Wordfest welcomes back tech visionary Cory Doctorow and his latest bestseller, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late. The show, hosted by Wordfest’s Creative Ringleader Shelley Youngblut, includes an audience Q&A and book signing. Want to be first in the signing line? You can pre-order Doctorow’s new book and backlist from Owl’s Nest Books here.
“This book—ostensibly about Al, but more broadly about the new world of hyper-capitalism and high tech—is stunning in its clarity and breadth of vision. In trying to keep some kind of grasp on what is going on in the world, I read Cory Doctorow.” –Brian Eno
Invigorating Conversation
Libations Bar, with non-alcoholic options
Audience Q&A
Book Signing
75 minutes. No intermission
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. He is the author of many books. He writes nonfiction policy books such as The Internet Con and Chokepoint Capitalism, as well as science fiction for adults (Red Team Blues and The Lost Cause) and young adults (Little Brother). He has been inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame and has been honoured with the Arthur C. Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Award and the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. He was made an honorary Doctor of Laws by York University and an Honorary Doctor of Computer Science by the Open University. For a quarter century, he has been an activist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He co-founded the U.K. Open Rights Group and holds visiting appointments at the Open University, MIT, Cornell, and the University of North Carolina. Born in Toronto, Doctorow now lives in Burbank and London.
It’s not enough to ask what the technology does—we must understand who it’s doing it for and who it’s doing it to
As we enter the age of AI, we are in danger of being reduced to what Cory Doctorow dubs the ‘reverse centaur.’ With that term he conjures a human being conscripted as the assistant to a dominant machine. It could be a driver made to deliver nonstop, all day long; a warehouse worker packing shelves without bathroom or food breaks; or a programmer reviewing impossible amounts of AI-produced code.
Don’t fall for the hype! The billionaires managing the rise of AI are putting on a command performance for the bosses and investors, not for the ordinary people who might use the products. When this latest tech bubble bursts, will there be something useful for us in the wreckage?
In The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, Doctorow examines why we find ourselves in this mess and how we can get out of it. Life after AI should mean the tools work for us, not the other way around.
Invigorating Conversation
Libations Bar, with non-alcoholic options
Audience Q&A
Book Signing
75 minutes. No intermission
Shelley Youngblut is the CEO & Creative Ringleader of Wordfest. She was the recipient of the 2020 Calgary Award for Community Achievement in the Arts and the 2018 Rozsa Award for Arts Leadership. She also won the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award at the Western Magazine Awards. Youngblut was the founding editor of Calgary’s award-winning Swerve magazine and has created magazines for ESPN, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Nickelodeon, Western Living, and The Globe and Mail. A former pop-culture correspondent for ABC World News Now and Canada AM, she was also a frequent contributor to CBC Calgary’s The Eyeopener, The Homestretch, and Daybreak Alberta.
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