Review: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI

I blazed through The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. It’s not too hard, as the audiobook is only 5 hours long, but it was also incredibly engaging and I didn’t want to stop listening. I first found Cory Doctorow through his fiction which was what convinced me to try ebooks. His books were available under a creative commons license for free from his own website so it was risk-free. Since then I’ve continued to read both his fiction and non-fiction books.

A Couple Recent Interesting Podcast Episodes

First off, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy listening to the science fiction short story podcast Escape Pod. Today I listened to episode 949, A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls. Large Language Models (LLMs), what we have colloquially called AI for the past few years, have been a giant source of wonder and consternation in the world. AI in general has long been a topic for science fiction, but this short story tackles the current LLM version of AIs. I found it to be a very fun episode that is a master class in providing a huge amount of backstory without an exposition dump. I don’t want to spoil anything about this story, but they naturally drop all these background details about the world that make me want more stories in this universe. It also has a fun, light tone to it. I highly recommend you either listen or read (the full text is available at the episode link above)