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Research, Papers & Books (24)

Studies, reports, whitepapers, and books worth reading.

• A Rhetorical History of Modern Money Theory with John T. Harvey (Money on the Left)

  Podcast episode with economist John T. Harvey on how Modern Money Theory has been argued and debated.

  podcast

• AI Infrastructures and Sustainability: Expanding Perspectives on Automation, Communication and Media

  Open-access book exploring the environmental and societal impacts of AI infrastructure — data centers, energy, labor, and the politics of large-scale computation.

  Book

• Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring (FAccT 2026)

  Stanford-led study of 3 million applicants screened by a single algorithm vendor, finding racial disparities and homogeneous rejections — the same people get screened out everywhere. Explains why applicants must apply widely to reach a human.

  Document

• Automation and Repression (MIT Working Paper)

  MIT economics working paper analyzing how automation technologies can be used to expand state surveillance and repression, and the economic conditions that make that more likely.

  Document

• Can AI Spot Mistakes in IKEA Assembly?

  Epoch AI report on a spatial reasoning benchmark built around finding mistakes in photos of partially assembled IKEA furniture — a proxy for economically important visual reasoning tasks like repair work. Top scores jumped from 28% to 80% in 10 months; Chinese open-weight models trail the frontier by about 7 months.

  Report

• Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of AI

  Stanford Digital Economy Lab paper using payroll data to track employment changes for early-career workers in jobs most exposed to AI.

  Research Paper

• Digital Colonialism and the Role of Local Intermediaries: Big Tech, Data Sovereignty and Human Rights in Africa

  An open-access scholarly article in the Business and Human Rights Journal (2025) by Jake Okechukwu Effoduh of Toronto Metropolitan University. It examines how Big Tech firms and local intermediaries perpetuate data exploitation, infrastructure dependency and algorithmic bias in Africa, drawing parallels between historical colonialism and the modern digital economy.

  paper

• Forward Together: The Black Policy Playbook for an Equitable America — 2026 Addendum

  Joint Center report (PDF) with policy recommendations on voting rights, economic opportunity, workforce, education, healthcare, criminal legal system, technology and immigration.

  Report

• How AI Agents Reshape Knowledge Work: Autonomy, Efficiency, and Scope (working paper)

  The underlying working paper by Jeremy Yang and co-authors, using Perplexity data to model tasks as discrete steps and compare fixed vs. marginal costs of chatbots versus autonomous agents.

  Case Study

• How Much Should We Spend to Reduce A.I.'s Existential Risk?

  Stanford economist Charles I. Jones works out, in plain economic terms, how much money it would be worth spending to lower catastrophic risks from advanced AI — comparing it to the roughly 4 percent of GDP the U.S. effectively spent during Covid-19.

  Document

• JCPAR Workforce

  Congressional Black Caucus Foundation publication on workforce policy, hosted on Issuu. Described from title; details not checked page by page.

  Report

• Libby by OverDrive

  Free reading app from OverDrive that borrows ebooks, audiobooks and magazines from your local public library with a library card. Works in a browser or on iOS, Android, Kobo and Kindle (US libraries only), with offline downloads, CarPlay and Android Auto support, holds, and tagged reading lists.

  Tool

• Message Passing Enables Efficient Reasoning

  An arXiv paper showing how message-passing techniques let language models reason more efficiently, with the full text free to read and download.

  Paper

• O-Ring Automation (NBER Working Paper 34639)

  Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb's January 2026 NBER working paper modeling how automating some tasks in a chain of interdependent tasks changes the value of the remaining human work. Free PDF.

  Research Paper

• Open Library

  Internet Archive's open book catalogue: read, borrow and discover more than 3 million books free.

  Library

• PhyPID Group

  Site of the PhyPID group at the University of Colorado Boulder, working at the intersection of physics, AI, and data-driven discovery.

  Website

• Ranked: U.S. Wealth by Generation in 2026

  A Visual Capitalist chart using Federal Reserve data to compare U.S. household net worth across generations in 2026.

  Article

• Same Storm, Different Boats: Generative AI and the Age Gradient in Hiring

  Ratio Institute Working Paper No. 388 (Lodefalk, Löthman, Koch, Engberg) on how generative AI relates to hiring across age groups. Free PDF.

  Research Paper

• Secret Collusion among AI Agents: Multi-Agent Deception via Steganography

  Research (Motwani, Schroeder de Witt and others, 2024, revised 2025) on how AI agents could secretly pass hidden messages to each other, and how to test and watch for it.

  Research Paper

• SkillGym: Internalizing Human Skills into LLMs for Real-World Problem Solving

  arXiv paper (Sept. 2026) introducing SkillGym, a framework that turns human-written agent skills into executable, verifiable training environments so language model agents learn them as built-in capabilities.

  Research Paper

• The GovLab

  The Governance Lab's research, publications and programs on how institutions can govern more effectively and legitimately through technology and data.

  Website

• The New Science of Maps

  Visual gallery and book companion exploring how modern maps, data, and spatial thinking shape understanding.

  Website

• The Technological Republic (book site)

  Official site for The Technological Republic by Palantir co-founder Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, arguing that Silicon Valley abandoned work of national consequence. The site is free to browse and lists press coverage and every retailer.

  Book

• Towards Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacies

  An open-access paper on Zenodo describing Critical AI Literacies (CAILs): ways of thinking about AI that reject framings from the technology industry, naive computationalism, and dehumanizing ideologies, and that center human cognition and the integrity of research and education. Co-authored by Olivia Guest and Iris van Rooij, among others.

  Research Paper