About this Event
Please join us in store on Friday, June 26th at 7:00pm central to help celebrate Cory Doctorow's new book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late . Cory will be in conversation with Rick Perlstein!
About The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late:
A short, provocative guide to what's good, bad, and stupid about AI and the discourse around AI, by the author of Enshittification.
In modern tech parlance, a centaur is a person who is able to use technology to be a better, more productive version of themself. A reverse centaur is a person who is forced by technology to work at an inhuman pace—a driver made to deliver all day long, nonstop; a warehouse worker made to work without food or bathroom breaks; a programmer made to crank out impossible amounts of code.
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI is not another anti-AI screed. Cory Doctorow uses AI in his work every day. As a creative person, he has no moral or dogmatic issue with AI—he thinks the technology is useful, even exciting, and full of potential. And yet.
AI has arrived surrounded by unprecedented hype driven by a tech industry desperate to maintain its unprecedented valuation based on its own promises of endless financial growth. Despite the fact that almost all of AI’s real-world implementations have proved underwhelming, AI is projected to be worth more than $16 trillion—a number that only makes sense if AI replaces vast swathes of the wage-earning human workforce. To justify that level of “value,” every story about AI must be presented as inevitable, world-changing disruption. Even the tales of the robot apocalypse are a calculated attempt to bolster the fearsome power of AI.
For Doctorow, it is imperative to see through that hype to the real story, to understand the technology not just for what it does, but for who it does it to and who it does it for. From that point of view, the story of AI is indeed dramatic and unprecedented, having generated an investment bubble so big that it endangers the entire world economy. In The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI—as he so successfully did in Enshittification—Doctorow recounts both how we found ourselves in this dire situation and how we can get through it, to a life “after” AI in which the tools work for us, not the other way around.
About the authors:
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. He is the author of many books, including The Lost Cause, a solarpunk science-fiction novel of hope amid the climate emergency. His nonfiction book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation is a Big Tech disassembly manual. Other recent books include Enshittification; Red Team Blues, a science fiction crime thriller; Chokepoint Capitalism, nonfiction about monopoly and creative labor markets; the Little Brother series for young adults; In Real Life, a graphic novel; and the picture book Poesy the Monster Slayer. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
Chicagoan Rick Perlstein is the author of a four-book series on the rise of conservatism in America. The first, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, won the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 2001. The second, Nixonland, appeared on the “best of” lists of over a dozen publications in 2008. Three were New York Times bestseller. A contributor to publications including the Nation, Washington Post, New Yorker, New Republic, he also is the editor of the first scholarly collection of Richard Nixon’s speeches and writings.
About the event:
This is a free, in person event and registration is required. Please click on the link below to register for free! Cory and Rick will be happy to sign/personalize copies of their books after the event! Can't make it to the event? Signed copies will be available in store and online with national shipping.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Exile in Bookville, 410 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, United States
USD 0.00
