In August, a thoughtful blogger, Tanner Greer, posed an interesting question to the Silicon Valley crowd: "What are the contents of the'vague tech canon'? If we say it is 40 books, what are they?" He was using the term "canon" in the sense of "the collection of works considered representative of a period or genre", but astutely qualifying it to stop Harold Bloom – the great literary critic who spent his life campaigning for a canon consisting of the great works of the past (Shakespeare, Proust, Dante, Montaigne et al) – spinning in his grave. Greer's challenge was immediately taken up by Patrick Collison, co-founder with his brother, John, of the fintech giant Stripe (market value 65bn) and thus among the richest Irishmen in history. Unusually among tech titans, Collison is a passionate advocate of reading, and so it was perhaps predictable that he would produce a list of 43 books – adding a caveat that it wasn't "the list of books that I think one ought to read – it's just the list that I think roughly covers the major ideas that are influential here".

I read an article the other day about a computer program that writes fiction. You feed it a few lines, tell it the genre – science fiction, horror – and it produces the rest. It writes in full grammatical sentences; comes up with metaphors and analogies; emulates a writer's particular style and so on. The author of the article, who seemed a little too thrilled about the existence of this diabolical toy from the depths of Silicon Valley says, at some point, that this "tool" was going to be the "salvation" for writers who dislike writing, which, according to him, is nearly all writers. I want to say to this writer: you are wrong. And to this robot that writes fiction I want to say … well I don't want to say anything to it because, you know, robots are robots.