Each day, a new outrageous claim of AI’s capabilities vaults into the headlines. Even by Silicon Valley standards, they’re becoming unhinged. I’m left asking, who is the audience here? Who shares these megalomaniacal fever dreams of unlimited power and absolute social disintegration?
As a software engineer, I am comforted by how AI performs in real life. Output that seems credible cloaks flaws that compound, producing bloated and buggy software. Successive AI releases gussy up and supercharge the output, but they never resolve fundamental flaws, “hallucinations” if you’re being generous. They’re intrinsic to the technology.
As with his last book Enshittification, Cory Doctorow’s latest, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late, expertly navigates this divide by decoding the laws and economic incentives behind AI’s hype cycle.
Doctorow’s diagnosis is this: There are a myriad of advantages availed to tech companies pursuing breakneck growth over stability. For one, stock can be used as payment or collateral instead of money. Investors need to be convinced there are lucrative new worlds to conquer. With companies such as Amazon having already hoovered up every market from retail to infrastructure, the last prize big enough to warrant the stratospheric AI costs is the white-collar labour market. This is why headlines are littered with direct quotes from AI execs about job replacement. They are the ravings of chronic gamblers deep in the hole waiting for the payout.
On the other side of the equation, managers are sick and tired of engineers’ overinflated salaries and mouthy activism and thus make a willing audience for claims they can automate away their daily struggles with messy humans.
Doctorow isn’t anti-AI per se. In the correct context, he considers it an important tool that boosts productivity, particularly to a seasoned veteran able to spot its errors. Such a configuration is a “centaur”, Doctorow’s nerdy mythological metaphor for a human fused to and enhanced by a tech workhorse. Unfortunately, augmenting the existing workforce is more expensive as it keeps those annoying humans in the loop. And the price of AI is going up.
What often happens is the titular “reverse centaur”: when a human is strapped into a machine which monitors and exploits them as they train it. Amazon employees are the archetypal example, but its prevalence is growing. You’re probably one without knowing. For example, those CAPTCHA tasks where you select the traffic lights? Well, that’s you training a machine to recognise traffic lights.
In The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, the treatment of the creative professions is perhaps the best indication of the cross-disciplinary knowledge needed to separate AI’s true incarnation from the hype. It is a creature more of market dynamics than technological breakthrough. As a former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a sci-fi writer, Doctorow can unpick copyright law and plot a way forward. New copyright powers for a creator to sell their work to an LLM will never translate into a financial benefit. It will just be another clause in the boilerplate, signed over to big production corporations at no extra compensation. Market concentration means if they don’t like it, there’s nowhere else to go. Instead, Doctorow identifies that copyright can only be assigned to human-made works and so AI output can never be safely owned. And the only thing production companies hate more than paying creatives is not owning stuff.
His rebuttal of AI consciousness is typical of his depth and humour: no matter the selective breeding, a horse can never give birth to a steam engine. In other words, Generative AI can never become aware. His detailing of the environmental costs and waste wrought as multiple AI operations duplicate to compete is the best and most succinct I’ve read. He is certain this bubble will soon burst. The fallout will be brutal for ordinary people, but the aftermath will be an opportunity to sift through the wreckage, recycle the tech and the hardware for some saner purpose.
One complaint with The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI is its overwhelming focus on the US market and law, while the Canadian author understands the EU just as well. Occasionally, he also reuses examples from earlier works and even within the book itself. These I easily forgive for a much-needed reality check, a cool head in wild times that can defuse spiralling madness by explaining it while somehow keeping upbeat in the process.
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late by Cory Doctorow is published by Verso ($35).