For some years I have been working on a memoir themed around the books that have shaped my world view. The concept is to discuss how the books we’ve read since childhood shape our world-view, and may have influenced our decisions. I hope the idea will resonate with readers.

This is not an extended version of the books that interviewees on Desert Island Discs are invited to take along with their records. I chronicle not so much my favourite books as those that most challenged or enlightened me in terms of my understanding of this complex thing called life that we get thrown into – starting with childhood. There are novels, memoirs, travel writing, works of psychology and philosophy, by writers of different cultures, penned in different languages, read in different parts of the world.

I am therefore naturally curious about recommended reading lists that one may come across in the media.

Technology entrepreneurs leading the AI revolution are particularly keen to advertise their ‘top books to read’. Choices that I have come across are intriguing, though mildly disappointing. Sam Altman’s list, for example, includes just one novel, and it’s science fiction. Jeff Bezos’ list contains just two novels, The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, a historical novel, and one that is a fictionalized business story.

The lists are intellectually monochrome. There is little literature of imagination, hardly any classic novels, and no humour. This reveals an incurious mind – or at least, lacking in curiosity about perspectives outside a rather narrow bandwidth in which it is assumed that North American science and management theory represent the apex of civilization and that science is closing in on an answer to life, the universe and everything. Their holy grail – general artificial intelligence – is being designed by rich men keen to boast of their seemingly limited comprehension of what actually constitutes intelligence.

I acknowledge that the context of these lists is often around helping you in your career, rather than reading for pleasure or cultural enlightenment, yet it’s reasonable to judge them while noting the explicit ambition of many in the AI industry to create a machine that is (their phrase), ‘smarter than humans’. So a narrow definition of intelligence as something linear and measurable co-exists with a library mostly made up of North American non-fiction. One glimpses a world view that is technocratic, uninquiring of its taken-for-granted philosophical assumptions, proudly philistine and utilitarian.

They really do appear to believe that intelligence can be reduced to a quantifiable set of computations; that it is a puzzle to be solved. This is at best a questionable operating assumption, but more probably a cultural bias.

In the way in which AI machines are constructed, one of the most striking factors, that seems to pass with little scrutiny, is the belief that only literature influences literature, only music influences music and only business and economic theories influence how businesses ought to be run. This rigid compartmentalization runs counter to how creativity actually works; so they will boast that their AI machine ‘writes’, having ‘read’ far more books than a human could read in a lifetime, ignoring the fact that it doesn’t really read, it just scrapes content, and ignoring the non-literary influences on human creators such as nature, music, relationships and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Gabriel García Márquez’ principal influence in devising magical realism were the fantastical tales related by his grandmother, told to him factually ‘with a brick face’ as though they had actually occurred. The oral tradition lies entirely outside any Silicon Valley database (thankfully). Jane Austen devised the unreliable narrator based on – well, who knows except her? – native genius, we can only conclude. She pays her audience the compliment of sufficient intelligence to discern the reliability, or otherwise, of a third-person narrator, something a socially naïve computer, with its literal mindset, will always struggle with. JMW Turner was inspired by the reflection of sunlight on the sea when he was relocated to Margate as an eight-year-old boy.

If you listen to the following pieces of music, replete with human emotion: Larghetto from Xerxes by Handel, Barber’s Adagio for Strings, The Weakness in Me by Joan Armatrading, Strange Fruit by Billy Holiday, If You See Her Say Hello by Bob Dylan, Love is A Losing Game by Amy Winehouse, with sensitivity you appreciate that there is more, far more, than composition and influence at play here: these are expressions of the human soul. The depth of feeling trembles in the air as it makes its way from creator to listener, even across the centuries. An AI machine can no more create such works than a typewriter can conduct an orchestra.

This may sound like special pleading from a human author to respect the human craft and advise against the over-use, or inappropriate use, of large language models, even as they become more ‘sophisticated’ (especially as they become more ‘sophisticated’). And yes, it is. Only a human can create, and if the tech bros read more novels, they would deepen their understanding of what their machines can do, and what they cannot.

Who is more intelligent, the individual with the high IQ and narrow reading list, or the one with a lower IQ but eclectic influences? I am happy to be in the latter category, but the bigger point is this: the difference is not measurable.

• Philip Whiteley is an experienced author, journalist and ghostwriter. He writes fiction under the byline PJ Whiteley. More information at: pjwhiteley.com