Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI

CORY DOCTOROW is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. He is the author of many books. He writes nonfiction policy books such as The Internet Con and Chokepoint Capitalism, as well as science fiction for adults - Red Team Blues and The Lost Cause - and for young adults - Little Brother. He has been inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame and has been honored with the Arthur C. Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Award and the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. He was made an honorary Doctor of Laws by York University and an Honorary Doctor of Computer Science by the Open University. For a quarter century, he has been an activist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He co-founded the UK Open Rights Group and holds visiting appointments at the Open University, MIT, Cornell, and the University of North Carolina. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Burbank, California.

We live in a jungle of new tools and new fables about them - and It's genuinely confusing. Utopians battle it out with dystopians and the rest of us oscillate between awe and shock. We search for reliable guides who can tell us what's going on and where it might take us. Cory Doctorow is the most lucid and generous guide I know of, and this book - ostensibly about AI, but more broadly about the new world of hyper-capitalism and high tech - is stunning in its clarity and breadth of vision. In trying to keep some kind of grasp on what is going on in the world, I read Doctorow obsessively.

• Introduction BEFOREHow We Got Here Against Inevitabilism Really Weird Math BUBBLEThe Funny Math Gets Dangerous AI "Art" AI Has a Labor Issue (Not a Copyright Issue) What Should Creative Workers Do About AI? Actual, Existing AI Absent Indians and Gujarati People Typing Agentic AI and Other AbsurditiesAFTERBubbles and Productive Residues AI After the Bubble