Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI

Opening line: ”On a September morning, the kind of equatorial summer day where the air is thick with the threat of rain and your clothes stick to your skin by nine o’ clock, Ian Koli is waiting for me outside Connie’s Coffee Corner, a busy cafe in the Kibera neighborhood of Nairobi, Kenya."

Ending line: ”They smiled as we climbed. ’It means many, many steps.’”

Recommending a book is good, and something we do when we’ve read a book we enjoyed. But how do we go about when we read a book that feels so important we want to make sure other people read it?! A simple recommendation is not enough. We should invent a ”must-read” card we can invoke that forces other people to read the book we invoke it on. I would have used my card on this book.

Even if I think the book is not the best literary piece I’ve read, and sometimes a bit too flourished in its language, the points it’s hitting and the perspectives it casts has stuck in my mind forever.

With the prevalence of AI in our western society it’s easy to just run along in order to not be left behind, without noticing the risk of not seeing where we are heading. Murgia gives an extensive and detailed insight into the darker sides of AI, the areas we don’t see, don’t know about and just maybe don’t really want to know about. Going forward, I don’t really know how I will be able to use AI without being reminded of the conditions of the data-workers doing the dirty work that enables the models to run.

Favorite passage:

”He acknowledged why people may start to prefer speaking to AI systems rather than to one another. ’I get it, interacting with people, it’s hard. It’s tough. It demands a lot, it is often unrewarding,’ he said.

But he feels that modern life has left people stranded on their own desert islands, leaving them yearning for companionship. ’So now because of this, there is a market for volleyballs,’ he said. ’Social chatbots, they could provide comfort, real solace to people in the same way that Wilson provides.’

But ultimately, what makes our lives meaningful is the empathy and intent we get from human interactions - people responding to one another. With AI, he said, ’It feels like there’s someone on the other end. But there isn’t.’” (p.261)