Cory Doctorow’s speech at a University of Washington lecture late last year is worth revisiting amid the artificial intelligence boom. The talk on “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticising AI” by the science fiction author and technology commentator is based on his new book due out around the middle of this year.
The title refers to a tech industry term for a human empowering or enabling a machine, instead of the reverse. Such jobs are largely menial and degrading, but they do provide companies with an “accountability sink” – a human link in the chain to blame when AI inevitably gets things wrong.
Doctorow, a former startup creator, knows computing well enough to say that “AI can’t do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job”.
And tech companies will create AI to convince investors that they are still growth companies. The vast majority of growth companies are in the tech sector.
“If you are an exec at a dominant company with a growth stock, you have to live in constant fear that the market will decide that you’re not likely to grow any further,” Doctorow says. He cites Amazon.com, Inc.’s US$240 billion one-day selloff in 2022, when the company warned that its growth rate might slow.
Hence the incentive for tech companies to hype one proposition after another to sell growth stories to investors.
Many, as Doctorow notes, are now virtual monopolies or oligopolies, but “once the market decides that you aren’t a growth stock, once you become mature, your stock is revalued”. Against this, monopoly status matters little. He highlights an expected disruption in the labour market when expert staff are fired and replaced with AI.
There are many more aspects to the story, and Doctorow’s analysis probably won’t burst the bubble. But the fact that a respected futurologist who knows the tech business inside out is saying that it is highly damaging, both in implementation and its eventual collapse, is something investors should consider.
