AFormer Google CEO Eric Schmidt can tell you that AI is hard to sell these days. Last month, he tried to talk about the AI revolution during a commencement speech at the University of Arizona and was booed by students about to enter the AI-ridden job market. His restlessness was telling.
Schmidt isn’t the only AI booster who’s recently crashed among students due to growing popular backlash. Every week there’s a new story about an author, publisher or academic who has tarnished their reputation by using an unreliable chatbot. Most American voters are opposed to building huge, resource-consuming new datacenters. A majority believes AI will negatively impact not only jobs but also creativity and human relationships. In some circles, to say that AI has any benefits is akin to saying that biological warfare is discredited. As a New York Times column keep it: “AI populism is here. And no one is ready.”
A decade ago, when people like Elon Musk and Sam Altman were still enthusiastic supporters of heavily regulated ethical AI (ha!), the most widely discussed downside of the technology had an apocalyptic glamour: superintelligent AI could one day destroy the human race. But since Altman’s company OpenAI released its big language model ChatGPT in November 2022, AI’s public image has taken a nosedive: It is now widely viewed as a job crusher, fact mangler, slop maker, privacy invader, climate trasher, and a general pain in the neck. Never before had a new technology been thrust down our throats with such speed, determination and complete disregard for public opinion. Cory Doctorow’s book explains why clearly.
Doctorow, who writes as he speaks and speaks as he writes, is not someone who needs AI to fill the pages. By my count, this is his 36th book, counting fiction, nonfiction, and graphic novels, right after last year’s Enshitification. That controversy expanded on his own neologism to describe why Big Tech’s ‘grow or die’ business model has made online platforms so much worse. This blatant contempt for its customers is one of the reasons AI is so reviled. The Silicon Valley elites who are telling us that AI will change the world are the last people we trust to change the world for the better. As a technology, AI has advantages and disadvantages; As a rushed project of a greedy elite, it is transparently obscene.
Doctorow quickly follows up this entertaining primer with his usual vivid analogies, righteous anger, and sarcastic asides – OpenAI, currently valued at $852 billion, is basically dismissed as “a hugely overrated and terrible firm.” But as the central metaphor suggests, this is no anti-AI polemic and Doctorow is no purist. In automation theory, a centaur is a person who is assisted by a machine, whether using hearing aids or driving a car. A reverse centaur is a person whose freedom is diminished by the demands of the machine, like an Amazon warehouse worker. The technology of AI theoretically allows every employee to become a centaur, but the business model demands the opposite. Take radiology. In the Centaur scenario, a human radiologist works with an AI radiologist to perform a more accurate analysis, but this costs the hospital money. In the reverse centaur version, AI radiologists demote living humans to the level of result-checking drones, which are more likely to make mistakes. Very cheap, but you see the problem.
Doctorow, who has written several science fiction novels, cites one of the defining messages of the genre: “The most important thing about a gadget is not what it does, but what it does it for and who it does it for.” Just as the Luddites were not angry at the machines themselves, most anti-AI sentiment is actually anti-capitalism rather than anti-technology. Doctorow uses a framework that 19th-century socialists would recognize: unless workers form a union to fight back, owners will use every trick to avoid paying workers more.
The problem with AI business is that it promotes encroachment. Tech companies’ incredible price-to-sales ratios are based on the promise of future growth, hence high-stakes bets like the metaverse or failed social media platform Google+. The huge valuation of the AI sector is largely derived from the wages of the human workers it is supposed to replace – Morgan Stanley Prediction This would add about a trillion dollars per year to the S&P 500. And because the tech owners’ net worth is tied to stock price rather than actual profits, they have a personal incentive to keep investors excited: AI could be a money pit today, but just you wait. If the investor is the real target of the AI industry’s marketing, the consumer merely becomes a part of the hype machine. Individuals using chatbots are not so much a significant source of revenue as uninformed salespeople pushing the message that machines will replace us any day now, as are journalists who cover snake-oil absurdities like AI-generated “actor” Tilly Norwood.
Doctorow despises the doctrine of “inevitability”, which he explains through Margaret Thatcher’s slogan “There is no alternative”. When Eric Schmidt told students, “(If) someone offers you a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask which seat, you just sit down,” it was inevitability. The idea is that revolutionary new technology gives you, the employee or the consumer, no choice but to engage with it. Yet technology has been shaped by the choices of people like Schmidt, and they are not at all inevitable. If you give people an ultimatum – use our product or suffer – booing is the least you can expect.
One thing that should give anti-AI fanatics pause is Doctorow’s suggestion that the industry is deliberately channeling outrage about things like AI-generated art as propaganda: If people are so horrified and angry, then the promise of replacing human labor must be genuine. In this book, at least, he is not enthused by headline-grabbing concerns, whether existential risk or AI psychosis, deepfake porn or election disinformation, because these are unintended consequences. His target is the revenue model and the bubble it creates: “To be an effective AI critic, you have to hit the source of AI’s power, which is the investment capital it attracts.”
It sure looks like a bubble. Last year, two studies found that 90% If a product is advertised as AI-enabled, any of us are less likely to use the product 95% Generative AI pilot schemes are failing. In fact, many companies have been forced to hastily re-hire the employees they replaced with inadequate chatbots. For Gen Z, AI has favorability, according to NBC survey rating Of minus 44. As Doctorow writes, “Tech platforms are desperate to convince Wall Street that you love AI, which is very different from convincing You That you love AI.”
Unfortunately, the seven Big Tech companies alone account for one-third of the value of the US stock market, so the pain of watching the bubble burst will soon turn bitter – it is likely to cause an economic shock worse than 2008 and 2020. This is the story of a remarkable new technology that can be introduced by the worst people, for the worst reasons, in the most careless, self-serving way. These are not machines you should be angry with.
