In 2025, I found plenty of time to listen to podcasts, but didn’t make enough time for more challenging reads. To resolve this imbalance, I purchased an Audible subscription and I have resolved to read (listen to) at least 26 books this year. After reading each book, I’ll log it here with a brief summary and some reflections.

I’m thinking of reading mostly non-fiction books this year, to balance out an emphasis on fiction in previous years and to make progress in building my understanding of the world.

Contents:

• 1. Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom
• 2. Feline Philosophy by John Gray

§1. Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom

Audiobook (2x), Jan 23–31, 2026.

Bostrom is a futurist and philosopher, and Deep Utopia is his exploration of the potential and limitations of a realistic utopian future for humanity. I got a lot out of reading Superintelligence back in the day so I had been meaning to give this new book a try since it came out.

Channeling Plato, the book’s philosophical discussion is framed as a fictional series of lectures delivered by Bostrom, interleaved with dialogues between a group of friends auditing the class. Bostrom also splices in various technical readings, including some stories from alternative universes in which sentient animals or appliances strive towards their own utopian visions. I suspect there were some allegorical elements of the alternative universe stories and the hints at university (dis)function that went over my head, but I mostly came for the explicit philosophical discussion in the lectures, and I think I was able to follow most of that.

As with Superintelligence, the philosophical discussion revealed to me that concepts I had a folk understanding of were actually deeper than they appeared, or introduced useful concepts and distinctions that I think I will find useful in framing my thinking going forward. For example:

• Bostrom taxonomises various barriers humanity could face in implementing a utopia, beyond just physical limits and also including various ‘reachability’ constraints. I appreciated this broader and unified discussion of constraints.

• Bostrom had a habit of asking, for a given human value, why do we have that value? This is obviously of interest to me as an alignment researcher. He repeatedly appealed to a concept of ‘intrinsification,’ where instrumentally useful things over time come to seem instrinsically valuable to us.

I think these kinds of things are good examples of the value of reading good philosophy, and I am overall happy I read the book.

Also as with Superintelligence, I didn’t find all of the book’s discussion philosophically satisfying. For example:

• One recurring theme that stood out was that I generally felt that the topic of developing humans into the best versions of themselves was under-treated. Perhaps this is out of scope as Bostrom is specifically talking about a utopia for us, present humans. I think I might just have an intuitively broader notion of us that includes some of who we could be? I’m not sure, I would have liked to see how Bostrom would frame this. He does discuss some related issues of identity loss later in the series.

• A more pedantic complaint. At a couple of points Bostrom suggests creating isolated situations where humans limit their access to utopian technological affordances in order to achieve certain kinds of value that the affordances undermines. He explicitly says that one could consider these people to be leaving utopia, but he prefers to consider the isolated situations as still being part of utopia. I didn’t appreciate this being dismissed so readily.

I will say, I had a much longer list of incredulous margin notes in Superintelligence. It’s on my mind to re-read that some day and see how well my complaints hold up.

Overall, the book seemed incomplete to me. I would have liked to see more of the stories of Feodor the Fox and ThermoRex the space heater—it felt like there was more to develop in both. Moreover, the final lecture in the fictional series was also open to the public, and consequently dropped most of the prior motivation of discussing utopia in order to give Bostrom’s self-contained account of ‘the meaning of life.’ I was hoping there would be a final discussion that connected this account back to the discussion of utopia, explored how our search for meaning would play out in utopia.

Note: This was a long and dense book. I followed fine, but I don’t think I will retain most of it. Of course, I would ideally like to retain valuable things I read this year, so, going forward, I’m going start trying to take notes while reading and write a summary of the key ideas in each book as I see them at the end.

§2. Feline Philosophy by John Gray

Audiobook (2x), Feb 2–9, 2026.

The book is a short exploration of the contrast between the ways cats and humans orient to life. I learned a few cool things about cats. According to Gray:

• Domestic cats are very genetically similar to their wild ancestors, apart from having slightly shorter legs and more colourful fur.

• They also have smaller brains, but it’s particularly the parts of the brain responsible for ‘fight or flight’ response that has shrunk, presumably because their environment tends to be somewhat less hostile.

  Aside: It’s amazing how often I find things that seem relevant to AI alignment when reading random books!

• Cats have never been pack animals, they are independent. They are happy to live with humans, but they don’t think in terms of hierarchies of dominance. They will form groups of cats only out of convenience. They will love humans but not in a dependent way.

• Cats are “selfless egoists.” This sounds oxymoronic but he means they are egoists in that they think only of their own needs while also being selfless in the specific sense that they don’t concern themselves with their identity or self-image.

This leads Gray to claim that cats were never domesticated—rather, they domesticated humans. Fun line; it reminds me of Harari’s take on the agricultural revolution from the perspective of crops.

The book made general claims about cat behaviour, and drew examples mostly from cats in literature or biographies, so I’m not sure how carefully each of these claims has been studied. But they seem plausible.

Anyway, of course, the book was just as much, if not more, about humans as it was about cats. Here’s some things I learned about humanity.

• First of all, it’s striking that at one point it was totally normal for people to think cats were unworthy of moral consideration, or worse:

  • Descartes experimented on cats, managing to somehow prove in the process of torturing them that the cats had no souls. (I think he experimented on dogs in similar ways too.) Philosophy of mind is hard, I guess?

  • Western religious societies until relatively recently viewed cats as devils, sometimes ritually burning them alive. (Of course they also did this to women accused of witchcraft.)

  • Even scientists used to feel totally free to torture cats in order to study pain. (These days there are animal ethics guidelines that might stop this but I think I have met some scientists that would be sympathetic to it on utilitarian grounds.)

• On the other hand, animist civilisations like Egyptians saw cats as embodiments of gods. To me this shows that very many different civilisational world views are possible.

• According to Gray, cats teach us that the meaning of life is in the living of life and not in the questioning of why. From what I hear about his other writing, he views humans as more similar to animals than they like to think. Except, he points out, humans have self-awareness and accordingly self-consciousness and this leads to their problems.

  • Humans orient to the world by writing stories about their lives. However, this makes it difficult when the stories are disrupted, can lock them into unpleasant roles (such as when someone views their life as tragic, they can become unable to escape the tragedy), and prompts people to think ahead prematurely to their own death (the end of their story).

  • He links self awareness to the fall of man—once you know you are in paradise, you are no longer in paradise.

There was quite a lot more in the book. Stories of many historical philosophers who had written about similar topics, and several cats and their owners, friends, and foes. These were interesting but I didn’t focus as much on remembering the details.

I think I extracted the main message of the book, that we should live more in the moment. But the book was a bit meandering, so it wasn’t obvious what the hierarchy of ideas was meant to be. There is a nice list of ten principles at the end, and the book was short and sweet, so would be pretty easy to re-read.