What books shaped you?

“Everyone has their sort of favorite philosopher, but my favorite philosopher is Douglas Adams. …it highlighted an important point, which is that a lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part. The universe is the answer; what are the questions? Asimov certainly was influential because he was seriously paralleling Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but he applied that to a sort of modern galactic empire… The lesson I drew from that is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one. Our AI Grok is modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is one of my favorite books. Which is it’s a book on philosophy disguised as a book on humor.”

— Elon Musk, November 2017 · Watch: Elon Musk at CHM Revolutionaries ↗