Artificiality Book Awards 2025

We're pleased to announce the Artificiality Book Awards 2025.

This year, the best books we've read about AI have been about the same thing approached from different angles: the convergence of different kinds of intelligence, the growing scholarship examining these interactions, and what it means to be human now that intelligence exists in very real forms beyond us.

Three books defined 2025 for us on this front: Blaise Agüera y Arcas's What Is Intelligence?, N. Katherine Hayles's From Bacteria to AI, and Christopher Summerfield's These Strange New Minds. Each offers a distinct account of the nature of intelligence, but taken together they form a powerful triangulation of what we believe is a genuine shift in how we understand intelligence—and therefore ourselves.

Blaise's book has been called the most important work on intelligence since Gödel. Hayles writes directly about the paradigmatic shifts in meaning that follow from seeing cognition as something operating across many scales, creatures, and systems. And Chris offers the clearest account we've seen of why the fact that AI has learned so much from statistical structure alone is one of the most important discoveries of the twenty-first century.

This year's full list also includes Steven Pinker on common knowledge, Kees Dorst on designing for complex change, Carl Benedikt Frey on why progress isn't inevitable, Nina Beguš on how fiction shapes AI development, and Steven Sloman on how conviction—not understanding—often drives human judgment.

We've also compiled a working library of the books that shaped how we think, long before we called it "the artificiality"—from Sapolsky's Behave to Brian Arthur's The Nature of Technology.

Read more here.