Doctorow has a book-length version of this, "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI", which I just read. It's not one of his better works. It's all conventional anti-AI wisdom. Too much of it is about the impact of AI on the punditry and writing industries. I expected better from Doctorow.
I would have expected more focus on the relationship between AI and power. Doctorow has been down that road in his fiction.
There's worry about government oppression, but government oppression has been around for most of recorded history, and probably peaked with East Germany. What he doesn't get into is how AI empowers corporations to be more obnoxious. Which is strange, because he's been into that in his fiction. See his "Unauthorized Bread".
One thing AI does is to make corporate control of individuals cheaper. The classic Big Brother peaked, as mentioned, with East Germany, where about 10% of the population was involved with the Stasi. Only a government that didn't have to make a profit could do that.
Corporations couldn't go in for that level of surveillance because it wasn't cost-effective when it was labor-intensive. With modern surveillance technology to collect data, and AI to analyze it, it now pays. See Flock, Google, etc.
> A reverse centaur is a machine that uses a human being as its assistant
So like a political, military or religious machine does. We're already bred for it. We're Konrad Lorenz's geese, desperate to be led. It's the path of least resistance.
> This is a political act of resistance. Margaret Thatcher's motto, after all, was "There is no alternative," by which she meant, "Stop trying to think of alternatives." The bully's trick is to present your defeat as a fait accompli: "Resistance is futile."
More broadly, that trick is the most effective and important today: No matter the issue, people - including on HN - will tell you how powerless they are and how pointless it is. It's such a social norm that they will actively resist and attack anyone who violates it and suggests otherwise - goodness forbid you have hope, an idea, or want to do something. I see many adopt bizarrely false perspectives and opinions for which the only sensible explanation (IMHO) is they are strong defenses against action and empowerment - many/most won't even talk about serious issues like climate change (see - I bet you're triggered by the suggestion of discussing it).
People never accomplish anything without believing in it first. It's old, basic military psyops to preach hopelessness to the enemy soldiers, in dropped pamphlets, radio broadcasts, through propaganda campaigns. Sorry, I forgot - we can't talk about those things either.
Until people believe, nothing will change. When they believe, everything will change. That's why there is so much impetus toward despair.
I don't find empty platitudes like "you can just do things" all that inspiring. I prefer seeing a specific example of something you could do and an explanation about why it might help.
Great analogy and really good points. I'm hopeful for a "slow pop" on the bubble though but we'll see! Very nice and so much easier to actually read a non-ai generated article too.
I am a developmental autism researcher using multimodal neuroimaging, standardized and experimental behavioral/cognitive assessments, with a focus on longitudinal modeling to study condevelopment of brain and behavior. I also manage lab servers, databases, I program pipelines for neuroimaging, and I also write grant applications. I also tend towards slow and rigorous over fast and loose in publications. This is both the reason why my publication land solidly mid-high tier, never publishing in low quality journals, but also not flashy enough to into the highest tiers (Biological Psychiatry is my top tier so far, a very good journal).
This preamble is to provide context: I wear many hats, and have to be familiar and competent over a wide range of things, and I must be comfortable enough to trust that I can do things I don't know, but scared enough, that I obsess in making sure I didn't get it wrong (especially if the result is suspiciously strong).
How I spend my day has completely changed since powerful AI. While I still read papers, AI often helps me find relevant papers quickly. Interested in surveying multivariate longitudinal statistical models, AI can provide generally competent overviews to help me decide on directions.
At times, I feel like it is a better neuroscientist than I am. It definitely has a larger breadth of relevant information at its immediate disposal. I'll run ideas against it, working hard to get it to not be syncophatic (usually by telling it that a local LLM suggested it but that I was unsure), and it can often raise points that I had not considered.
At times it can even seem like it is running the show, and I'm just getting in the way: Reverse Centaur.
But other times, I feel like it is helping me leverage my time to explore MY goals much more quickly, and it is empowering.
Also, Opus and ChatGPT have a real functional fixedness issue, and a hard time weighing the importance if various aspects of the research question/space. It will get stuck in solving minutea while missing the obvious large problem with an approach. I would be lying if I said that I did not get you in telling it this. One does want to feel useful after all.
