Published: 2023-09-13

Table of contents

I created this list to help me learn about the fundamental ideas behind computing and AI. I want to make myself aware of the insights that made the technology of today possible, and I think the best way to do that is to read the sources that first introduced the ideas that shaped the present. Join me in learning.

Why you should read seminal works

If you want to have good ideas about computers, read things from this list.

  1. You’ll improve your pattern recognition by exposing yourself to examples of how people got ideas, how they developed them, and how those ideas stood the contact with reality. Unless you’ve intimately followed several ideas for many decades, you probably don’t have many examples from life, so expanding the sample will help a lot.
  2. You’ll likely pick up insights that most people miss. When an idea becomes successful, it becomes a part of how most people perceive the world, and the insights that led to its creation wash out. A funny analogy here is to think of how etymology reveals insights about the words we are used to. How often do you think about philosophy as love of wisdom, or passion as suffering? We are so used to these words we don’t think about what insights went into creating them. Similarly, many insights that went into the best ideas on computing are not obvious today.

Better pattern recognition and awareness of the insights behind the big ideas will likely make you better at developing insights of your own.

How I chose what to put on this list

In the process of putting together this list, I had to choose from a large number of works, all of which were seminal in some way. So I came up with a framework for selecting the works I want to read first. Here are my selection criteria: