STG's

Life 3.0, by Max Tegmark, looks into our AI powered future, and how it could be. Several interesting parts, including the views on how an hypothetical Artificial General Intelligence could launch. Other bits felt less interesting and dragged more, for example the theory on how much energy or space could be available for AIs (even if the mechanisms analyzed were sometimes interesting). It also goes a lot into AI safety, which the author cares so much about it that he launched a foundation to study the subject, including grants for researchers and everything. Overall, I felt it was pretty good, but some parts drag it down.

Oracle is a new book by Douglas E. Richards. This one is SF but not a technothriller - it even has aliens. The basis of the stories is that clairvoyants are real, and there are several alien groups in Earth. One of them believe a clairvoyant can win their war. It is a bit hard to write about the book without spoilers, but one thing I feel worth mentioning is how Deus Ex Machina a lot of the book is - in the sense that the rules are specifically made so that anything can happen for the story to work. For example (more spoilers ahead!) - the portals appear on an unknown schedule, possibly controlled by other aliens, and they may or may not let tech pass, depending on the convenience for the story. Same for the visions (although that one is common to pretty much any story that has visions). Overall, good, but feels more contrived than the usual by the author.

Recursion, by Blake Crouch, is a SF novel. I find it a little hard to talk about it without spoiling. What I knew coming in, is that suddenly people started having false memories of whole other lives. A cop starts investigating and discovers it is much more than it seems (which should be obvious to most SF readers, although the particularly mechanism seems novel enough). I pretty much loved it, and it was one of the fastest books I've finished lately. Maybe it is too much of a giveaway, but it strongly reminded me of Ripples in the Dirac Sea,  a short story that won the 1989 Nebule prize, and that is so haunting that I immediately remembered it even though it has been 30 years since I last read it. Overall, strongly recommended to any SF fans.