Book review: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow
No subject has made me go more hot and cold than AI.
Some days, I open Gemini, Claude or ChatGPT, set tough tasks and am dumbstruck by the speed and accuracy of the results. Wow, this is the future, I think to myself. On other days, I ask something simple and they get it all wrong. Wow, this is utter rubbish.
Later, I read that AI solved a theorem that had left scientists scratching their heads, or progressed a new treatment for cancer. The future. Then a report into its adoption finds it has delivered zero productivity gains for most firms, or a company that replaced staff with chatbots had to quietly rehire them because the bots failed. Utter rubbish.
The constant flip-flop is exhausting – but I am far from alone. I’ve spoken to colleagues, consultants, regulators, even tech investors who confess similar mood swings. Which is why I gleefully took shelter in the warm certainty offered by Cory Doctorow’s new book. Doctorow is famous for his skepticism of Silicon Valley, and, no surprises, he goes all guns blazing on its latest technological frontier.
AI is, for the large part, rubbish, Doctorow says. Most of what it promises is wildly overstated by executives desperate for more cash to keep the lights on at loss-making ventures. AI won’t take all our jobs because, in most cases, it simply isn’t good enough. And it won’t ever be good enough, because they’ll go bust before they can get there, such is the eyewatering capex involved in powering every model advance.
Well, that’s that then. Except – is it? There is a breezy confidence – an arrogance, even – in Doctorow’s thesis that makes me queasy. The delivery has a familiar cadence, the arguments a familiar inevitability, to the very AI execs Doctorow rails against, and I am suspicious for the same reason.
Sure, there are tell-tale signs of an AI bubble – but did the dotcom crash kill the internet? Did railway mania kill the train? We are far too early in this technology’s evolution to make meaningful predictions. Unpleasant though it may be, going hot and cold remains the best way to stay sane.
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow is available from 23 June, published by Verso Books. Hardback £16.99.