Chinese netizens spot AI books on president Xi Jinping's bookshelf

Every year, China's president Xi Jinping delivers a New Year's Eve address, outlining the country's plans for the months ahead. But Chinese netizens don't just pay attention to his words; they also scour the bookshelves behind Xi, analyzing the titles and authors found there to try and gain some insight into his mind. As reported by The Shanghaiist (and seen via Quartz), the books on AI were Pedro Domingos' The Master Algorithm and Brett King's Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane. Both deal with the potential impact of artificial intelligence on society, with King's book providing a futurist's slightly fantastical overview on this and other technologies, while Domingos' offers a more grounded and practical look at the rise of machine learning. Xi is said to be a voracious reader, and other books spotted on his shelf this year included a growing collection of Western classics (from War and Peace and The Old Man and the Sea to The Odyssey and Les Misérables), economic texts like Money Changes Everything by William N. Goetzmann and Michele Wucker's The Grey Rhino, and numerous titles on Chinese history and military strategy.