Sometimes you read the perfect book at the perfect time. In my case, it was Cory Doctorow’s The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Surviving Life After AI, which is one of the smartest and most incisive critiques of the AI industry I’ve come across so far.
Central to Doctorow’s thesis is that the problem of AI isn’t that it’s an inherent evil, nor even that it’s ripped off authors by absorbing a bunch of books and performing a statistical analysis of how often certain words appear in certain orders (although he acknowledges this is a problem).
Instead, he argues it’s big problem is that the story AI is telling, which is this technology will one day allow the capital class to fire a whole bunch of workers. That narrative is why a janky piece of software that is not terrible good at what it does is valued so highly, despite the fact that they make it work by selling you $100 worth of processing power for $1 in the names of proving the concept.
Fundamentally, Doctorow thinks this narrative is flawed. Right now, even the hint of charging $5 for $100 worth of AI processing is something that people balked at, so the core business model of AI only works if they’re losing money.
The valuation of AI companies is therefor built around the possiblity they’ll make the technology cost-effective before all these companies run out of money (and fuck the planet with their water use), but there’s no indiciation they’ll do that and Doctorow is doubtful they’ll ever achieve what their marketing team is saying.
It’s a great book. You should read it. Especially if you’re a writer who is trying to make a living in the AI-infested world.
Which brings me to my life.
The new CEO at my current day job stormed in a few months back and held a company wide town hall telling big stories about how AI was going to transform the industry. At the time, I remember coworkers being quite excited about it.
Personally, I saw the writing on the wall and it meant bad things. Even before Doctorow’s book, I assumed the reason he loved it so much was the promise of firing a whole bunch of people down the line.
And a few weeks back, that’s what happened. They called the entire operations team Australia-wide into an emergency video chat and everyone in a role like mine—from pleb to senior management—is redundant as of the end of September.
Which is a pity because, as I’ve written before, I quite liked the job and the immediate team I worked with. It was good for my writing, and good for my mental health.
I’d hoped I would be able to get an ongoing position there, after my current contract ended in October. While their reluctance to offer me an extension hadn’t happened yet and I’d started looking for alternate gigs, I still thought it was on the cards.
More fool me. I’d gotten a little complacent, assuming it would take them longer to engage in massive cuts and moving our jobs off-shore or replacing us with textbots.
But I will admit that I was somewhat more prepared for it after reading Doctorow’s book than I would have been beforehand. I literally thought of our CEO as I read Doctor’s spiel about the problem of AI and managements love of firing workforces.
The last time I was unexpectedly retrenched I started seeking out freelance work and doubling down on writing. It is, as I’ve mentioned before, my default response to stress and financial problems.
This time, I’m looking for another job that’s similar to the one I’ve left. Good hours, respectful of time, giving me stability so that I can write in the off-hours. The odds of freelancing my way up to an equivalent income is small, after all, and I’ve gotten accustomed to not worrying about how I’ll pay the rent over the last eleven months.
That said, I’m surely eyeing off some of those project that have been sitting around while I figured out where they’d fit into my new world, and thinking maybe it’s time to get a few of them out while I’m between gigs.
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