The AI Con
How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want
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- $249.00
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- $249.00
Descripción editorial
'The blizzard of excitement, misinformation and pure hype around AI has driven many of us to want an honest guide. If, like me, you’re one of those many, you need to read this book' BRIAN ENO
Is AI going to take over the world? Have scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to replace all our jobs? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything?
The answers to these questions, as the expert authors of The AI Con make clear, are 'no', 'they wish', 'LOL', and 'definitely not'. In fact, these fears are all symptoms of the hype being used by tech corporations to justify data theft, motivate surveillance capitalism, and devalue human creativity.
Packed with real-world examples, pithy arguments and expert insights, The AI Con arms you to spot AI hype in all its guises, expose the exploitation and power-grabs it aims to hide, and push back against it at work and in your daily life.
‘A book to inoculate your mind against Big Tech’s AI utopian hype’ Yanis Varoufakis
‘Hanna and Bender provide the clearest picture yet of what AI is, what it is not, and why none of us need to accept it’ Timnit Gebru
‘A powerful antidote. The authors show that these technologies will serve to deepen existing inequalities, and further 'enshittify' life and work for the vast majority of people’ Grace Blakeley
‘Truly eye-opening. An indispensable “field manual” for those who want to fight for a more humane economy and a better society’ Ha-Joon Chang
‘Fascinating and thought-provoking’ Johann Hari
‘A must-read’ Aleks Krotoski
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"The AI project has always been more fantasy than reality," according to this scathing takedown. Bender (Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing), a linguistics professor at the University of Washington, and Hanna, research director at the Distributed AI Research Institute, argue that AI is often less capable than its promoters let on, pointing out that "driverless" robotaxis, for example, usually require the assistance of remote drivers. That hasn't stopped corporations from using AI to undermine human workers, the authors contend, discussing how the Writer's Guild of America went on strike in 2023 to protest film studios' plans to pay screenwriters a lower rate for "rewriting" AI scripts even when the changes were so extensive that the scripts were effectively new. The authors are as skeptical of "AI doomers" as they are of "AI boosters," positing that while large language models are incapable of harboring any intent to wage war on humanity, the real threat lies in how they're cheapening the quality of human labor, normalizing data theft, and subjecting individuals to ever more sophisticated surveillance. Though the narrative sometimes risks devolving into an undigested series of anecdotes about AI's ills, the authors nonetheless drive home the troubling ways in which the technology is transforming society. AI skeptics will find plenty of fodder for their critiques.
