Books that stayed with me
Andrej Karpathy · December 2024 · The science fiction subset of a personal list
Reading this list added 2 works to the catalogue.
- 1957 Atlas Shrugged · Play as vocation
- 2010 The Lifecycle of Software Objects · Care work persists
How it was compiled. Of roughly two hundred books read, the few he still thinks back to or refers to, given in no particular order with a short note on each. Most of the list is non-fiction — evolution, geopolitics, food, cybersecurity, the history of information technology — and is omitted here. Six entries are science fiction.
What it brings. A short list of what stayed with one reader over years rather than what is best. Every entry that answers the question was already catalogued when it was read, which is a useful thing for a source to confirm.
| Work | Year | AGI | Answers | What people do all day |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The short stories of Ted Chiang Ted Chiang | 2019 | Yes | Yes | Named in the original: Exhalation, Division by Zero, Understand, Story of Your Life, Liking What You See, What's Expected of Us, and The Lifecycle of Software Objects — in which people raise AI creatures through years of unglamorous attention, long after the platform they live on goes out of fashion. |
| Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand | 1957 | No | Yes | The productive withdraw their labour and disappear to a hidden valley, where each does work they chose. The society they left cannot run its own railways. |
| A Fire Upon the Deep Vernor Vinge | 1992 | Yes | Partial | Trade, mostly. Civilisations operate at whatever level of intelligence their region of the galaxy permits, and the working life of a Beyond trader is shaped by a technological ceiling nobody can argue with. |
| Flowers for Algernon Daniel Keyes | 1966 | No | No | Charlie's arc is a hard takeoff and decay inside one skull. |
| 1984 George Orwell | 1949 | No | No | Falsify records at the Ministry of Truth; attend the Two Minutes Hate; queue for razor blades. |
| The Martian Andy Weir | 2011 | No | No | Grow potatoes, patch a habitat, do arithmetic by hand. |
Linked titles are in the catalogue. Partial means the work gestures at the question without sustaining it.
Source
This list was not compiled with this question in mind, which is the point of using it. The verdicts and the daily-life summaries are mine and arguable: the Answers column has no bright line, andPartial is where the disagreement lives.