How can you get a handle on it all? We asked four people well-versed in technology to recommend the best books for novices to get their arms around some of the biggest issues in technology today. The four are:

Tim O’Reilly,

founder and chief executive of O’Reilly Media, an online technology-learning platform;

Hayes Ferguson,

director of Northwestern University’s Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation;

David Siminoff,

general partner at Prime Movers Lab, a venture-capital firm; and

Rob Reich,

professor of political science at Stanford University and co-author of “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot.”

Here are eight of their recommendations:

1. “AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future,” by

(2021)

Mr. Lee, a former president of Google China, and Mr. Qiufan, a science-fiction novelist, join forces to portray how artificial intelligence will shape the world 20 years from now.

“This is an inspired collaboration, pairing 10 compelling science-fiction stories about technology-driven disruptions with a thoughtful assessment of the state of the technologies that may bring them about,” says Mr. O’Reilly. “The pairing of stories and essays is a powerful format, one that makes this a great book for anyone tired of overheated warnings about technology without context.”

Readers will learn about the state of progress in artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, robotics, cryptocurrency and quantum computing—and how society might deal with those technologies, Mr. O’Reilly says.

2. “The Code Breaker:

(2021)

This biography of Jennifer Doudna, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for her work on the Crispr system of gene editing, also looks at the ethics of genetic engineering.

Mr. Siminoff calls this the best book he has read this year. It covers the technologies that carry the promise of everything from curing Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases to allowing tiger parents to design children with thick heads of hair, dense muscular structure and turbocharged brains, he says.

“It grabbed me because of its highly digestible clarity—about 100 SAT points sharper than what could have been Crispr for Dummies,” he says.

Ms. Ferguson also praises the book, noting that “Doudna’s accomplishments are especially triumphant, given that she was discouraged from pursuing chemistry in college. ‘Girls don’t do science,’ her high-school guidance counselor told her.”

3. “Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed,” by

(1994)

In this work, now-deceased Lockheed engineer Ben Rich describes Skunk Works, the company’s plane-development program. It spawned the vaunted U-2 and Stealth aircraft.

The authors explain how a small group of hungry-to-build aerospace engineers tasked with creating the next generation of U.S. defense weaponry overcame “large-company Peter Principle friction,” says Mr. Siminoff. “This is the best anti-bureaucracy book on the shelves even today.”

Despite the fact that it was written nearly 30 years ago, he says, the book “still carries the weight of modern antiestablishment angst shared by creative visionary engineers everywhere.”

4. “Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code,” by

(2019)

The book posits that automation speeds up and deepens discrimination while appearing neutral or even benevolent. The author argues that discriminatory designs encode inequities by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies.

“This book is the best single overview of how and why new technologies perpetuate and exacerbate racism,” says Mr. Reich. “Some examples are obvious, such as when Google’s search algorithm identifies a photo of a Black face as a gorilla. Others are far more hidden and insidious, a form of computational racism in which the necessary abstractions of programming erase the complexity and particularity of humans and their lived experiences of race.”

Mr. Reich says the book makes the case that “the path forward is to center a rival set of values in the work of technologists—equity as well as efficiency, justice as well as the corporate bottom line, technology as a method of diagnosis as well as a solution to a problem. This is a clarion call for any technologist or citizen.”

5. “Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity,” by

(2020)

This book looks at who stands to win and lose from the Covid-19 pandemic. “We’re still not post-corona,” Ms. Ferguson says, “but the predictions Galloway makes in the book remain on track.”

Ms. Ferguson says that the author saw that the pandemic would accelerate trends already under way, including online shopping and working from home. “Even as vaccines make it safer than it was a year ago to leave home, scores of people who thought they never would buy groceries online are now accustomed to the ease of Instacart delivery.”

What’s more, Ms. Ferguson says, the book makes it clear that the rapid embrace of technology by holdouts has boosted the dominance of big tech companies. And she quotes the book’s warning: “The Covid-19 pandemic is an effective weapon of mass distraction from big tech’s bad behavior.”

6. “Terra Ignota,” a quartet of novels by

(2016-2021)

The books are set in the year 2454. A series of events has led the world to war after 300 years of peace following the end of the nation-state.

“One of the big problems we all face in coming to grips with the future is that we frame it in terms that we already know, which blinds us to the ways in which it might truly be different,” says Mr. O’Reilly. “For lubricating our vision with regard to technology’s impact on our society, I can suggest no better guide than Renaissance historian and science-fiction writer Ada Palmer’s series.”

The books aren’t so much a prediction of the future, but rather an analysis of how people respond to change, Mr. O’Reilly says. That includes “trying to stop it, trying to take advantage of it, and only when all else fails, trying to surf the wave of transformation and become different.”

7. “An Ugly Truth: Inside

(2021)

This is an account of the controversies enveloping Facebook in recent years. The authors argue that the company’s missteps were an inevitability rather than an anomaly.

“Frenkel and Kang do a superb job of showing how Facebook’s relentless pursuit of world domination (or, put another way, the company’s unwavering desire to connect more people) has led to an often dangerous indifference,” says Ms. Ferguson. The book should be required reading for all Facebook users and anyone who wants to understand how its decisions are made, she says.

8. “Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy,” by

(2016)

The book focuses on the societal impact of big-data algorithms, which often reinforce our inequalities, Ms. O’Neil argues.

“This is a landmark book,” says Mr. Reich. “With compelling illustrations of the ubiquity of algorithmic decision-making tools, from teacher evaluations to bank lending and criminal recidivism, O’Neil’s book is the best introduction for a layperson to how data science works and where it can go wrong.”

The book illustrates that “algorithms can amplify human bias as easily as they can correct it,” he says.

Mr. Weil is a writer in West Palm Beach, Fla. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.