CNCarlo Niccolai

Bookshelf — Carlo Niccolai

What are the books/writing that shaped you?

Plenty — but here's a shelf of the ones that really stuck with me.

A mix of fiction, philosophy, philosophy of technology, and one machine-learning paper. Roughly the lineage behind how I think about people, technology, and the world.

Flatland: A Romance of Many DimensionsEdwin A. Abbott

Taught me that the limits of our perspective are not the limits of reality.

Way of the Peaceful WarriorDan Millman

A reminder that mastery is daily practice, presence, and doing the ordinary thing well.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden BraidDouglas Hofstadter

Where logic, art, and music meet — and where my fascination with minds and machines began.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the GalaxyDouglas Adams

Proof that the biggest questions are best met with curiosity and a sense of humour.

Minima MoraliaTheodor W. Adorno

Aphorisms that taught me to stay critical of the world I live in, even its comfortable parts.

The Man Who Was ThursdayG. K. Chesterton

A philosophical thriller about order, chaos, and never trusting appearances.

The Question Concerning TechnologyMartin Heidegger

Reframed technology as a way of seeing the world, not just a set of tools — a seed of my thesis.

Technics and CivilizationLewis Mumford

A history of how our machines and our societies shape each other — core to how I read technology.

The Social ContractJean-Jacques Rousseau

Where I first wrestled with legitimacy, freedom, and what we owe one another in a society.

The Divine ComedyDante Alighieri

A journey through everything human — and the book that ties me to my Italian roots.

The City of the SunTommaso Campanella

An early utopia that made me think about how we design societies, and who they're designed for.

Being MortalAtul Gawande

A humane look at medicine, aging, and what actually matters in the end.

Attention Is All You NeedVaswani et al. (2017)

The paper behind the Transformer — the architecture under the AI I now build with every day.

Architect or Bee?Mike Cooley

On technology, work, and human creativity: whether we design our tools or merely serve them.

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