The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to Criticizing AI

Summary

Today's links The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (permalink) Last night, I gave a speech for the University of Washington's "Neuroscience, AI and Society" lecture series, through the university's Computational Neuroscience Center. It was called "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI," and it's based on the manuscript for my next book, "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI," which will be out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux next June: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/future-tense-neuroscience-ai-and-society-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139 The talk was sold out, but here's the text of my lecture. I'm very grateful to UW for the opportunity, and for a lovely visit to Seattle! == I'm a science fiction writer, which means that my job is to make up futuristic parables about our current techno-social arrangements to interrogate not just what a gadget does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to. What I don't do is predict the future. No one can predict the future, which is a good thing, since if the future were predictable, that would mean that what we all do couldn't change it. It would mean that the future was arriving on fixed rails and couldn't be steered. Jesus Christ, what a miserable proposition! Now, not everyone understands the distinction. They think sf writers are oracles, soothsayers. Unfortunately, even some of my colleagues labor under the delusion that they can "see the future." But for every sf writer who deludes themselves into thinking that they are writing the future, there are a hundred sf fans who believe that they are reading the future, and a depressing number of those people appear to have become AI bros. The fact that these guys can't shut up about the day that their spicy autocomplete machine will wake up and turn us all into paperclips has led many confused journalists and conference organizers to try to get me to comment on the future of AI. That's a thing I strenuously resisted doing, because I wasted two y...