A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about 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.
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, even creative ones, like doctors, teachers and care-workers? 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 so they can replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people …
A smart, incisive take-down of the bogus claims being made about 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.
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, even creative ones, like doctors, teachers and care-workers? 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 so they can replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines. Meanwhile, across healthcare, education, media, government and law-enforcement, ‘AI’ products are already being introduced that are unreliable, ineffective, unjust and dangerous.
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.
An excellent overview of the harms and pitfalls of modern AI systems, in particular generative AI. Because I'm terminally online, I was already fairly familiar with most of the arguments, but what this book does excellently is collate them all into one place, as well as making them accessible for people new to the topic. Oh, and it's chock full of references, which will be incredibly useful for my own research
AI is being increasingly pushed as inevitable everywhere, but this book provides hope and recommendations for how to see through that hype. I had a slightly different perspective than most of the audience of this book, as a developer who has worked for years in language technology, but for the most part, the technical details matched my experience. I definitely recommend this book for anyone wanting to push back on the attempts by businesses and government agencies to automate away our jobs, knowledge, and vital services, which has become even more important in the last few months.
I enjoyed reading this book, though as someone who watches Mystery AI Hype Theatre 3000 pretty regularly, the information contained within is something I was already aware of.
For those of you who haven't read it, give it a read - it covers a lot of the underlying lies being bandied about in the current AI Hype bubble, and the sheer amount of bullshit coming out of Silicon Valley as they desperately grasp for the trillion dollar use case.
Overall, pretty short, but extremely well cited. The only ding I'm giving the book is that I think the prose could have been structured a bit better, there are a bunch of "we'll cover this in {x} section" or "we covered this in {x} section" as you go through and I think you'd have needed less of that were the sections reorganized a bit to have a stronger "narrative" arc.
