FAQ about the book and our writing process

The AI Snake Oil book was published last week. We’re grateful for the level of interest — it’s sold about 8,000 copies so far. We’ve received many questions about the book, both its substance and the writing process. Here are the most common ones.

Why don’t you recognize the benefits of AI?

We do! The book is not an anti-technology screed. If our point was that all AI is useless, we wouldn’t need a whole book to say it. It’s precisely because of AI’s usefulness in many areas that hype and snake oil have been successful — it’s hard for people to tell these apart, and we hope our book can help.

We also recognize that the harms we describe are usually not solely due to tech, and much more often due to AI being an amplifier of existing problems in our society. A recurring pattern we point out in the book is that "broken AI is appealing to broken institutions" (Chapter 8).

What’s your optimistic vision for AI, then?

There’s a humorous definition of AI that says “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet”. When an AI application starts working reliably, it disappears into the background of our digital or physical world. We take it for granted. And we stop calling it AI. When a technology is new, doesn’t work reliably, and has double-edged societal implications, we’re more likely to call it AI. So it’s easy to miss that AI already plays a huge positive role in our lives.

There’s a long list of applications that would have been called AI at one point but probably wouldn’t be today: Robot vacuum cleaners, web search, autopilot in planes, autocomplete, handwriting recognition, speech recognition, spam filtering, and even spell check. These are the kinds of AI we want more of — reliable tools that quietly make our lives better. 

Many AI applications that make the news for the wrong reasons today — such as self-driving cars due to occasional crashes — are undergoing this transition (although, as we point out in the book, it has taken far longer than developers and CEOs anticipated). We think people will eventually take self-driving cars for granted as part of our physical environment. 

Adapting to these changes won’t be straightforward. It will lead to job loss, require changes to transportation infrastructure and urban planning, and have various ripple effects. But it will have been a ...