Life After AI
with Cory Doctorow
Fall Festival In Person Streaming Non-Fict Science
[Doctorow] resembles the great rock critics of an earlier era, a high-tech Greil Marcus or even a Lester Bangs.
Join us for a deep dive into the reality of AI with Cory Doctorow and his latest international bestseller, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence?Before It's Too Late.
In modern tech parlance, a centaur is a person who is able to use technology to be a better, more productive version of themself. A reverse centaur is a person who is forced by technology to work at an inhuman pace?a driver made to deliver all day long, nonstop; a warehouse worker made to work without food or bathroom breaks; a programmer made to crank out impossible amounts of code.
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI is not another anti-AI screed. Cory Doctorow uses AI in his work every day. As a creative person, he has no moral or dogmatic issue with AI?he thinks the technology is useful, even exciting, and full of potential. And yet.
AI has arrived surrounded by unprecedented hype driven by a tech industry desperate to maintain its unprecedented valuation based on its own promises of endless financial growth. Despite the fact that almost all of AI’s real-world implementations have proved underwhelming, AI is projected to be worth more than $16 trillion?a number that only makes sense if AI replaces vast swathes of the wage-earning human workforce. To justify that level of “value,” every story about AI must be presented as inevitable, world-changing disruption. Even the tales of the robot apocalypse are a calculated attempt to bolster the fearsome power of AI.
In The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI?as he so successfully did in Enshittification?Doctorow recounts both how we found ourselves in this dire situation and how we can get through it, to a life “after” AI in which the tools work for us, not the other way around.
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