Best Artificial Intelligence Books to Read in 2025

What tech can shape our individual and collective futures like Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Artificial intelligence is on a nonstop evolutionary path. From Siri scheduling meetings for us to Alexa taking our shopping lists to robotics and machines automating routine tasks for us, AI is no longer part of science fiction. It’s fully integrated itself with our reality.

As an custom software development agency that stays up to date with the latest happenings in AI, at team at Digital Authority Partners is here with our favorite artificial intelligence books. These will give you an idea of what else AI is capable of, what else we can learn from it, and how it can progress in the future.

Without further ado, here are some of our favorite nonfiction and fiction artificial intelligence books of 2025.

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Nonfiction Artificial Intelligence Books to Read in 2025 

These nonfiction artificial intelligence books explore the impact of AI on our world and how it shapes our future.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

Homo Deus (which translates to “human god”) brings us into the future, where artificial intelligence does more than simply automate tasks. Professor Harari shows us a dark world where humans have been overthrown by intelligent machines.

The book is divided into three parts:

• Homo sapiens conquers the world: The first part recounts the history of humans (or Homo sapiens), their relationship with animals, and the former’s dominance over the latter.
• Homo sapiens gives meaning to the world: The second part shows humankind’s rise to being the dominant being.
• Homo sapiens loses control: The final part showcases humanity’s achieving godlike status thanks to technological advancements but ultimately being consumed by it.

Harari paints a bleak picture of what artificial intelligence and intelligent machines may potentially lead to if humans fail to harness their power correctly. He depicts humans as obsolete, losing control of the very “godlike” technology that we helped create.

He ends with a powerful, thought-provoking question: “What will happen to society, politics, and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?"

• Find Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari with publisher HarperCollins Publishers.

The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

Forbes magazine once described futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil as “the ultimate thinking machine.” It’s hard to miss the irony, since Kurzweil has been writing on AI subjects since 1990, well ahead of his time.

This book talks about a single event, or “singularity,” which explores technology expanding exponentially with no turning back, faster than individual humans’ ability to shape or stop it. 

The Singularity is Near walks us through what happens after this singularity occurs. This merging of humans and machines will lead to a level of intelligence that goes beyond human comprehension. 

Human aging and pollution may be reversed, and any product of any kind may be manufactured and sold, leading to wealth beyond our imagination. Even death, a natural, biological occurrence, could be overcome. Kurzweil goes as far as to give an estimated date for this singularity — 2045.

• Find The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil with publisher Penguin Random House.

Responsible Artificial Intelligence: How to Develop and Use AI in a Responsible Way by Virginia Dignum

In this read by Virginia Dignum, we learn more about the ethical implications of AI as it continues to integrate itself into our everyday lives. The author discusses the issue of AI replacing traditional social structures and affecting human researchers, technologists, and manufacturers.

We all know that artificial intelligence has its pros and cons, and this book adds to the ongoing discussion by talking about the right way to design responsible and ethical AI systems. Professor Dignum goes in-depth about the specific responsibilities that AI developers and researchers have to build these systems.

To ensure that AI behaves in a way that’s fair, honest, and trustworthy, we must build and train it in a way that upholds social, moral, and legal values. A true expert, Virginia Dignum is a Professor of Computer Science at Umeå University in Sweden and an associate professor at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

• Find Responsible Artificial Intelligence: How to Develop and Use AI in a Responsible Way by Virginia Dignum with publisher Springer.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

Swedish-born Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom has a healthy respect for the danger of “superintelligent” machines whose cognitive prowess surpasses that of their human creators. 

What happens when machines develop greater intelligence than humans? Nick Bostrom uses the term “superintelligence” and explores how it can be created, how to control it, and how it could possibly take over the world.

Rather than re-writing the plot of Terminator, Bostrom builds his philosophy around the metaphor of a family of sparrows terrorized by predatory owls. Wouldn’t it be great, they think, if they can plunder an egg from an owl’s nest, hatch it, and raise an owl chick to be their defender against other owls?

