This week saw the release of Cory Doctorow’s new book. It’s called The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late.
I read it in one sitting on the hottest June day on record (in England).
I think it’s an important book. If you’ve ever found yourself overawed by the talk around AI, Doctorow will help you think critically. As the title suggests, it’s about how to think about this technology.
Doctorow isn’t anti-AI. He appreciates that it’s useful stuff. His criticism focuses on the big AI companies and the tricks they use to provoke high feelings about their product.
He explains that the more we talk about AI taking everyone’s jobs, the more it encourages investor confidence. Our conversations give the impression that AI is most definitely a high-growth field, increasing the value of the big companies. This has created a financial bubble.
Doctorow suggests that even the talk of AI developing superhuman intelligence and killing us actually helps these companies.
Reading this book felt a lot like reading the history of an 18th-century financial bubble. People behaved strangely around money in the past; judging by Doctorow’s account of how companies and investors behave, humans apparently haven’t changed much.
I’ve found that when I’m inside a system of information, it’s very difficult to look at it from the outside. Since ChatGPT’s release in November 2022, we’ve all been bombarded with news stories about the wonders and terrors of AI. It’s like living inside a glass dome made of information.
When so many highly successful people talk about AI’s ability to create a jobless future, it’s hard to believe that they’re wrong.
I think that humans are wired to assume that very successful people must have access to some hidden wisdom – otherwise, they wouldn’t be highly successful would they? That’s why we pay greater attention to their words.
The truth is, as Doctorow says, our belief in AI carries power. His writing confirmed my gut feeling that people are losing jobs to AI because bosses believe that the technology is good enough to replace human workers. These bosses, like us, have also been living inside the information dome.
Doctorow argues there’s no doubt that AI is helpful technology, but he seems to want us to downgrade it in our minds. We ought to be thinking of it as the latest cool thing to have on a computer. My takeaway is that we shouldn’t be as feverishly excited about it as we have been. It’s good tech, but it’s not that good.
Yet somehow, we’re all trapped and sticky under the glass, surrounded by such high emotion that AI seems as existentially threatening as climate change and the hottest June day on record (in England).
TIDE and CANUTE 