Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, The: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late (HB)

The new book from the author of the bestselling title Enshittification. In this gripping new title, Doctorow examines the exploitative aspect of AI at the hands of billionaires and how we can get out of it. As we enter the age of AI, we are in danger of being reduced to what Cory Doctorow dubs the 'reverse centaur'. With that term he conjures a human being conscripted as the assistant to a dominant machine. It could be a driver made to deliver nonstop, all day long; a warehouse worker packing shelves without bathroom or food breaks; or a programmer reviewing impossible amounts of AI-produced code. Don't fall for the hype! The billionaires managing the rise of AI are putting on a command performance for the bosses and investors, not for the ordinary people who might use the products. When this latest tech bubble bursts, will there be something useful for us in the wreckage? In The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, Doctorow examines why we find ourselves in this mess and how we can get out of it. Life after AI should mean the tools work for us, not the other way around. Contents: BEFORE: How We Got Here; Against Inevitabilism; Really Weird Math. BUBBLE: The Funny Math Gets Dangerous; AI "Art"; AI Has a Labor Issue (Not a Copyright Issue); What Should Creative Workers Do About AI?; Actual, Existing AI; Absent Indians and Gujarati People Typing; Agentic AI and Other Absurdities. AFTER: Bubbles and Productive Residues; AI After the Bubble. "Cory Doctorow is the most lucid and generous guide I know of, and this book - ostensibly about AI, but more broadly about the new world of hyper-capitalism and high tech - is stunning in its clarity and breadth of vision. In trying to keep some kind of grasp on what is going on in the world, I read Doctorow obsessively." - Brian Eno.