Beginning with Andrew Yang’s proposal for a $1,000 a month “Freedom Dividend” during his Democratic Party primary campaign (2019-2020), Basic Income has become salient as a means to mitigate the social and economic turbulence caused by rapid adoption of robotics and AI. BIEN has published an increasing number of News and Research items on BI and related guaranteed income pilot programs around the world here on this website, Such pilots now number in the hundreds. AI, a term first coined at a Dartmouth College summer workshop in 1956, is currently becoming a increasingly prominent topic and figures to become an object of political debate worldwide.

In this article I review two books on AI just published in the first months of 2026.

Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, We Are As Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance

Diamandis and Kotler’s latest book challenges the reader to explore “A feedback loop of recursive AI self-improvement that accelerates progress beyond comprehension or control.” This as AI and robotics are taking mankind into a turbulent period of social and political change at warp speed. What can we do not only to survive, but flourish? Read this book as a guide.

David Brin’s latest book draws from his diverse CV, with degrees in astronomy (BS), electrical engineering (MS), astronomy (PhD), a post-doctoral fellowship at the California Space Institute and another at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies; a wide range of advisory and consulting gigs; and author of tens of science fiction and non-fiction books. In Alien Minds Brin analyses different perspectives on AI (both Artificial General Intelligence – AGI and Artificial Superintelligence – (ASI): doomers (like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares), optimists (e.g. Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis), transhumanists (if you can’t beat them, join them) e.g. Hans Moravec, Brin himself, and perhaps Elon Musk. A fascinating characteristic of this book is the inclusion in each chapter of “asides” addressed to “our newest children” – AGIs and ASIs.  Brin concludes that the best way of “aligning” AGIs and SGIs to human values is through the creation of a “disputation arena” in which competition between individual Ais avoids the doom scenario