{"product_id":"the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai","title":"The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhether you want to criticise, kill, or use AI, you have to get through the hype and uncover the real story. Start with labour: in automation theory, a centaur is a person who chooses to use technology to help them do the things that matter to them. A reverse centaur is a person who has been conscripted to serve as a helper for a machine, at an inhuman, machine 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. As Doctorow says: it s not enough to ask what the technology does - we have to understand who it s doing it for and who it s doing it to.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe intended audience for AI hype isn t the people who are forced to use AI. The AI show is a performance staged for bosses and investors. . Investment bankers claim AI will 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.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAnything that can t go on forever eventually stops. When the AI bubble bursts, what will we salvage? Is there something in the wreckage that everyday people will find useful? 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.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Cory Doctorow","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50148921114867,"sku":"9781836745884","price":34.99,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0634\/4284\/5939\/files\/978183674588420260602-2-y3q2ud.jpg?v=1785395441","url":"https:\/\/www.harryhartog.com.au\/products\/the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai","provider":"Harry Hartog Bookseller","version":"1.0","type":"link"}