.

A plausible future where AI is used control entire populations — in effect giving the illusion of freedom granted by the generous benefactors within a centralised, powerful totalitarian state.

It is a frightening reminder about what the world could be like if the Orwellian nightmare described in the novel 1984 were to come true - a reality that could materialise within our lifetime.

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