Our library in Hewett Centre is open every Sunday after service during Coffee Hour in Hewett Centre, and our Library Team offers related reading lists based on the topic of the Sunday service. Here is their list for the Sunday, June 28, 2026 at 11 a.m. service on “A Unitarian Uncyclical on AI”, featuring Paul Prescod. All are welcome in Hewett Centre after the Sunday service to check out some books, and to have coffee and conversation.
VanU library books related to this Sunday’s sermon:
1. AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future by Kai-Fu Lee and Quifan Chen, 2021, 006 LEE
From LibraryThing: “… the former president of Google China and a leading writer of speculative fiction join forces to answer an urgent question: How will artificial intelligence change our world over the next twenty years? AI will be the defining issue of the twenty-first century, but many people know little about it apart from visions of dystopian robots or flying cars. Though the term has been around for half a century, it is only now, Kai-Fu Lee argues, that AI is poised to upend our society, just as the arrival of technologies like electricity and smart phones did before it. In the past five years, AI has shown it can learn games like chess in mere hours-and beat humans every time. AI has surpassed humans in speech and object recognition, even outperforming radiologists in diagnosing lung cancer. AI is at a tipping point. What comes next? Within two decades, aspects of daily life may be unrecognizable. Humankind needs to wake up to AI, both its pathways and perils. … In ten gripping short stories that crisscross the globe, coupled with incisive analysis, Lee and Chen explore AI’s challenges and its potential”.
2. A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence: What It Is, Where We Are, and Where We Are Going by Michael Wooldridge, 2021, 006 WOO
From LibraryThing: “From Oxford’s leading AI researcher … The somewhat ill-defined long-term aim of AI is to build machines that are conscious, self-aware, and sentient; machines capable of the kind of intelligent autonomous action that currently only people are capable of. As an AI researcher with 25 years of experience, professor Mike Wooldridge has learned to be obsessively cautious about such claims, while still promoting an intense optimism about the future of the field. There have been genuine scientific breakthroughs that have made AI systems possible in the past decade that the founders of the field would have hailed as miraculous. Driverless cars and automated translation tools are just two examples of AI technologies that have become a practical, everyday reality in the past few years, and which will have a huge impact on our world. While the dream of conscious machines remains, Professor Wooldridge believes, a distant prospect, the floodgates for AI have opened. …”.
3. The Big Disconnect: The Story of Technology and Loneliness by Giles Slade, 2012, 303.48 SLA
Written by a VanU member. From LibraryThing: “… the author offers a bracing look at an America where intimacy with machines is increasingly replacing mutual human intimacy. In a sweeping overview that ranges from the late nineteenth century to the present, he reveals how consumer technologies changed from analgesic devices that ameliorated the loneliness of a newly urban generation in the Gilded Age to prosthetic machines that act as substitutes for companionship in contemporary America. Mining insights from neuroscience, the author delves deeply into the history of this transformation, showing why Americans use certain technologies to mediate their connections with other human beings instead of seeking out face-to-face contacts. In a final investigative section, he describes ways in which some people are bucking the trend by consciously including interpersonal strategies that build empathy, community, and mutual acceptance. …”.
4. Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv, 2008, 155.41 LOU
From LibraryThing: “I like to play indoors better because that’s where all the electrical outlets are, reports a fourth grader. But it’s not only computers, television, and video games that are keeping kids inside. It’s also their parents’ fears of traffic, strangers, Lyme disease, and West Nile virus; their schools’ emphasis on more and more homework; their structured schedules; and their lack of access to natural areas. Local governments, neighborhood associations, and even organizations devoted to the outdoors are placing legal and regulatory constraints on many wild spaces, sometimes making natural play a crime.
As children’s connections to nature diminish and the social, psychological, and spiritual implications become apparent, new research shows that nature can offer powerful therapy for such maladies as depression, obesity, and attention deficit disorder. Environment-based education dramatically improves standardized test scores and grade-point averages and develops skills in problem solving, critical thinking, and decision making. Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that childhood experiences in nature stimulate creativity.
In Last Child in the Woods, Louv talks with parents, children, teachers, scientists, religious leaders, child-development researchers, and environmentalists who recognize the threat and offer solutions. Louv shows us an alternative future, one in which parents help their kids experience the natural world more deeply – and find the joy of family connectedness in the process. …”.
5. The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay, 1998, 600 MAC
From LibraryThing: “Text and numerous detailed illustrations introduce and explain the scientific principles and workings of hundreds of machines. Includes new material about digital technology.”.
6. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt, 2005, 330 LEV
From the publisher description on LibraryThing: “Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask …. The authors show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives–how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. … set out to explore the hidden side of everything. If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work.”.