Cory Doctorow's "Reverse Centaur" book — why AI is hell on workers
by Mark Frauenfelder · Boing BoingA centaur is a person assisted by a machine — anything from a bicycle to a spell-checker. A reverse centaur, Cory Doctorow says, is "a person who has been conscripted to assist a machine." Most of the people AI is being inflicted on today are reverse centaurs — warehouse pickers, gig drivers, and coders forced to do the work of six laid-off colleagues at a pace that makes good work impossible, then blamed when the AI output is defective.
Cory Doctorow, who was the first co-editor at Boing Boing, launched a Kickstarter for his new book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. It blew past its $10,000 goal in days.
From the Kickstarter:
I wrote this book because I was totally fed up with how much space AI was taking up in the world, in our conversations, in our policy, and in our economy. In a reasonable world, we'd call these AI tools "plug-ins" and we'd use them or not, based on our assessment of whether they make sense for our use. Employers wouldn't be spying on their employees to make sure they were using AI. Schools wouldn't be determined to teach "AI literacy" to our kids. Governments wouldn't be handing over the last drop of potable water and the last Watt of power in our grid to speculative data centers.
Some AI uses are fine. Others are foolish. Some are incredibly destructive. But AI as a technology just isn't that important. Sure, some of this stuff makes for a cool demo, but this is tech, there's a new cool demo every couple years.
What is important is the indiscriminate, uncritical way we're integrating this defective, wildly unprofitable technology into our governments and businesses. We're replacing people who do jobs with AI that does those jobs badly, and then, when those AI companies (inevitably) go bust, we'll have nothing. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our civilization, and our descendants will be fixing the mess for generations.
He's selling the DRM-free audiobook, ebook, and print edition on Kickstarter because Audible — Amazon's 90%-market-share audiobook monopoly — refuses to carry any title that isn't permanently locked to its platform. It's Cory's tenth audiobook Kickstarter since 2020. The book comes out June 16 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US and Verso in the UK.
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