How will they tame the owl? Will it turn on them? Go back to its own kind? Those questions, the sparrows decide, are tomorrow’s problems. For today, it’s hard enough to steal the egg, so they focus on that. In other words, they focus on what they can do with insufficient thought to whether they should do it. 

A less apocalyptic version of Jurassic Park, this is one of two books Bill Gates recommends everyone read to prepare themselves for the AI revolution.

• Find Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom with publisher Oxford University Press.

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark

Leave it to Swedish-American cosmologist Max Tegmark to extrapolate the implications of AI back in time billions of years to the very origin of cognition, as well as forward to the stars. In the process, he breaks down life (as the title implicates) into three phases. Life 1.0 is the biological origins; Life 2.0 the cultural overlays; Life 3.0 technological enhancements.

In the process, Tegmark ponders the implications of AI for warfare, criminal justice, safety, physics, human meaning, and the workforce as he explores the possible futures AI might lead us to — anywhere from “friendly AI” to an “AI apocalypse.”

This book explores AI’s impact on our future and whether we can use it to create a future that’s fit for humans. The author explores the two sides of the AI coin, one that helps us flourish versus the other that gives us more power than we can handle.

• Find Life 3.0 Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark with publisher Penguin Random House. 

AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI's Future and Save Our Own by Verity Harding

Artificial intelligence wouldn’t exist without human developers and researchers. As AI continues to evolve, we should continuously ask ourselves: Who is AI really for? Verity Harding, Director of the AI and Geopolitics Project (AIxGEO) at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, has an answer. 

Verity Harding was named one of Time100's most influential people in AI 2023, proving her as a true expert. Her book aims to empower us to view AI not as a weapon or something that could control us but rather as something that’s rooted in trust and is guided by peaceful values.

Other artificial intelligence books talk about the negative or scarier implications of AI. Meanwhile, AI Needs You is a nice change of pace that gives readers hope that people can train and design AI to reflect humanistic values and serve the common people.

Harding cites lessons from three major 20th-century technological breakthroughs — the space race, in vitro fertilization (IVF), and the internet. She uses these examples to remind us that, as the creators of AI, it’s up to us humans to guide this technology toward a brighter future.

• Find AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI's Future and Save Our Own by Verity Harding with publisher Princeton University Press.

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

“If data is the new oil, China is the new Saudi Arabia,” Kai-Fu Lee, one of China’s top AI thought leaders, boldly posits. Born in Taiwan, coming of age in the U.S., and now residing in China, Lee has a global perspective on the AI landscape. He is bullish on China’s position to lead the market in AI, but for reasons that may not have Silicon Valley rushing to repatriate.

Take, for example, the fact that China maintains the Mount Everest of data collections due to the fact that fewer laws restrict how much data Chinese companies are allowed to collect on their 1.5 billion countrymen and countrywomen. Add the fact that Chinese tech and startup culture favors quantity over quality and doesn’t let a silly thing like “intellectual property rights” stop them from co-opting a good idea.

Most thought-provoking of all, the Chinese government is all-in on AI innovation. If the U.S. must face a future with China as a geopolitical foe, Lee puts Silicon Valley on notice.

• Find AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee with publisher HarperCollins Publishers.

Analytics of Life: Making Sense of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Analytics by Mert Damlapinar

If you want less philosophy and more nuts and bolts in your study of AI, Mert Damlapinar has you covered with a manager-and-entrepreneur friendly breakdown of the field as it applies to big business, small business, and our daily lives. Analytics of Life provides a more practical approach to using data analytics in our daily lives.

Damlapinar takes the dire predictions of the impact of AI on the blue-collar workforce and extends them to the white-collar workforce, while at the same time offering sunny predictions for the future of the data analytics industry. 

This book is for anyone looking for a career that leverages big data and machine learning. Analytics of Life is required reading for people who want to position their career trajectories to be a beneficiary of AI rather than a casualty.

