P(boon)

These works and ideas, along with much I have surely forgotten,
have helped shape the ideas presented in P(boon).

Essays

  • Allegory of the Cave by Plato (c. 380 BCE)
  • First Word by Vernor Vinge in OMNI Magazine (January 1983)
  • Technological Singularity by Vernor Vinge in Whole Earth Review (1993)
  • Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan (1994)

Short Stories

  • The Sorcerer's Apprentice by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1797)
  • The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster (1909)
  • The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges (1941)
  • The Last Question by Isaac Asimov (1956)
  • Where Am I? by Daniel Dennett (1981)
  • The Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler (1989)
  • The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant by Nick Bostrom (2005)
  • The Egg by Andy Weir (2009)

Academic Papers

  • Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by Norbert Wiener (1948)
  • Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing (1950)
  • The perceptron: A probabilistic model for information storage and organization in the brain by Frank Rosenblatt (1958)
  • On Distributed Communications: I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks by Paul Baran (1964)
  • A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style (arXiv:1508.06576) (2015)
  • Attention Is All You Need (arXiv:1706.03762) (2017)
  • Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners (arXiv:2005.14165) (2020)
  • Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models (2020) (arXiv:2001.08361)
  • Visual representations in the human brain are aligned with large language models (arXiv:2209.11737) (2022)
  • Universal Manipulation Interface: In-The-Wild Robot Teaching Without In-The-Wild Robots (arXiv:2402.10329) (2024)
  • Could AI Leapfrog the Web? Evidence from Teachers in Sierra Leone (arXiv:2502.12397) (2025)
  • From Tokens to Thoughts: How LLMs and Humans Trade Compression for Meaning (arXiv:2505.17117) (2025)
  • Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test (arXiv:2503.23674) (2025)
  • Palatable Conceptions of Disembodied Being (arXiv:2503.16348) (2025)

Fiction Books

  • Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott (1884)
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke (1968)
  • Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)
  • Contact by Carl Sagan (1985)
  • Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992)
  • Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (1999)
  • The Martian by Andy Weir (2011)
  • Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (2021)

Non-Fiction Books

  • Rossum's Universal Robots by Karel Čapek (1920)
  • The Medium Is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore (1967)
  • Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by Buckminster Fuller (1969)
  • Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step by Edward de Bono (1970)
  • Gaia by James Lovelock (1979)
  • Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (1979)
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)
  • Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman (1985)
  • The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution by Frank White (1987)
  • Information Anxiety by Richard Saul Wurman (1989)
  • Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman (1992)
  • The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan (1996)
  • Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz (2000)
  • Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart (2002)
  • A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (2003)
  • The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil (2005)
  • Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite by Paul Arden (2006)
  • I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter (2007)
  • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (2014)
  • Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom (2014)
  • Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design by Barry M. Katz (2015)
  • Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari (2016)
  • Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World by Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund (2018)
  • The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long-Term in a Short-Term World by Roman Krznaric (2020)
  • Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World by Nick Bostrom (2024)
  • Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari (2024)
  • If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares (2025)

Photographs

  • Earthrise by Lunar Orbiter 1 (1966)
  • Pale Blue Dot by Voyager 1 (1990)
  • Ultra-Deep Field by Hubble Space Telescope (2004)

Short Films

  • The Information Machine by Charles and Ray Eames (1957)
  • Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames (1977)
  • Celery Man by Adult Swim (2010)
  • Overview by Guy Reid (2013)
  • What Happened to Horses Is Happening to Us by CGP Grey (2014)
  • The Art of Warez by Oliver Payne (2019)
  • Welcome to the Internet by Bo Burnham (2021)

Movies

  • Metropolis by Fritz Lang (1927)
  • Woman in the Moon by Fritz Lang (1929)
  • Ikiru by Akira Kurosawa (1952)
  • 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Richard Fleischer (1954)
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick (1968)
  • The Violent Universe by Kirk Browning (1969)
  • Zardoz by John Boorman (1974)
  • Koyaanisqatsi by Godfrey Reggio (1982)
  • WarGames by John Badham (1983)
  • Cyberpunk by Marianne Schaefer Trench (1990)
  • Until the End of the World by Wim Wenders (1991)
  • Apollo 13 by Ron Howard (1995)
  • Hackers by Iain Softley (1995)
  • Contact by Robert Zemeckis (1997)
  • Gattaca by Andrew Niccol (1997)
  • Bicentennial Man by Chris Columbus (1999)
  • Pirates of Silicon Valley by Martyn Burke (1999)
  • The Matrix by Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski (1999)
  • The Story of Computer Graphics by Frank Foster (1999)
  • The Thirteenth Floor by Josef Rusnak (1999)
  • No Maps for These Territories by Mark Neale (2000) (An interview with William Gibson)
  • Idiocracy by Mike Judge (2006)
  • Big Hero 6 by Don Hall and Chris Williams (2014)
  • Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World by Werner Herzog (2016)
  • AlphaGo by Greg Kohs (2017)
  • Graphic Means: A History of Graphic Design Production by Briar Levit (2017)
  • General Magic by Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude (2018)
  • We Are As Gods by David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg (2020) (A film about Stewart Brand)
  • A Stranger Quest by Andrea Gatopoulos (2023) (A film about David Rumsey)
  • Once Within a Time by Godfrey Reggio (2023)
  • The Thinking Game by Greg Kohs (2024) (A film about Demis Hassabis)

Television

Video Games

  • Antichamber by Alexander Bruce (2013)
  • The Talos Principle 1 by Croteam (2014)
  • Horizon Zero Dawn by Guerrilla Games (2017)
  • The Talos Principle 2 by Croteam (2023)

Podcasts / YouTube channels

Ideas

  • Betteridge's law of headlines
  • Drake equation
  • Fermi paradox
  • Godwin's law
  • Jevons paradox
  • Kardashev scale
  • Moravec transfer
  • Moravec's paradox
  • Paperclip maximizer
  • Ship of Theseus
  • The great filter
  • The qualia problem
  • Zeno's paradox

Designers

  • April Greiman
  • Erik Nitsche
  • James Paterson
  • James Victore
  • Joshua Davis
  • Lance Wyman
  • Lou Dorfsman
  • Matt Owens
  • Max Huber
  • Michael Cina
  • Paul Rand
  • Will Burton

Artists

  • Casey Reas
  • Corita Kent
  • George Carlin
  • Harold E. Edgerton
  • Lillian F. Schwartz
  • Lloyd Sumner
  • Manfred Mohr
  • Robert Tinney
  • Sol LeWitt

Organizations

  • Electronic Frontier Foundation
  • The Internet Archive
  • The Long Now Foundation
  • Wikipedia

Miscellaneous

  • The Mother of All Demos by Douglas Engelbart (1968)
  • The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence by Tim Urban (2015)
  • Import AI by Jack Clark