Book

The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI

Cory Doctorow

5/5

Kill the hype

Angry momentum is a key discerning feature of this well-argued and documented critique of the AI bubble. This eloquent anger motivates action, creates excitement and derives much amusement from the inept but dangerous AI promoters and equally inept but dangerous employers who lap up all the hype. Most importantly this anger makes this book eminently enjoyable. Anyone grappling with what AI means for our future would benefit from reading it. Also, all those who, in Doctorow’s memorable words, ‘are sick to the back teeth of having AI jammed into their eyeballs by overcapitalised tech companies’.

There are so many false AI experts around at the moment, and Doctorow not only effortlessly exposes them, but also makes them look ridiculous, which they fully deserve. He also debunks AI marketing language which is invading our everyday. Let’s not glamorise AI errors by calling them ‘hallucinations’, they are nothing but botshit, just a basic lack of advertised capabilities.

It is interesting to note that it seems to be the Canadians who often have this unique perspective as highly knowledgeable and disabused commentators ‘from above’ of technological and social trends emanating from the US in its blind and aggressive technological race for profit: William Gibson, Douglas Copeland and now Cory Doctorow. Although Doctorow rejects that he is in any way a prophet, his takedown of hype is satisfyingly thorough and incisive – a damning indictment of unscrupulous AI companies.

Doctorow, who in 2022 coined the best word to describe the current race to the bottom in products and services, enshittification, pulls off another feat by analysing with flair and precision our awestruck vulnerability facing the emerging AI technologies. For such a smooth writer, the clunky full title, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It’s Too Late, is surprisingly paltry, and I guess that comes with being primed to be a bestseller in the States.

At least Doctorow manages to squeeze into the title the term reverse-centaur, the opposite of centaur. Centaurs ride the wave, reverse-centaurs get abused by it and that category probably includes most of us. A centaur is a person assisted by a machine, a reverse-centaur a person conscripted in assisting a machine. These terms are apt and unusual, and although reverse-centaur is a bit of a mouthful (perhaps anti-centaur would have been neater), it is distinctive enough that it may stick around as another clever Doctorow invention. Let’s face it Doctorow loves jargon, particularly the one he invents, repurposes or discovers himself. Sometimes this can be tiresome even when a valid point is being made, a trait he has in common with Gibson and Copeland, and with the tech oligarchs he criticises.

The book is full of excellent real life examples of why AI is not what it is promised to be and how we are under constant attack to give in to believing into the inevitability of AI application as dreamed up by the corporate tech companies. The claimed efficiency of AI is still very much debatable. The author highlights some important phenomena which occur when working with AI which are not given enough consideration, such as automation blindness which in critical work such as cancer detection could be a question of life or death. Correcting bot’s work is not as easy and brainless as it seems, in fact it is impossible to do with an acceptable degree of accuracy. And of course who will be blamed for this but the human workers who haven’t had a say in how the process is set up in the first place. The AI bubble is just another expression of late capitalism’s voraciousness to take further advantage of workers for the further enrichment of the conmen at the top of the pyramid.

The key takeaway is don’t feed the AI bubble. By believing the spiel you only enable AI owners to attract more investment. All the AI owners want is for us to talk about how AI will replace jobs, in order to magnify the bullshit they tell investors. Even though on a smaller scale some AI inventions can have productive uses, the wider reality is that this is an unsustainable industry of staggering proportions attempting to further subjugate workers for profit, not to mention its shocking ecological irresponsibility.

Let the bubble burst as soon as possible, Doctorow says. The market will crash and adversely affect everyone, but we can hopefully go back to recycling and putting to good use whatever remains.