12 Books To Help You Think Wisely About Ai

AI is already so deeply embedded in our daily lives that it’s naive to suggest we should have a binary position for or against it. AI drives our social media algorithms to capture our attention, it recalculates our driving directions when there’s an accident ahead, and it helps radiologists detect cancerous tumors in our medical images. There’s an uneven mixture of terrific and terrible in the common uses of AI.

To some degree, AI is inevitable. Yet we should think carefully about what specific applications cost us as individuals and as a society. If a student uses AI to solve all his calculus homework problems, he’s likely to struggle to answer the questions on the final exam. If we delegate conversation with the elderly to AI avatars, we shouldn’t be surprised to find we no longer really know the people who raised us and loved us in our youth.

At the heart of the cultural conversation about AI is the question “What does it mean to be human?” AI is forcing us to ask that question in earnest. It’s not a new question, but there’s a particular urgency to it in the digital age.

The Gospel Coalition’s new book, The AI Apocalypse: A Survival Guide for Humanity, brings together experts working in the AI industry as well as theologians to discuss the future of humanity in the AI age. Many of the contributors have provided book recommendations to help readers better understand AI’s technological and theological implications.

Joshua Baru

Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference (Princeton University Press, 2025) (Amazon)

This research-informed guide separates genuine AI capabilities from hype. Narayanan and Kapoor explain why some AI systems are genuinely useful while others—especially those claiming to predict complex human outcomes—often promise more than they can deliver.

Accessible rather than overly academic, the book equips ordinary readers to ask better questions about AI, recognize misleading claims, and approach new technologies with informed, healthy skepticism.

Clayton Chancey

Brian Cantwell Smith, The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment (MIT Press, 2019) (Amazon)

Smith was a philosopher and AI researcher whose unusual range of interests shaped this philosophically serious but accessible work. He distinguishes between “reckoning,” where computers excel, and “judgment,” which requires ethical commitment, contextual awareness, and responsible action.

The Promise of Artificial Intelligence was written in 2019, just after the breakthrough transformer architecture that led to our modern LLMs but before they became mainstream consumer products. Though not written from a Christian perspective, this short book clearly identifies what’s at stake when computational ability is confused with human judgment.

Skyler Flowers

C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (1945; repr., Scribner, 2003) (Amazon)

The third book in Lewis’s Space Trilogy has been mentioned a lot in recent discussions about technology, and for good reason. This story is terrifyingly prophetic in its portrayal of the mindset of the modern world. We witness the rise of an antihuman, antinature, and demonic totalitarianism that threatens to exterminate and replace humanity in the name of progress.

This is vintage Lewis as it points to objective moral truth and forewarns of certain prevailing currents in contemporary culture through an engaging fictional story. Though it’s substantially different in tone from the two previous books in the Space Trilogy, it’s worth reading all three together and in order.

Rachel Gilson

Gerald Hiestand and Todd Wilson (eds.), Technē: Christian Visions of Technology (Cascade, 2022) (Amazon)

This book features two chapters that should be read side by side, in one sitting if possible: Andy Crouch’s “The Alchemists’ Dream” and Douglas Estes’s “Why We Get Technology Wrong.” They represent two competing strands in Christian thinking on technology, one of which likely represents your intuitions.

Our gut can tell us something important, but it shouldn’t have the final word. Read these chapters slowly and charitably, and welcome either a change of mind or a deeper understanding of where you started from.

Michael Graham

Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670; repr., Penguin Classics, 1995) (Amazon)

Pascal belongs on the Mount Rushmore of computer science. Centuries before the computer age, he made critical advances that prepared the way for both hardware and software.

Pensées is sprawling in scope but gives keen attention to the nature of the human condition, especially the paradox of how man can be both great and wretched. Because AI is trained on human content, it’ll invariably reflect both the greatness and wretchedness of man.

Collin Hansen

Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (Penguin, 2025) (Amazon)

Sometimes I wonder if the AI masterminds skipped dystopia day in English class and never read books such as Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. Hao’s exposé shows the problem is even worse. Some of those dystopias actually gave shape to AI as we know it today.

Now I’m just wondering if Sam Altman skipped the last act of Spike Jonze’s 2013 film, Her. Spoiler: Joaquin Phoenix and the voice of Scarlett Johansson don’t live happily ever after.

Brett McCracken

Byung-Chul Han, Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity (Polity, 2024) (Amazon)

This isn’t a book about AI. It’s about a key part of being human that is at risk of disappearing in an age of AI: having space in our lives to contemplate, filling unmediated “downtime” with thinking. AI eradicates the need and value of contemplation. From prompt/problem to instant answer/solution, the middle space of processing and cogitating is eliminated.

That’s a real deprivation making us less human. Han’s book concisely makes the case for the irreplaceable value of contemplation in an age of optimization.

Alan Noble

Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (Vintage Books, 1964) (Amazon)

In this dense work, Ellul explores the role of “technique” in the contemporary world. Essentially, technique is the maximization of efficiency in every sphere of human existence.

While he doesn’t directly address AI, he addresses the powerful drive for efficiency at the heart of AI. Ellul’s warnings about technique’s totalizing effects are equally valid for understanding the urgency to adopt, adapt, and maximize that drives AI.

Keith Plummer

Sherry Turkle, Artificial Intelligence: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines (Little, Brown and Company, 2026) (Amazon)

In this popular-level volume, social psychologist and MIT professor Turkle explores how the recent and growing phenomenon of interacting with LLMs as conversation partners, friends, and romantic interests is forming (or better yet, deforming) us personally and interpersonally.

She sounds a well-researched and sobering alarm about the dangers of acclimating ourselves to treating chatbots as though they care about us and preferring them over real human relations. Turkle isn’t a Christian, but that shouldn’t deter you from reading this important work.

Autumn Ridenour

Shannon Vallor, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford University Press, 2024) (Amazon)

In this accessible volume, Vallor favorably assesses technology, yet challenges the design, goals, and values behind new forms of AI. She nails the issue in her overarching thesis: AI fails because it mirrors our shortcomings, failures, and worst forms of narcissism at a collective scale. What is needed? Newness born through creativity, freedom, and change.

Philosophical in nature, her overarching argument parallels the hope, transformation, and desire for new vision essential to theological commitment.

Jonathan Sams

Jeremy Peckham, Masters or Slaves? AI and the Future of Humanity (IVP, 2021) (Amazon)

Peckham combines his experience in the field of AI with a distinctly Christian perspective on human dignity and responsibility. In a world that obsesses over what AI can do, he begins with the doctrine of the imago Dei to ask what our use of AI reveals about who we are and what we value.

Accessible to general readers, this book helps Christians think carefully about how AI may affect work, relationships, privacy, and our understanding of what it means to be human.

Christopher Watkin

Stephen Driscoll, Made in Our Image: God, Artificial Intelligence and You (Matthias Media, 2024) (Amazon | TGC Store)

Driscoll provides one of the clearest and most accessible Christian introductions to AI. Avoiding both technological utopianism and alarmist “doomerism,” he explains AI through the biblical doctrines of creation, fall, redemption, and new creation.

Especially valuable is his account of human identity: Our dignity rests not on outperforming machines but on being made in God’s image. Popular rather than academic, it’s ideal for thoughtful church readers.