Ep 483 - Banned Books Week - Being a Reader in a Dystopian Hellscape

Mallory O'Meara (0:06)

You're listening to Reading Glasses, a show about book culture and literary life designed to help you read better. I'm author and book devourer Mallory O'Meara.

Brea Grant (0:13)

And I'm Brea Grant, filmmaker and e-reader. This episode, we're taking off another box from the Reading Glasses Glasses Glasses Challenge, read a banned book by an author that is still alive. That was the key to that one.

Mallory O'Meara (0:24)

Very important element.

Brea Grant (0:26)

Yeah, plus we're celebrating slash, Are We Mourning, Banned Books Week, with some tips on how to be readers in a dystopian world where they're banning a lot of books. Mallory just said to me, I finally got it together and got our Banned Books Week episode out for Banned Books Week, which we're excited about.

Mallory O'Meara (0:41)

Every year it comes up fast and every single year I'm like, oh no, we should have done a Banned Books Week episode this year. Folks, I've been planning this since January. I finally got it together. But first, Brea, what are you reading?

Brea Grant (0:52)

I'm reading, look, I know it's Halloween season, but there's nothing scarier to me than the incoming of AI. And so I am reading, I just finished The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow. Cory Doctorow wrote Enchidification. He also writes science fiction books.

It is a really interesting take on AI. His whole thing is he's like, I'm a science fiction writer. I cannot predict the future. I don't know where things are going. But let's talk about what AI is happening now. Let's talk about the bubble. We know it's a bubble because there's people who are like, it will eventually do these things and you should invest billions of dollars into it. And we don't actually know if it will ever be able to do those things because it's not doing those things currently.

It's also, he wants to know like, the main thing that it's doing right now, the main thing is that it's like, here's how you replace your workers. And that is something that we should be fighting against and questioning whether or not it actually can replace the workers. Because that's what we're working to make it do is like, AI will replace people, but then eventually we realize that it doesn't even work to replace people. We have to hire those people back. We want to hire them at the rates we were paying for AI. So it's like this weird way of like, screwing up the current system we have and firing people from their jobs and then paying people less. It is a really, it's a depressing book, but I actually think for me, it was interesting to read because I think there's so much talk about, I buy into it too where I'm like, here's what it does in the future. Here's what AI could do in the future. I mean, how it's going to replace us, but the question is like, why are we using it now when it's not doing these things?

Mallory O'Meara (2:29)

And will it ever do this? If you think I'm not doing pull ups to get ready to fight terminators, I mean, I've been training for this for years.

Brea Grant (2:36)

But the real fear is like, what is it doing to our economy currently, which is some really bad shit. Like it is, like we are spending a lot of money on AI in a way and banking on these things, working when there's no proof that they're going to work.

Mallory O'Meara (2:50)

And it's just making everything bad.

Brea Grant (2:53)

Yeah, and like there's a reason that when you open up something it's like, here's our AI assistant. And we're all like, we don't want it. We don't want the AI assistant. It's like 80% of people don't want it when they were interviewed, but they make it so you have to use it because they've spent so much money on it. All of these companies. So it is, I actually found it to be not dystopian, but rather to give you like ammunition when people are talking about it, because there are some things and like, listen, come at, whatever, come at me. But he says this too, where he's like, oh, I wanted to use AI to go through every paper or book I've ever written to see how many times I said this word. And I was like, yes, that is actually a good use. Like there's things that we can use like computer automation for that is helpful. That doesn't mean we need to make art for us.

Like there's just like such a difference between what we're talking about it being possibly used for at some point versus like the things that it can currently do that are like, oh, okay, go through these hundreds of scientific papers and like find these words because we know you can do that. But it is not capable of synthesizing those words.