Book Review: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by cory doctorow
The material conditions of the world we live in have changed (again), this time because of AI.
But it’s not because AI itself has changed the world, although it can be a useful tool.
No, AI has changed our real experience of the real world because people with very deep pockets either believe the breathless hype that it’s the single most valuable and most dangerous thing that’s ever invented by humans, or are working hard to make other people believe it.
Because these very rich people control the strategic direction of the corporations and governments we work at, buy from, and are governed by, AI spending is distorting everything around it, including your retirement savings.
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, by Cory Doctorow, is an easy to read, deeply researched, and by turns hilarious and infuriating book that explains exactly how we got here, how the AI bubble was built, for whom, who will walk away rich and happy when it pops, and what regular people will be left with when it’s over.
Primarily, it’s a book about how to engage your own critical thinking skills so you aren’t influenced by the convenient fictions that AI will break containment or kill humans to maximize paperclip production or whatever story designed to distract us from the man behind the curtain who’s trying to make as much money as he can before it all goes the way of pets.com.
Who should read it?
Genuinely, everyone. Small investors, workers, students, seniors: if you care how your tax dollars are spent, how your retirement savings are invested, how your teachers and professors are being pressured, how your boss is looking at your job, you should take the time to read this slim little book.
If you only have time to read one chapter:
I waffled a bit on this, because I really just want you to read the whole book. But If nothing else, read Really Weird Math, Doctorow’s chapter on the incentives these companies have to convince new investors and existing shareholders that they’re “growing” even if they’re not (and never will be) profitable.
If you only have time to read one paragraph:
The future is up for grabs. It is not inevitable. AI isn’t a genie that can’t be put back into a bottle. How we use AI is up to us. Whether we use AI is up to us. The future can be ours, if we never stop remembering that the most important fact about a technology isn’t what it does, it’s who it does it for and who it does it to.
(AI After the Bubble, page 222)
If you only have time to read one sentence:
If we are good AI critics, if we carefully identify the pathological aspects of AI and relentlessly tagged the financial basis of the AI bubble, we can make sure that all the terrible things billionaires want to do with AI never happen, and we can consign alll the terrible things that are currently being done with AI to history’s ash heap.
(Bubbles and Productive Residues, page 213)