Great reading list! They’re honestly two stories that I reflect on constantly while thinking about AI lately.

Player Piano, not to spoil anything, is about a world run by engineers and machines. The machines are “optimal” and make every decision. How do people find purpose, and how should the engineers that build the machines view their role in society?

Manna is the story of two societies with competing visions of how AI (which ironically starts out strikingly similar to an LLM) interacts with welfare/universal basic income and post-scarcity society. For good measure, it also hypothesizes the end state of the internet panopticon and personalized “scores” and rates.