AI today feels like a partner,and it is rewarding. I have yet to find a person that I can work this closely with. Usually other scientists are too busy pursuing another paper, etc.
Once AI surpasses me, this joy will go away. I am fine with a machine being better than me in almost everything, but if it's the thing I like doing, and if it's value is only judged by the extent in which it pushes the frontiers of science, I don't want to live in that world.
Most people do jobs that they are not in love with. I forsook higher paid careers in order to have a career where I can choose what to do, then work to make it happen. So I don't want to say that my experience and fears generalize, but I want AI to stay at roughly this level. A level where we aren't the meat tool, or worse, unneeded, but we are empowered for self fulfillment.
I'm not sure his argument holds that foundational models will no longer function after the bubble pops. There's plenty of open weight models that are competitive which are more likely to exist in a world with abundant cheap GPUs.
>When the AI bubble bursts, there will be stellar bargains on GPUs…
>these standalone models can do amazing things
>The things these open source standalone models can do will only expand, and they will become a given for our computing applications.
I think of the “big” foundation models as the “fossil fuel” of AI. Once the bubble pops and we can’t afford to train any more of them, we’ll be distilling and remixing the ones we managed to make during this weird period where they were feasible.
Quaaludes are maybe a better analogy since the original, strong ones are mostly gone and the pills being manufactured today are significantly weaker. And their effect on Wall Street's decision making is pretty comparable to AI's
Based on my experience, even the models we have now are a huge benefit when properly used. And we probably have a decade or two of significant gains we can make just with harnesses, skills, heuristics, etc. even if no further progress were made on models.
CTF + F "bubble" - 15 results. This guy was manically predicting the bubble in 2025
> AI is a bubble.
> AI is a bubble. Bubbles burst. We're in for a near-total collapse of the AI investment mania
> AI is a bubble, and when bubbles burst, they sometimes leave behind a productive residue
> When the AI bubble bursts, there will be stellar bargains on GPUs
> The bad news is all the damage the bubble is doing now and all the further damage that will come from its collapse.
> After the bubble bursts, there will be the mass incineration of everyday people's retirement savings and the knock-on effects as the whole market craters
> Every day the bubble persists, the harms of today and tomorrow increase. We need to burst that bubble as soon as possible.
Holy. Shit. This guy is insane. He's been pulling the same schtick since 2014 calling many other companies a bubble. Why why is this guy taken seriously.
I don’t agree with Doctorow on this point, but there’s nothing inherently unreasonable about predicting an economic phenomenon is a bubble and having to wait several years to be proven correct. Michael Burry first purchased credit default swaps on mortgage backed securities in May of 2005.
"The stock market has predicted nine out of the last five recessions." And people who don't put their money where their mouth is? The track record gets so much worse.
Doctorow has a book-length version of this, "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI", which I just read. It's not one of his better works. It's all conventional anti-AI wisdom. Too much of it is about the impact of AI on the punditry and writing industries. I expected better from Doctorow.
I would have expected more focus on the relationship between AI and power. Doctorow has been down that road in his fiction. There's worry about government oppression, but government oppression has been around for most of recorded history, and probably peaked with East Germany. What he doesn't get into is how AI empowers corporations to be more obnoxious. Which is strange, because he's been into that in his fiction. See his "Unauthorized Bread".
One thing AI does is to make corporate control of individuals cheaper. The classic Big Brother peaked, as mentioned, with East Germany, where about 10% of the population was involved with the Stasi. Only a government that didn't have to make a profit could do that. Corporations couldn't go in for that level of surveillance because it wasn't cost-effective when it was labor-intensive. With modern surveillance technology to collect data, and AI to analyze it, it now pays. See Flock, Google, etc.
He evidently has no clue about open source (people just plagiarize with AI and don't do amazing things).
If he wants to build resistance as stated in the last paragraphs maybe he should be a bit more careful.
So like a political, military or religious machine does. We're already bred for it. We're Konrad Lorenz's geese, desperate to be led. It's the path of least resistance.
