About this Event
This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.
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ACCESSIBILITY:
Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator.
ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at [email protected] by Jun 10 to request.
Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.
For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact [email protected]
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A short, provocative guide to what's good, bad, and stupid about AI and the discourse around AI, by the author of Enshittification.
A centaur is a person whose work is assisted by technology, a worker whose tools make them happier and more productive. A reverse centaur, on the other hand, is a worker pressed into service to technology, a person pushed beyond human endurance to work on a machine’s terms. Think of a warehouse worker made to work without food or bathroom breaks, or a programmer made to crank out impossible amounts of code.
There is, to Cory Doctorow, nothing inevitable about the story of AI, about who or what will play which roles. He thinks the technology is useful, even exciting. But AI has arrived surrounded by unprecedented hype, preordained as a world-changing disruption that defies all rational evaluation. Doctorow seeks to puncture that bubble before it’s too late, to help us understand the technology not just for what it actually does—though that, of course, is important—but 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, though it is not the version of the story we have been commonly told. In The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI—as he did so successfully in Enshittification—Doctorow recounts both how we found ourselves in this 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.
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 amidst 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 the international bestseller 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.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Strand Book Store, 828 Broadway, New York, United States
USD 13.61 to USD 22.90
