How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots - Ars Technica
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Last year we featured a lengthy interview with tech journalist/science fiction author Cory Doctorow about his book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It. The prolific Doctorow is back with a provocative new book that serves as a follow-up of sorts, focusing on AI and related issues: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.
Doctorow doesn’t actually enjoy talking about AI, but he’s constantly being asked to comment on it. “I made the tactical error of being sick of talking about AI,” Doctorow told Ars. “So I wrote a book about why I think it’s a dumb thing to keep asking people to talk about, and now I have to talk about it.” Reverse Centaur is Doctorow’s attempt to “sort out the bullshit from the material reality.”
In automation theory, per Doctorow, a “centaur” describes a human augmented with a technology, like machine learning, or even just driving a car, or using autocomplete. A reverse centaur “is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine,” Doctorow said in a speech last December. He gave the example of an Amazon delivery driver, surrounded by AI cameras monitoring their driving, who essentially serves as a peripheral to the delivery van.
Being a centaur is generally viewed as a positive thing; few people relish being a reverse centaur. And yet the AI industry seems intent on using those tools to create more reverse centaurs. It’s one thing to incorporate AI tools in the medical field to help radiologists process X-ray images and spot possible tumors they might otherwise have missed. It’s quite another to fire nine out of 10 radiologists and let AI make the diagnoses, with the remaining radiologist solely responsible for checking the AI’s work—and, ultimately, taking the blame for any errors.
Doctorow is not virulently anti-AI; he uses AI tools regularly and sees potential in many of those tools as useful plugins or cool new apps. But he is nonetheless alarmed at all the hype surrounding AI, the enormous capital expenditures, the unrealistic expectations and self-serving messaging, and the potentially catastrophic economic consequences when the AI bubble inevitably pops.
“The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things,” Doctorow said. “It wants expensive ‘disruptive’ things: big foundational models that lose billions of dollars every year. When the AI investment mania halts, most of the models are going to disappear, because it just won’t be economical to keep the data centers running. The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the stock market, and they endlessly pass around the same $100 billion IOU. AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more.”
Naturally Doctorow has some ideas about how to push back against the prevailing narrative of AI’s inevitability. Ars caught up with him to learn more.
Macmillan Publishing
Macmillan Publishing
Macmillan Publishing
Macmillan Publishing
Macmillan Publishing
Macmillan Publishing
Ars Technica: We touched briefly on AI last year when we chatted about your prior book. Reverse Centaur seems like a natural outgrowth of that.
Cory Doctorow : Enshittification is primarily a thesis about how firms in the absence of constraint get tilted to the bad, but it’s also a thesis about how the constraint of competition, when it falls away, produces all kinds of perverse outcomes. One of those perverse outcomes is that firms that have saturated their markets can no longer grow, and they have to find other markets. There’s a ticking bomb when you saturate your market because it’s only a matter of time until investors start to worry that you’re not a growth stock, you’re a mature stock. Mature stocks trade at a small fraction of the multiple that growth stocks do.
There’s an enormous amount of liquidity in growth stocks, which means that you can use growth stocks to grow. You can buy other companies with shares, and shares are an endogenous substance that you make on the premises by...