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AAs former Google CEO Eric Schmidt will tell you, AI is a tough sell these days. Last month, he tried to talk about the evolution of AI during a starting address at the University of Arizona and was widely scorned by students who were about to enter a job market ravaged by AI. His frustration was telling.
Schmidt isn’t the only AI advocate who has fallen out with academics recently as the popular backlash grows. Every week brings a new story about an author, publisher or other student who has ruined their reputation by using unreliable chatbots. Most US voters oppose the construction of new, larger, more attractive warehouses. A many believe AI will disrupt not only jobs, but also creativity and human relations. In some areas, saying that AI has any value is like saying that biological warfare gets a bad rap. As part of the New York Times install it: “AI populism has arrived. And no one is ready.”
Ten years ago, when Elon Musk and Sam Altman were still strong advocates of moral AI (ha!), the most talked about technology had an apocalyptic beauty: superintelligent AI could one day destroy the human race. But since Altman’s company OpenAI released its big ChatGPT in November 2022, the public image of AI has fallen to the ground: it is now seen as a job breaker, a realist, a slop maker, a privacy invader, a climate burner and a pain in the neck. Never before have new technological innovations been shoved down our throats with such speed, determination and disregard for public opinion. Cory Doctorow’s book explains why.
Doctorow, who writes like he talks and talks like he writes, is not someone who needs an AI to turn pages. Counting fiction, non-fiction and graphic novels, this is, by my count, his 36th book, hard on the heels of last year. Enshittification. The debate grew on its neologism to explain why the growth-or-death business of Big Tech has made Internet platforms so bad. This disdain for its customers is one of the reasons why AI is criticized. The oligarchs of Silicon Valley tell us that AI will change the world and the last people we trust to change the world for the better. As a technology, AI has its pros and cons; as a runaway project of a ruthless elite, it is disgusting.
Doctorow runs through this interesting game with its vivid comparisons, righteous indignation and unpleasant aspects – OpenAI, which is currently valued at $852bn, is dismissed as an “excessive and dangerous company”. But as the central illustration suggests, this is not an anti-AI story and Doctorow is no purist. A centaur, in automation theory, is a person assisted by a machine, whether using a hearing aid or driving a car. A reverse centaur is a person whose freedom is limited by the demands of the machine, like an Amazon warehouse worker. AI technology technically allows every worker to be a centaur, but the business model demands that change. Take radiology. In centaur’s case, a human radiologist works with an AI radiologist to make an accurate analysis, but this costs the hospital money. In the reverse centaur version, an AI radiologist takes the survivors down to the level of analyzing the results of the drones that are prone to error. Very cheap, but you see the problem.
Doctorow, who has written several science fiction books, quoted one of the brand’s messages as saying: “The most important thing about this device is not what it does, but who does it and who does it.” Just as the Luddites didn’t rage against the machines at play, most anti-AI sentiments are anti-capitalist rather than anti-technological. Doctorow uses a framework that a 20th-century socialist would recognize: employers will pull any trick to avoid overpaying workers unless the union fights back.
The problem with AI business is the very thing that drives entertainment. The impossibility of selling the prices of technology companies is based on the promise of future growth, hence high bets such as Metaverse or the failed Google+ platform. The main valuation of the AI sector comes from the salary of the people who want to change it – Morgan Stanley. they predict it will add almost a trillion dollars a year to the S & P 500. And because the top technology bosses are tied to the price of the product instead of the real profit, they have a personal incentive to keep investors happy: today AI can be a money pit, but wait. If the investor is the real target of AI companies’ marketing, then the consumer is just a cog in the hype machine. People who use chatbots are not as important a way to make money as marketers who don’t know the message that machines will replace us every day, just like the journalists who write snake oil lies like the AI-created “player” Tilly Norwood.
Doctorow scorns the theory of “inevitabilism”, which he describes in reference to Margaret Thatcher’s words “there is no other way”. When Eric Schmidt told the students, “(If) someone offers you a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask which seat it is, you just get on,” that was inevitable. The idea is that the new revolutionary technology gives you, the employee or the consumer, no choice but to ride. Yet technology is shaped by the decisions of people like Schmidt, and it is not at all inevitable. If you give people a decision – use our product or suffer – then the blow is the least you can expect.
One thing that gives anti-AI hardliners pause is Doctorow’s idea that the industry is purposely hyping things like AI-generated art as a kind of magic: if people are scared and angry, then the promise of changing the human profession must be real. In this book, perhaps, they are not affected by the anxiety of the topic, whether it is being vulnerable or AI psychosis, deep pornography or interfering with the decision, because these are unexpected consequences. His goal is the way to get money and the bubble he created: “To be an opponent of AI, you have to hit the source of the power of AI, which is the money that attracts it.”
It certainly looks like a bubble. Last year, two studies found that 90% in our case we cannot use a product if it is advertised as being powered by AI, that is 95% about generative AIs driving failed plans. Instead, many companies are forced to quickly hire employees they replaced with inadequate chatbots. For gen Zs, according to an NBC survey, AI has an advantage rate from 44. As Doctorow writes, “Technology platforms are desperate to convince Wall Street that you like AI, which is very different from convincing. you that you like AI.”
Unfortunately, the seven largest technology companies alone account for a third of the value of the US market, so the schadenfreude of seeing an explosion in the near future will be painful – it could cause economic shocks similar to those of 2008 and 2020. This is a story of an amazing technology that was released very carelessly, for the worst reasons that people can think of. It’s not a machine you should be angry with.
