Reading list

An informal reading list on the convergence of three threads: artificial intelligence, conflict resolution, and the social science — and science fiction — of how people cooperate. Some of these books are foundational, some speculative, a couple just a good time. The quotes are from the books themselves.

Conflict, and how we get unstuck

High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out — book cover

High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

Amanda Ripley · 2021

Ripley separates high conflict — the self-perpetuating us-versus-them kind that becomes its own destination — from the healthy conflict that actually moves somewhere, and reports from people who found their way out.

“In healthy conflict, there is movement. Questions get asked. Curiosity exists. … In high conflict, the conflict is the destination. There's nowhere else to go.”

GoodreadsAmazon

Game theory and the evolution of cooperation

That adversaries can cooperate is a formal result, not a hope. These are the works that established it, and the one that marks its limits.

The Strategy of Conflict — book cover

The Strategy of Conflict

Thomas C. Schelling · 1960

The 1960 classic that recast conflict as mixed-motive: adversaries who oppose and share interests at once. Schelling shared the 2005 Nobel for it.

“The power to constrain an adversary may depend on the power to bind oneself; that, in bargaining, weakness is often strength, freedom may be freedom to capitulate, and to burn bridges behind one may suffice to undo an opponent.”

GoodreadsAmazon

The Evolution of Cooperation — book cover

The Evolution of Cooperation

Robert Axelrod · 1984

Through repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma tournaments, Axelrod showed how cooperation can emerge among self-interested players with no central authority — the empirical case that adversaries can learn to cooperate.

“What accounts for TIT FOR TAT's robust success is its combination of being nice, retaliatory, forgiving, and clear.”

GoodreadsAmazon

Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World — book cover

Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World

Kelly Clancy · 2024

A neuroscientist’s history of how games and game theory shaped the modern world — and a warning about mistaking the model for the territory.

“By simplifying and abstracting reality, games with their ever-seductive appeal can be too easily mistaken for reality itself. Human decision-making is not often rational.”

GoodreadsAmazon

Negotiation and fair division

Information and collective intelligence

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age — book cover

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

Jimmy Soni & Rob Goodman · 2017

The biography of Claude Shannon, who made information itself measurable. The 1948 paper that started it is linked below, and remains the foundation of communication and collective intelligence.

“The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.”

Claude Shannon, 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication' (1948)

GoodreadsAmazonShannon's 1948 paper (PDF)

Shared Wisdom: Cultural Evolution in the Age of AI — book cover

Shared Wisdom: Cultural Evolution in the Age of AI

Alex Pentland · 2025

Pentland argues our oldest strength is pooling experience into collective wisdom, and asks how to design AI to strengthen that capacity rather than replace it.

“The core problem wasn't the AI itself but the inadequate models of society available, models that failed to capture complexity and dynamism and suffered from misinformation, bias, and lack of inclusion.”

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Imagined futures

Science fiction where mathematics, prediction, and machines reshape society — from a galaxy steered by the statistics of mass behavior to lives run by swarms of personal agents.

Foundation — book cover

Foundation

Isaac Asimov · 1951

Here for the Seldon Plan: psychohistory forecasts a civilization’s future from the statistics of mass behavior, then steers it through predicted crises toward a shorter dark age. The original dream of a social science exact enough to manage conflict at scale — and its first crisis is won by wit, not war.

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

Salvor Hardin

GoodreadsAmazon

Accelerando — book cover

Accelerando

Charles Stross · 2005

Manfred Macx runs his life through an exocortex — a swarm of software agents that negotiate, transact, and remember on his behalf. The canonical fiction of distributed personal AI.

“She still believes in classical economics, the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information doesn't work that way.”

GoodreadsAmazon

Rainbows End — book cover

Rainbows End

Vernor Vinge · 2006

A near-future of pervasive wearables and ambient augmented reality, where human cognition is continuously assisted — and trust and coordination become the hard problems.

“In the modern world, success came from having the largest possible educated population and providing those hundreds of millions of creative people with credible freedom.”

GoodreadsAmazon

For younger readers (and the rest of us)

Nothing here is required reading; the books are gathered because the questions they ask keep meeting in the same place. Links go to Goodreads and Amazon as plain references — no affiliate tags — so buy wherever you like, your library or local bookshop included.