The AI Con
How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want
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- 149,00 kr
Publisher Description
A smart, incisive take-down of so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, exposing the real harm these technologies do to our jobs, health, society and environment, who stands to gain from them, and how to fight back.
‘You need to read this book’ BRIAN ENO
‘Written with absolute authority and incredible wit and verve’ KAREN HAO
Have tech companies created artificial minds? Are they going to replace all our jobs? Will they take over the world?
The answers to these questions, as the expert authors of The AI Con make clear, are ‘no’, ‘they wish’ and ‘LOL, definitely not’. In fact, these fears are all symptoms of the hype being used to justify data theft, motivate surveillance capitalism and devalue human creativity in order to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines.
Packed with real-world examples of the injustices and harms already being done in the name of ‘AI’, The AI Con arms you to spot the hype in all its guises, expose the exploitation it aims to hide and push back against it at work and in your daily life.
‘A must-read...provide[s] the clearest picture yet of what AI is, what it is not, and why none of us need to accept it being shoved down our throats’ TIMNIT GEBRU
‘A powerful antidote to the hype’ GRACE BLAKELEY
‘Truly eye-opening...indispensable’ HA-JOON CHANG
‘A book to inoculate your mind’ YANIS VAROUFAKIS
‘Refreshing...persuasive’ GUARDIAN
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.
