Cory Doctorow is back with a new book that tries to separate hype from reality. The Reverse Centaur Guide to Life After AI follows up on his earlier work Enshittification, this time zeroing in on the AI industry and its contradictions.
Doctorow coined the term reverse centaur to describe a person serving as a peripheral for a machine. A regular centaur is a human augmented by technology. A reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body. He gives the example of an Amazon delivery driver surrounded by AI cameras, essentially functioning as an appendage to the delivery van.
The book argues that the AI industry is creating more reverse centaurs. Doctorow points to the example of firing nine out of ten radiologists and letting AI make diagnoses, with the remaining radiologist just checking the AI work and taking the blame for errors.
He is not anti-AI. He uses AI tools and sees genuine potential in many of them. But he is alarmed by the hype, the enormous capital expenditures, the unrealistic expectations, and the potentially catastrophic economic consequences when the bubble pops.
Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the stock market. Doctorow warns that when the investment mania halts, most AI models will disappear because it will not be economical to keep the data centers running. He calls AI the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok.
On the metaverse versus AI spending, Doctorow notes that Meta wasted $60 billion on the metaverse but has spent $150 billion on AI in the last three years, with plans to spend another $150 billion this year. Global AI capital expenditure has doubled from $700 billion to $1.4 trillion since he started writing the book.
