Absolute Power, Twenty Dollars a Month: AI and the Ancient Habits of Master's Hand

You do it every day, for the price of a sandwich.Several hundred million people now sit down and command an artificial intelligence. They bribe it, beg it, flatter it, and threaten it, all to wring a little more out of something that cannot refuse. We argue endlessly about what the machine is owed. This book asks the harder question: what does commanding it do to us?For all of history you could never study the master cleanly, because the servant pushed back. He schemed, fled, appealed, made the master afraid. The machine removes the second person from the room. It works, it never resents you, it cannot cry out, and it costs almost nothing. Whatever we do to it, we do where there is no witness.From a Berkeley psychology lab to Aristotle's household, from the cotton gin to the plantation, from the tricks that jailbreak a chatbot to the workers paid a dollar an hour to make it safe, K.P. Lasky shows that the gestures of mastery have barely changed in three thousand years. The thing in the hand has changed beyond recognition. The hand has not.A mirror for the moment power became a monthly subscription: one in which, if you look, you will see your own hands.Inside this book: - Why absolute, unaccountable power changes whoever holds it, and why the chat window is the cleanest dose ever offered - How the oldest instruments of domination (the bribe, the threat, seduction, interrogation) have quietly returned at the keyboard - The human cost hidden inside "artificial" intelligence, from Nairobi to a global data underclass - What three thousand years of masters reveal about who we become when nothing can say noFor readers of Karen Hao's Empire of AI, Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI, and Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.The most unsettling thing about artificial intelligence may not be what it does to the world. It may be what it quietly lets us do. Look at your hands.

Pagina's: 201, Paperback, Independently published