• Find Analytics of Life: Making Sense of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Analytics by Mert Damlapinar.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

Despite AI’s gigantic contribution to society and our everyday lives, there’s no doubt that it can also be misused or abused. In her book, Meredith Broussard talks about our overreliance on AI and computer technology and how it can result in poorly designed systems.

Instead of using technology to drive cars or find us a romantic partner, Broussard reminds us of the limits of using technology and what it can (and should) be used for instead. She issues a warning that we should never assume that a computer will always get things right.

This book also touches on a unique term called “technochauvinism,” the belief that technology is always the answer. While some believe that technology will solve most of the world’s social problems, Broussard argues otherwise.

She undergoes real-life experiments that prove technology has its limitations and even creates new problems, from unsafe self-driving cars to investigating why students can't pass standardized tests.

• Find Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard with publisher MIT Press.

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos

This book, by University of Washington Professor Pedro Domingos, was Bill Gates’ other recommendation of required reading for the coming AI tsunami. 

The Master Algorithm breaks down AI thinking into five “tribes.”

• Analogical modeling analyzes datasets with compensation for imperfections.
• Bayes’ theorem attempts to describe the probability of an outcome based on prior knowledge of the starting conditions.
• Connectionism attempts to reproduce the activity of a human brain by processing information through simultaneous transmissions to interconnected cells.
• Evolutionary computation models global perfection of algorithms on evolutionary biology. Inductive reasoning allows machines to draw conclusions based on evidence, the way human minds do. 

Domingos regards these “tribes” as pieces in a “master algorithm” to ultimately achieve a state of perfect understanding of the universe.

• Find The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos with publisher Basic Books.

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil

Kurzweil’s follow-up to The Singularity is Near digs deep into neuroscience and what it can teach us about how to create an artificial brain, modeled on an actual brain. In doing so, he shines light on how some of the most important practical science, from evolution to relativity, had its origins in thought experiments — that is, brains just doing what they do. 

How do they do what they do? Kurzweil posits a hierarchy of “pattern-recognizers” within the brain and models the organ as a “recursive probabilistic fractal” based on anywhere from 30 million to 100 million bytes of information. In doing so, he outlines the “system requirements” of a machine that would have the computing power of a human brain. 

It’s not all theory with Kurzweil, either. He highlights Henry Markham’s Blue Brain Project, an effort to create a full artificial brain by 2023, though he isn’t optimistic about their chances.

• Find How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil with publisher Penguin Random House.

Our Final Invention by James Barrat

Artificial intelligence is getting closer and closer to achieving human-level intelligence, and James Barrat’s book, Our Final Invention, serves as a warning. This book focuses on the threats that artificial superintelligence (ASI) poses to human existence, stating how machines will soon be difficult to predict and control like they were before.

At least one author on this list had to go full-Terminator, and documentarian James Barrat doesn’t disappoint. His book marvels at the lemming-like charge to make our own greatest rival — a machine with intelligence to rival our own. 

He builds convincing arguments that such an intelligence would share with us our instinct for self-preservation and would not take kindly to the idea of being switched off. Rivaling us in cunning, with the potential for global access, Barrat’s AI boogeyman really could unleash some sort of “judgment day” on us. With the potential for recursive self-improvement, Barrat imagines an AI that would leave us in the dust.

• Find Our Final Invention by James Barrat with publisher Macmillan Publishers.

Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI by Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson

Daugherty and Wilson skip the dire predictions of apocalyptic dystopia and take a pragmatic dive into what AI means for the modern workplace. To them, AI is more likely to disrupt business practices than the very nature of humanity, and, at least in the near-term, it’s hard to disagree with them. 

The authors draw on their experience with 1,500 different companies to describe six evolving mergers of human and machine intelligence that enable companies to pivot quickly and leap forward in profitability. 

One of the most “manager-friendly” books on this list, Daugherty and Wilson include a “Leader’s Guide” for managers to align their company for success with the help of AI. It's hard to discount the impact of AI and machine learning in the workplace — and it's best to be prepared. 

