The print edition of The Intelligence Illusion is available for order
I expected an “AI” Bubble, I even wrote about the attempt to create the bubble before I wrote The Intelligence Illusion, but I didn’t expect it to be this big or this irrational.
I certainly didn’t expect that my writing on how generative models harm business, work, and organisations would still both be relevant and accurate two years down the line.
But it is.
The continuing accuracy isn’t that surprising. The flaws of the technology were obviously fundamental to its design and structure right from the outside. For generative models to suddenly become productive in a business context they would have had to invent something completely new, and modern tech companies just don’t do that kind of work any more, at least not in the US.
But the continuing relevance does surprise. Generative models are a bad idea in multiple ways and their poor performance when it comes to business productivity really shouldn’t be what decides whether you use them or not.
- They are an ongoing environmental disaster. Not just their energy and water use. That’s genuinely of less importance than the fact that the bubble has led tech companies to switch from being ostensible allies to environmentalism to outright political adversaries.
- They have become political tools. Their biases skew the output of anybody who uses them and they lend themselves to be used as “accountability sinks”, where an institution delegates decision-making to a machine learning model and that way ensures that nobody gets held accountable when it makes horrifying decisions.
- They are a central point of political control over language, image, and work in general. Already, there is pressure on Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI to skew their models to suit the politics of the current US administration.
- Their output is severely flawed, full of errors and fabrications.
You shouldn’t need to know that they are poor productivity tools. There’s plenty of reason not to use them even without factoring in “they’re expensive and don’t shift productivity metrics in a measurable way”.
But we all know managers who only budge if it shifts the bottom line. Environmental havoc and the rise of authoritarianism is less important to them than their quarterly numbers and they, for the most part, believe the spin that “AI” is a productivity miracle.
That’s what The Intelligence Illusion is for.
It outlines the many flaws of the tech, in plain English, that affect its use in businesses and work.
I even had my parents read through the book to make sure it was accessible to a non-technical audience.
So far, it has only been available in ebook form. Getting to a print edition has been a long road where I’ve run into both issues with the printing and typesetting, but in the end I decided that it was time to stop overanalysing it and just focus on getting it out.
I settled on using Lulu, largely because it’s used by a lot of people I know from the Open Education scene, but also because they have built up a network of printing services and aren’t a printer themselves.
That means that if you order from the US, the book should get printed in the states and shipped to you without running into tariff issues.
The network aspect of Lulu does make it impossible for me to handle quality control meaningfully – the copies I get and the copies you get might not even come from the same printer – which is why I’m focusing on selling the print copies through the Lulu online store itself rather than my own sales page. Hopefully, the fewer intermediaries there are, the more likely everything is to work properly.
So, the hardcover edition of The Intelligence Illusion, available now for €45 EUR or $49 USD, currently exclusively from the Lulu shop.
And, if you’re interested, also available are the hardcover editions for Out of the Software Crisis and I am Uncluttered (Yellow), all at the Lulu shop.
Over the next few days, I’ll be adding these links to the product pages of the books and writing more about these editions, the hows and whys of their production, the work behind them, and generally reintroducing these books to you.
But I can say that, finally, my books are properly in print.