July 18, 2026

The Modern Mythology of AI

By: Peter L. Levin

This article was originally published in Quillette.

In his wonderful new book The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, Cory Doctorow tells us that the most important fact about a technology isn’t what it does, it’s who it does it for, and who it does it to. For veterans, and later for the country, Blue Button was a blow-out win; it helps millions of people manage their care, and it harms nobody.

LLMs can’t replace people, and AI can’t replicate actual thought. But if employers reject these truths and succumb to empty promises and motivated thinking, employees will suffer the immediate, material consequences of being replaced by a tool that cannot actually do their job because their bosses are confused by the perception and temptation of the uncaptured profit margin.

Today, of course, screen scrapes that mimic human reading are fully automated, and the robots hoovering up the information are not surveilling for new digital services. They’re indiscriminately looking for any kind of text, regardless of source, quality, veracity, or intent. Indeed, the entire internet is the training ground and the raw material for a new kind of application: large language models or LLMs.

Read the full article in Quillette.

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