Cory Doctorow's latest polemic, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, delivers a vivid and entertaining takedown of the economics driving the artificial intelligence revolution. The book argues that widespread public anger toward AI is not about the technology itself but the rapacious business model behind it.
Public backlash against AI grows
As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt discovered last month during a commencement address at the University of Arizona, AI is a hard sell. Students about to enter an AI-ravaged job market loudly booed his talk. Schmidt's discombobulation was telling, according to Doctorow, who writes that AI boosters are increasingly crashing out with audiences as the popular backlash intensifies.
Every week brings a new story about a writer, publisher or academic who has torched their reputation by using an unreliable chatbot. Most US voters oppose the construction of vast, resource-guzzling new datacentres, and a majority believe AI will negatively impact not just jobs but creativity and human relationships. In some quarters, saying AI has any benefits is akin to praising biological warfare. As a New York Times column put it: 'AI populism is here. And no one is ready.'
From existential risk to everyday annoyance
A decade ago, when Elon Musk and Sam Altman still advocated for heavily regulated ethical AI, the technology's most discussed downside had apocalyptic glamour: superintelligent AI could destroy humanity. But since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, AI's public image has fallen to earth. It is now widely seen as a job crusher, fact mangler, slop maker, privacy invader, climate trasher and general pain in the neck. Never before has a new technology been rammed down our throats with such speed and disregard for public opinion, Doctorow explains.
Doctorow, who writes like he talks and talks like he writes, has produced his 36th book, hard on the heels of last year's Enshittification. That polemic expanded on his neologism to describe why Big Tech's grow-or-die business model has made online platforms worse. This tawdry contempt for customers is one reason AI is so reviled. The Silicon Valley oligarchs telling us AI will change the world are the last people we trust to change it for the better. As a technology, AI has pros and cons; as a rushed project of rapacious elites, it is transparently obscene.
The centaur metaphor
Doctorow speeds through this primer with vivid analogies, righteous ire and snarky asides – OpenAI, currently valued at $852bn, is dismissed as 'a grossly overhyped and terrible firm'. But this is not an anti-AI polemic. A centaur, in automation theory, is someone assisted by a machine, such as using a hearing aid or driving a car. A reverse centaur is someone whose freedom is diminished by a machine's demands, like an Amazon warehouse worker. AI theoretically allows every worker to be a centaur, but the business model demands the reverse. In radiology, a centaur scenario pairs a human radiologist with an AI for more accurate analysis, but that costs the hospital money. In the reverse centaur version, the AI demotes surviving humans to results-checking drones more likely to make mistakes. Much cheaper, but you see the problem.
Doctorow, a science fiction novelist, cites the genre's defining message: 'The most important thing about the gadget isn't what it does, it's who it does it for and who it does it to.' Just as the Luddites were not angry with machines per se, most anti-AI sentiment is really anti-capitalist rather than anti-tech. He uses a framework a 19th-century socialist would recognise: bosses will pull every trick to avoid paying workers more unless workers unionise to fight back.
The bubble and inevitabilism
The problem with the AI business is the same thing driving enshittification. The improbable price-to-sales ratios of tech companies are based on promises of future growth, hence high-stakes bets like the Metaverse or Google+. The AI sector's colossal valuation derives largely from the salaries of human workers it aims to replace – Morgan Stanley predicts it will add almost a trillion dollars a year to the S&P 500. Because tech bosses' net worth is tied to stock value rather than actual profits, they have a personal incentive to keep investors excited: today AI may be a money pit, but just you wait. If the investor is the real target of AI marketing, then the consumer becomes a cog in the hype machine. Individuals using chatbots are unwitting salespeople for the message that machines will replace us any day now, as are journalists covering absurdities like the AI-generated 'actor' Tilly Norwood.
Doctorow despises the doctrine of 'inevitabilism', which he explains via Margaret Thatcher's slogan 'there is no alternative'. When Eric Schmidt told students, '[If] someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on,' that was inevitabilism. The idea is that revolutionary technology gives you no choice but to get on board. Yet the technology is shaped by choices, and they are not inevitable at all. If you give people an ultimatum – use our product or suffer – then booing is the least you can expect.
Juicing outrage
One thing to give anti-AI hardliners pause is Doctorow's suggestion that the industry is deliberately juicing outrage about AI-generated art as a form of hype: if people are this scared, the promise of replacing human labour must be real. In this book, he is not animated by headline-grabbing concerns like existential risk, AI psychosis, deepfake porn or election disinformation, because those are unintended consequences. His target is the revenue model and the bubble it has created: 'To be an effective AI critic, you need to strike at the source of AI's power, which is the investment capital it attracts.'
It certainly looks like a bubble. Last year, two studies found that 90% of us are less likely to use a product advertised as AI-enabled, and 95% of generative AI pilot schemes are failing. Many companies have been forced to rehire employees they replaced with inadequate chatbots. For Gen Z, according to an NBC poll, AI has a favourability rating of minus 44. As Doctorow writes, 'The tech platforms are desperate to convince Wall Street that you love AI, which is very different from convincing you that you love AI.'
Economic shock ahead
Unfortunately, seven big tech companies account for one-third of the US stock market's value, so watching the bubble burst would soon turn bitter – it is likely to cause an economic shock comparable to those of 2008 and 2020. This is the story of a remarkable new technology rolled out in the most reckless, self-serving way imaginable, by the worst people, for the worst reasons. It is not the machines you should be angry with.
The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late is published by Verso (£16.99).