This book is for managers, business owners, CEOs, and anyone interested in the the importance of proper training, support, and aligning your goals in order to prepare for the inevitable disruptions that AI will bring.

• Find Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI by Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson with publisher Harvard Business Review Press.

Fiction Books About AI to Read in 2025

Speak by Louisa Hall

Speak locates the story of the creation of artificial intelligence across the centuries, starting with the plight of a lonely Puritan woman on a journey to the new world with a husband who doesn’t love her. Other characters across the epochs include a Jewish refugee, computing innovator Alan Turing, a rogue computer programmer, and — most poignantly — a lonely and disabled girl whose only friend is AI software — possibly the only “person” she can trust.

Hall places AI in a continuum of how we reach for each other but fall short, how we want to be heard but fail to listen, how we strive to connect but end up more alone than ever, with only our screens for companionship. While it seems to echo the age of social-media disconnect and artificial interactions, this novel looks both forward and backward, steeped in the past but ahead of its time. In Hall's estimation, we have never listened to each other, even before social media.

• Find Speak by Louisa Hall with publisher HarperCollins Publishers.

R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Capek

Czech writer Karel Capek was far ahead of his time when he penned R.U.R. in the early 1920s and introduced the word “robot” to English. Capek’s play envisions a world in which the human race creates artificial people to do their grunt work, only to discover that because their lives lack meaning without toil, the humans in question stop breeding. 

As robots tend to do, the androids of Capek’s dystopia revolt and kill their human creators, leaving only one human alive to attempt to teach them the meaning of love so they can learn to reproduce on their own. 

The play is a short read, but echoes many of the fears of latter-day AI critics, in words written a century ago.

• Find R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Capek with publisher Penguin Random House. 

Robots vs. Fairies Edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe

If you like Love, Death + Robots, you might find this anthology of short stories, by some of the most respected writers in the fantasy and sci fi genre, to be right up your alley. The stories roughly divide into “fairy” stories and “robot” stories, with some crossover, befitting the fact that robot AI technology seems magical in its own right. And befitting its place on the cusp of technology, the robot stories provide poignant meditations on what it means to be a “person,” what it means to “feel.”

Madeline Ashby’s “Work Shadow/Shadow Work,” for example, tells the story of an Icelandic pagan priestess and her put-upon robotic assistant, whom the priestess scorns for not having a “soul.” Of course, some witchy magic changes that game.

Jonathan Mayberry’s “Ironheart,” in contrast, is a more elegiac story about an aging veteran who returns home to his grandfather’s farm, staffed by robotic “workhorse” androids that have seen better days, and comes to empathize with them as he reflects on his own deteriorating body.

• Find Robots vs. Fairies Edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe with publisher Simon & Schuster.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor

We Are Legion follows Bob Johansson, a software engineer who sold his company but died in an accident before he could enjoy the fruits of his labor. 

He wakes up to find his mind repurposed to be the slave AI commander of a probe shot into space to detect habitable worlds. However, while on his voyages, he encounters a hostile alien intelligence that doesn’t take trespassers lightly.

This novel puts a unique twist on the AI equation wherein, instead of training machines to think like humans, what if you just put a human brain into a machine? The author explores questions about what makes us human and whether we still have autonomy when our consciousness is no longer tied to our biological body.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) is the first volume of the “Bobiverse” which includes the follow-up novels For We Are Many and All These Worlds.

• Find We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor.

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

Book #2 of Becky Chambers’ Hugo Award-winning series picks up where its predecessor, A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, left off. It kicks off with Lovelace, the ship AI of the starship Wayfarer, being downloaded into a body and having to learn to navigate the universe in corporeal form. Lovelace befriends Pepper, a chipper engineer with a dark past. 

In a field of bleak dystopias, A Closed and Common Orbit offers a cheery, optimistic take on the AI genre in the continuation of this incredible space opera. 

• Find A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers from HarperCollins Publishers.

