Episode · The Ezra Klein Show · 2026-10-16
Books mentioned on Is There an A.I. Bubble? A Debate.
The gargantuan bet on the future of A.I.
Paul Kedrosky recommended Middlemarch by George Eliot, Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution, and Insull by Forrest McDonald. Azeem Azhar recommended Day the Universe Changed by James Burke, Fathers and Sons (Warbler Classics Annotated Edition) by Ivan Turgenev, and Candide by Francois Voltaire.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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Middlemarch
Middlemarch by George Eliot is a classic Victorian novel that explores provincial life, social reform, morality, and human relationships in a fictional English town.
Recommended“Middlemarch is sort of my go-to on thinking about normal people being swept along by kind of the winds of change as a major technology revolution is taking place.”
Where to get it
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Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution
Recommended“Liberty's Dawn by Emma Griffin, which is a collection of the average worker's biographies and notes from during the Industrial Revolution.”
Where to get it
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Insull
Recommended“And the last one that I always put is Samuel Insul, a largely forgotten figure. He was the, probably one of the most important entrepreneurs of the 1920s whose empire in electricity shows what happens that you can build, building an empire on top of a GPT and even doing that successfully can still end up in collapse and calamity.”
Where to get it
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Day the Universe Changed
Recommended“So my three books. The first is The Day the Universe Changed. It's written by a BBC science journalist back in the early 80s.”
Where to get it
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Fathers and Sons (Warbler Classics Annotated Edition)
Recommended“The second book is Fathers and Sons by Turgenev, which is a book written in the 19th century. It's at that moment where the ideas of science and modernity are making their way into Russia”
Where to get it
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Candide
Candide by Francois Voltaire is a classic satirical novella that mercilessly mocks philosophical optimism, blind faith, and naive utopianism through the absurdly unfortunate misadventures of its protagonist.
Recommended“And then the final one which I'm just re-reading again is Condide by Voltaire.”
Where to get it
