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As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt could tell you, AI is a hard sell these days. Last month, he tried talking up the AI revolution during a commencement address at the University of Arizona and was loudly booed by students about to enter an AI-ravaged job market. His discombobulation was telling.
Schmidt is not the only AI booster to crash out with students recently as the popular backlash grows. Every week brings a new story about some writer, publisher or academic who has torched their reputation by using an unreliable chatbot. Most US voters are opposed to the construction of vast, resource-guzzling new datacentres. A majority believe AI will negatively impact not just jobs but creativity and human relationships. In some quarters, saying that AI has any benefits at all is akin to saying that biological warfare gets a bad rap. As a New York Times column put it: “AI populism is here. And no one is ready.”
A decade ago, when the likes of Elon Musk and Sam Altman were still passionate advocates of heavily regulated ethical AI (ha!), the technology’s most widely discussed downside had an apocalyptic glamour: superintelligent AI could one day destroy the human race. But since Altman’s company OpenAI released its large language model ChatGPT in November 2022, AI’s public image has fallen to earth: it’s now widely seen as a job crusher, a fact mangler, a slop maker, a privacy invader, a climate trasher and a general pain in the neck. Never before has a new technology been rammed down our throats with such speed, determination and complete disregard for public opinion. Cory Doctorow’s book pithily explains why.
Doctorow, who writes like he talks and talks like he writes, is not somebody who needs AI to fill pages. Counting fiction, nonfiction and graphic novels, this is, by my calculation, his 36th book, hard on the heels of last year’s Enshittification. That polemic expanded on his own neologism to describe why Big Tech’s grow-or-die business model has made online platforms so much worse. This tawdry contempt for its customers is one of the reasons AI is so reviled. The Silicon Valley oligarchs 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 pros and cons; as a rushed project of rapacious elites, it is transparently obscene.
Doctorow speeds through this entertaining primer with his usual vivid analogies, righteous ire and snarky asides – OpenAI, currently valued at $852bn, is parenthetically dismissed as “a grossly overhyped and terrible firm”. But as the central metaphor illustrates, this is not an anti-AI polemic and Doctorow is no purist. A centaur, in automation theory, is someone assisted by a machine, whether using a hearing aid or driving a car. A reverse centaur is someone whose freedom is diminished by the demands of a machine, like an Amazon warehouse worker. The technology of AI theoretically allows every worker to be a centaur, but the business model demands the reverse. Take radiology. In the centaur scenario, a human radiologist works with an AI radiologist to produce more accurate analysis, but that costs the hospital money. In the reverse centaur version, the AI radiologist demotes the surviving humans to the level of results-checking drones who are more likely to make mistakes. Much cheaper, but you see the problem.
Doctorow, who has written several science fiction novels, cites one of the genre’s defining messages: “The most important thing about the gadget isn’t what it does, it’s who it does it for and who it does it to.” Just as the Luddites weren’t angry with machines per se, most anti-AI sentiment is really anti-capitalist rather than anti-tech. Doctorow uses a framework a 19th-century socialist would recognise: the bosses will pull every trick to avoid paying workers more unless workers unionise to fight back.
The problem with the AI business is the same thing that drives enshittification. The improbable price-to-sales ratios of tech companies are based on the promise of future growth, hence high-stakes bets like the Metaverse or the failed social media platform Google+. The AI sector’s colossal valuation derives largely from the salaries of the human workers it aims to replace – Morgan Stanley predicts it will add almost a trillion dollars a year to the S&P 500. And because the net worth of tech bosses is tied to stock value rather than actual profits, they have a personal incentive to keep investors excited: today AI may be a money pit, but just you wait. If the investor is the real target of the AI industry’s marketing, then the consumer becomes simply a cog in the hype machine. Individuals using chatbots are not so much a crucial revenue stream as unwitting salespeople for the message that the machines will replace us any day now, as are journalists who cover such snake-oil absurdities as the AI-generated “actor” Tilly Norwood.
Doctorow despises the doctrine of “inevitabilism”, which he explains by way of Margaret Thatcher’s slogan “there is no alternative”. When Eric Schmidt told students, “[If] someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on,” that was inevitabilism. The idea is that revolutionary new technology gives you, the worker or consumer, no choice but to get on board. Yet the technology is shaped by the choices of people like Schmidt, and they aren’t inevitable at all. If you give people an ultimatum – use our product or suffer – then booing is the very least you can expect.
One thing to give anti-AI hardliners pause is Doctorow’s suggestion that the industry is deliberately juicing outrage about things like AI-generated art as a form of hype: if people are this scared and angered, then the promise of replacing human labour must be real. In this book, at least, he isn’t animated by the headline-grabbing concerns, whether existential risk or AI psychosis, deepfake porn or election disinformation, because those are unintended consequences. His target is the revenue model and the bubble it has created: “To be an effective AI critic, you need to strike at the source of AI’s power, which is the investment capital it attracts.”
It certainly looks like a bubble. Last year, two studies found that 90% of us are less likely to use a product if it is advertised as AI-enabled, and that 95% of generative AI pilot schemes are failing. In fact, many companies have been forced to hastily rehire employees that they had replaced with inadequate chatbots. For gen Zs, according to an NBC poll, AI has a favourability rating of minus 44. As Doctorow writes, “The tech platforms are desperate to convince Wall Street that you love AI, which is very different from convincing you that you love AI.”
Unfortunately, seven big tech companies alone account for one-third of the US stock market’s value, so the schadenfreude of watching the bubble burst would soon turn bitter – it is likely to cause an economic shock comparable to those of 2008 and 2020. This is the story of a remarkable new technology rolled out in the most reckless, self-serving way one could imagine, by the worst people, for the worst reasons. It’s not the machines you should be angry with.
