The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence- Before It's Too Late by Cory Doctorow
Many thanks to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and NetGalley for sharing
an advanced copy of Cory Doctorow’s timely and important new book The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence- Before It’s Too Late. I was excited to find this book,
especially less than a year after Doctorow’s excellent book Enshittification
was published that details the various ways that tech companies and especially
digital platforms offer less or worse service for higher premiums and fees over
time. The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI also takes a critical
look at the ways in which AI threatens to enshittify different areas of our
lives if we buy into the hype and wild claims about it’s disruptive
capabilities. If anything, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide… is truly a guide
for how to manage expectations and reject both the overhyped proclamations of AI
companies and the doomsayers’ nihilism and fears about a robopocalypse. Even
more importantly, Doctorow highlights the impact of AI on different sectors of
life, focusing especially on how AI consumes massive amounts of energy, water
and other resources, for little in return. It’s an important book since AI is a
major topic in so many fields, but it’s even more important to have this kind
of critical perspective that examines how AI fits into other technological innovations
and updates that have threatened to disrupt and change the ways we work, read,
communicate, and experience entertainment.
Doctorow uses the idea of a centaur to explain how we can either
use technology in our lives, or how technology can use us. For Doctorow, we
should all be centaurs in our technology use. Centaurs are mythological creatures
that have the torse and head of men but have the legs of a horse. When we use
technology to our benefit or when we are assisted by technology, we are centaurs.
He uses the example of driving a car or wearing hearing aids and using a
calculator. We are in control of our use of technology to assist us in tasks.
However, a reverse centaur is someone who is forced to assist a machine to
manage its tasks or who are surveilled by machines to meet certain quotas for
efficiency. Doctorow uses the famous I Love Lucy Episode where Lucy and
Ethel work on the chocolate assembly line and struggle to keep up as the pace
increases. He likens this to other major corporations that monitor driving and
warehouse work that often limit bathroom breaks, surveilling and managing time
and efforts to where humans are used up by machines. Thus, it’s clear that
Doctorow is no luddite, and that he believes in technology and recognizes the
various ways it enhances our lives. He’s also not against AI, as he notes a
particularly useful application from an open source program that was able to
transcribe massive amounts of audio data to find a quote from a podcast he was
looking for. However, what Doctorow does oppose is the use of technology, and
especially AI, to exploit workers, whether it is through the threats to their
jobs, surveillance pricing and wagering, and its exploitation in the creative
arts (visual arts, music, and even writing). Doctorow presents these ideas by
examining the AI bubble before it arrived, where we currently are in the
bubble, and looking at other bubbles that have burst, and considering how we
can avoid the consequences of other similar bursts to jobs and the economy. I
appreciated this perspective, especially since we tend to think of AI as a new
technology that has only recently appeared, but he provides some instances of automation
that people have promoted, and many times, there have been ulterior motives for
the idea of automation. AI is no different where Doctorow examines the ways
that promises and predictions are often presented as truths and capabilities.
This kind of hype for the exaggerated possibilities and potentials leads
investors to speculate on futures, driving up the stock value of companies. It’s
that kind of speculation that enables prompts other companies to wade out into
these new technologies. He cites notable failures like Google +, a failed
social media venture from Google, and the Facebook’s failed attempt to pivot to
video. In these instances, Doctorow examines how the companies latched on to
new trends in technology, but manipulated the metrics or even the access to
present a much more optimistic view of these technologies to attract more
investors, where they can redistribute their money within their original company.
It allows the company’s reputation to grow on promises, but not on actual
delivery or outcomes. Doctorow notes similar practices with AI companies that
allow them to promote possibilities and potential but not actually deliver.
The Bubble section explores these some of these
possibilities, and more importantly to recognize the threats and implications and
consequences that arise from the ways that AI is being pitched to major corporations.
Most notably, Doctorow explores how AI’s promise to replace workers is
something that corporate overlords salivate after. While this does seem to be a
constant threat and something that we’re reminded of repeatedly with AI
speculation, Doctorow provides several examples of AI that have never panned
out. Whether it involves Wendy’s or Delta Airlines attempting to implement surveillance
and/or surge pricing only to backtrack or instances of self-driving cars being
flummoxed by cones placed on their hood or dragging pedestrians for
considerable distances before stopping, there are many of the examples of implementations
that failed to meet the hype or caused considerable backlash from local
communities. And yet, due to the Byzantine Premium, when investors place extra
value on an asset they don’t understand, the hype continues to outweigh the
failures and investors continue to pour money into AI start-ups. Doctorow also
reminds us of Stein’s Law, that reminds us that everything that cannot go on
forever will eventually stop, and Doctorow provides suggestions that the hype
and promises that have failed to materialize for AI indicate that there can
only be so much innovation, leading to the eventual bubble bursting, which he
argues “this will not be a good day. Remember: seven giant AI companies account
for 35 percent of the U.S. stock market.”
There are a lot of other important predecessors that AI has
followed a kind of blueprint for to amaze potential investors, from the
Mechanical Turk, an 18th century automaton that was touted to play
chess when it was really controlled by someone inside the machine, to more
recent examples from 2021’s dancing Tesla Bot that was revealed to be a human
in a robot suit to a robot bartender that was revealed to have a tele-operator.
Amazingly, Doctorow also elicits some empathy for call center workers, who have
been some of the first to experience job loss from AI chatbots, only to be
frequently rehired. One of the most frightening areas that Doctorow documents
AI’s creeping influence is in healthcare, where AI agents surveil contract
nurses and offer jobs at lower rates to nurse’s with lower credit scores (with
higher debt). As a field that requires continuing education and rewards advanced
degrees while also requiring passing rigorous certification exams, it makes
sense that nurses would probably have more loan debt than some other fields,
but the idea that health care companies are partnering with AI technology firms
to cut costs on care and staffing is wrong on many different levels. Doctorow also
finds examples of radiologists and other specialists whose skills and training have
been supplanted by AI reviews of scans and other reports. The findings indicate
that serving as a reverse centaur to the AI review, that is reviewing the AI
findings, has diminished the accuracy of these health care specialists to a large
extent in the same way that other areas like TSA workers have shown diminished
results, or an accountability sink, in spotting positive results when AI misses
them.
I also appreciated Doctorow’s notes about AI and creativity,
noting how AI art lacks a soul and does not deserve copyrighting. He gets a
little in the weeds about the history of copyright law and how it applies to
artists, while also examining how studios, record labels, and other large
corporations have exploited copyright laws to benefit themselves over artists,
but Doctorow seems clear in his argument against AI art. He also offers hope and
a sense of community to push back against all of the hype and false promises of
AI. He uses the Writer’s Guild strike from 2023. As he notes, the Writer’s
Guild banded together to fight against AI replacing writers. They didn’t push
against AI in totality but rather to replace writers and being able to use AI
as needed. It’s this sense of strength in numbers, aligned with pushing back
against dehumanizing and fear mongering that AI companies are stressing to hype
up their products. While I’ll need to go back and re-read some of the chapters,
this is an important and timely book; one that will provide a deeper dive into
a wildly misunderstood technology and topic. It’s also important to check out
the facts and details now, since there’s
probably a good segment of the population using AI somewhat mindlessly and without
much intention beyond entertainment or completing tasks quickly. I was amazed
at the depth and breadth of this book, while also being relatively brief.
Doctorow covers a lot of history and uses many different familiar (and often
humorous) examples to make the complicated elements of AI technology and its
business models more familiar and comprehensible. Highly recommended!
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