The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI

I spent 13 years working for a giant IT consulting company and have seen firsthand the craze these last ~6 years of generative AI and AI chatbots and the like. I've never really quite known how to put the distinctions into words that non-IT people would be able to understand.

This book takes all of the same sorts of things I've seen in my professional experience and expands it about 1000 times to explain the financials, how it affects various professions, what's good, and what's bad. Cory is so good at explaining this.

Generative AI is literally just a statistical guess machine. That's it. It doesn't understand the concepts that you're having it give you information on. It is simply giving you the most likely next word after the last one, based off of your prompt. It doesn't add context, meaning, or nuance. It simply takes the phrase you give it and spits out exactly what the statistically most likely thing is that you could want, based off the words you used.

These giant tech companies are trying to sell everyone's bosses on the idea that it can do their employees jobs so the bosses will give them the money they were going to pay you. And it may be able to do your job, on average, but won't work for some percentage of that time. That means paying a human to search for and fix the AI's mistakes, quickly erasing the wage reductions that were promised. These companies are dumping hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars into AI datacenters all on the calculation that AI can consistently and reliably zero out the wage bills of bosses.

It's a great parlor trick for getting bosses that hate paying wages to invest their money, but it's only reliably useful in very specific circumstances.

It doesn't have to be this way. You. Should. Read. This. Book.

I'm on my third listen through it now so I can commit it to memory, and then I'm going next to Cory's previous book, "Enshittification"