How To Think About AI (with Cory Doctorow)
AI might just be useful once we get through the huckster phase.
Welcome to the podcast Organized Money. You can listen to today’s episode on Apple on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
One of our favorite guests is back! The writer, thinker, and general polymath, Cory Doctorow is here with a new book and a new episode of Organized Money!
After a brief detour into mid-century chili recipes, Matt, David, and Cory discuss The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, a “short, provocative guide to what’s good, bad, and stupid about AI.” Cory argues that in order to co-exist with AI, we must harness it as a tool for labor, rather than as a tool to discipline labor—which is exactly how Silicon Valley has positioned the technology.
Among many topics, they dissect the rhetoric of the AI boosters, discuss AI as a political project, the potential (or lack thereof) in AI art, the data center pushback, and how AI is a fundamentally solipsistic technology, distancing us from other people. Finally, they speculate on how this might all end—and the inevitable bust that follows any bubble.
Listen via Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We also provide transcripts and video for every episode. Here is last week’s episode.
Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.
I've listened to this twice and may listen to it a third time. Doctorow is an always very engaging and says a lot in a few words. But taking the time to parse the words can be worthwhile.
I'm a bit of a dinosaur about AI and resist it at every opportunity but kind of like the nano-plastics already in our body, it's already suffusing everything. I still cannot get over the fact that we've decided that burning energy and polluting water to generate repetitive cat memes is a worthwhile use of a finite resource.
I will try to catch the new book.
Most powerful image is the prediction of weeded over large parking lots from unused data centers. Such a metaphor for our times.