Date Night on Union Station by E.M. Foner

E.M. Foner kicks off the EarthCent Ambassador series with a hilarious depiction of ennui, job dissatisfaction, bureaucracy on a galactic scale, and, most importantly, a dating app. To what better use can AI possibly be put than matching bored diplomats to potential mates?

The story follows Kelly Frank, the lead diplomat from EarthCent to the space-based Union Station — but despite the high-flown title, it’s a post with little job satisfaction. Unfortunately, this AI Yenta sends Kelly on a series of dates with diminishing romantic returns. In space, nobody can hear you groan. Maybe they have Space Tinder.

• Find Date Night on Union Station by E.M. Foner.

The Golden Age by John C. Wright

The “Golden Age” of the title takes place 10,000 years into the future, when humans have achieved immortality and populated the solar system in the wake of a great technological event called the “Grand Transcendence.”

A highborn man is sent on a quest across the solar system to learn the truth about his identity and the dark secrets of his past. On this journey, he encounters humans, intelligent machines, and other life forms along the way.

The Golden Age is a far-reaching vision of the endgame of machine intelligence — a utopia, but one that is only skin-deep. There’s more to it than meets the eye.

• Find The Golden Age by John C. Wright.

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson

The first book in Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse series borrows from George R.R. Martin in its structure, with the story of an epic struggle told from the first-person point of view of multiple players in the drama. 

The drama is the aftermath of “Zero Hour,” an armageddon-level event precipitated by the AI entity Archos, a destroyer of man’s own design. Archos itself is a fascinating villain, not just for being formidable but also for being spookily childlike, even likable.

Robopocalypse is a rich, boldly drawn panorama of the “machines rise up” trope taken to its final conclusion. The sequel, Robogenesis, is equally engrossing.

• Find Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson from Penguin Random House

Queen of Angels by Greg Bear

Greg Bear’s immersive novel envisions a near future where psychotherapy and neuroscience have eliminated nearly all criminality, but have also imposed a kind of caste system on humanity. Into this milieu, acclaimed writer Emmanuel Goldsmith (ho there, 1984) is implicated in a series of eight grisly murders, a crime nearly unheard of.

The world-building alone is impressive in this novel. There’s Mary Choy, a detective assigned to the case, part of a high caste of mental aesthetes who don’t need therapy -- plus she’s augmented by nanotechnology for both aesthetics and function. There’s a psychotherapist who can enter his patients’ minds. There’s a government bureau that meticulously and invasively mines data on every citizen. 

Finally, there’s an AI space probe that discovers life at Alpha Centauri and achieves self-awareness and passes that self-awareness to its twin on earth, a kind of “entangled-particle” spooky action at a distance that makes hard sci-fi oh-so-sweet. 

• Find Queen of Angels by Greg Bear.

Daemon by Daniel Suarez

Daemon is the first of a two-part novel (the second volume is Freedom) that chronicles the rise to power of “the Daemon,” an AI set in motion by the death of its creator, a brilliant computer programmer. The Daemon starts by killing two of the collaborators in its creation, then goes on to take over the world.

The Daemon, however, does this subtly — one might even say, “possessing” the world through subterfuge. It invents ground-breaking products like self-driving cars, drone weapons, and a “darknet.” It invents a kind of “government by algorithm.”

The bulk of the story, however, plays out in its subversion of key players in society, coaxing or forcing them to do its bidding. Its eventual willing victims include a detective, a hacker, a government cryptographer, a gamer, a news reporter, and a drug dealer, among others.

Compared to the apocalyptic nuclear wars of other “evil AI” plots, Daemon offers a unique take that more closely resembles AI in our own culture — conquest by guile rather than by bombs.

• Find Daemon by Daniel Suarez from Penguin Random House.

2025’s AI Reading List: Wrap-Up

AI is a fascinating subject to read about, especially since some of the things discussed in these novels are already happening in our real world. These artificial intelligence books serve not just to entertain but as cautionary tales, encouraging readers to think critically about the utilization of AI and how we can coexist with it instead of letting it control us.

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