If you’ve ever used a bike, you’ve been a centaur – a human whose natural abilities have been enhanced by a piece of technology. But if you’ve ever used modern artificial intelligence, you may be a reverse centaur – someone who has done more for the machine than the other way around.
That’s the premise of The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late, the latest non-fiction book by Cory Doctorow.
As it stands, he argues, the tech industry has been selling investors on the promise that AI will soon be able to replace vast swaths of human jobs, thereby saving employers untold millions or billions of dollars.
But in reality, AI’s capabilities have been hugely overstated while the resultant investment gold rush has irretrievably sunk billions of dollars and caused immense ecological harm via related data centres.
AI will be a useful tool, says Doctorow, a prolific science-fiction author, journalist, digital rights activist and credited coiner of the term “enshittification,” but policy makers and the public need to be able to see through the bubble being peddled by tech bros for their own interests.
He returns to the Do Not Pass Go podcast to discuss how policy makers, investors and the public can best use AI, rather than have it use them.