More broadly, that trick is the most effective and important today: No matter the issue, people - including on HN - will tell you how powerless they are and how pointless it is. It's such a social norm that they will actively resist and attack anyone who violates it and suggests otherwise - goodness forbid you have hope, an idea, or want to do something. I see many adopt bizarrely false perspectives and opinions for which the only sensible explanation (IMHO) is they are strong defenses against action and empowerment - many/most won't even talk about serious issues like climate change (see - I bet you're triggered by the suggestion of discussing it).
People never accomplish anything without believing in it first. It's old, basic military psyops to preach hopelessness to the enemy soldiers, in dropped pamphlets, radio broadcasts, through propaganda campaigns. Sorry, I forgot - we can't talk about those things either.
Until people believe, nothing will change. When they believe, everything will change. That's why there is so much impetus toward despair.
I'm with you here.
> When they believe, everything will change.
Taken literally, this is absurd. Belief might be necessary for change, but it's not sufficient!
> That's why there is so much impetus toward despair.
Sometimes people really are in hopeless situations. It seems cruel to blame their despair on not believing enough.
This preamble is to provide context: I wear many hats, and have to be familiar and competent over a wide range of things, and I must be comfortable enough to trust that I can do things I don't know, but scared enough, that I obsess in making sure I didn't get it wrong (especially if the result is suspiciously strong).
How I spend my day has completely changed since powerful AI. While I still read papers, AI often helps me find relevant papers quickly. Interested in surveying multivariate longitudinal statistical models, AI can provide generally competent overviews to help me decide on directions.
At times, I feel like it is a better neuroscientist than I am. It definitely has a larger breadth of relevant information at its immediate disposal. I'll run ideas against it, working hard to get it to not be syncophatic (usually by telling it that a local LLM suggested it but that I was unsure), and it can often raise points that I had not considered.
At times it can even seem like it is running the show, and I'm just getting in the way: Reverse Centaur.
But other times, I feel like it is helping me leverage my time to explore MY goals much more quickly, and it is empowering.
Also, Opus and ChatGPT have a real functional fixedness issue, and a hard time weighing the importance if various aspects of the research question/space. It will get stuck in solving minutea while missing the obvious large problem with an approach. I would be lying if I said that I did not get you in telling it this. One does want to feel useful after all.
AI today feels like a partner,and it is rewarding. I have yet to find a person that I can work this closely with. Usually other scientists are too busy pursuing another paper, etc.
Once AI surpasses me, this joy will go away. I am fine with a machine being better than me in almost everything, but if it's the thing I like doing, and if it's value is only judged by the extent in which it pushes the frontiers of science, I don't want to live in that world.
Most people do jobs that they are not in love with. I forsook higher paid careers in order to have a career where I can choose what to do, then work to make it happen. So I don't want to say that my experience and fears generalize, but I want AI to stay at roughly this level. A level where we aren't the meat tool, or worse, unneeded, but we are empowered for self fulfillment.
>When the AI bubble bursts, there will be stellar bargains on GPUs…
>these standalone models can do amazing things
>The things these open source standalone models can do will only expand, and they will become a given for our computing applications.
I think of the “big” foundation models as the “fossil fuel” of AI. Once the bubble pops and we can’t afford to train any more of them, we’ll be distilling and remixing the ones we managed to make during this weird period where they were feasible.
> AI is a bubble.
> AI is a bubble. Bubbles burst. We're in for a near-total collapse of the AI investment mania
> AI is a bubble, and when bubbles burst, they sometimes leave behind a productive residue
> When the AI bubble bursts, there will be stellar bargains on GPUs
> The bad news is all the damage the bubble is doing now and all the further damage that will come from its collapse.
> After the bubble bursts, there will be the mass incineration of everyday people's retirement savings and the knock-on effects as the whole market craters
> Every day the bubble persists, the harms of today and tomorrow increase. We need to burst that bubble as soon as possible.
Holy. Shit. This guy is insane. He's been pulling the same schtick since 2014 calling many other companies a bubble. Why why is this guy taken seriously.
"The stock market has predicted nine out of the last five recessions." And people who don't put their money where their mouth is? The track record gets so much worse.