Name: AI Snake Oil
ISBN: 9780691249643

What Hacker News says

lovestoryNov 2024

I only have time to listen to audiobooks so I hope this list is not too basic.

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything by Nate Silver

The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto by Jonathan Taplin

The Value of Others by Orion Taraban

Rinsed: From Cartels to Crypto: How the Tech Industry Washes Money for the World's Deadliest Crooks by Geoff White

Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality by Venki Ramakrishnan

Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter by Zoe Schiffer

Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom by Katherine Eban

AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor

Hijacking Bitcoin: The Hidden History of BTC by Roger Ver

Go Woke, Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America by Charles Gasparino

The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life's Deepest Secrets by Thomas R Cech

and my book of the year

Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health by Casey Means M D

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smartmicOct 2024

I agree with you, but I would go further and turn the tables. An AI should simply not be allowed to evaluate people, in any context whatsoever. For the simple reason that it has been proven not to work (and will also never).

Anyone interested to learn more about it, I recommend the recent book "AI Snake Oil" from Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor [1]. It is a critical but nuanced book and helps to see the whole AI hype a little more clearly.

[1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691249131/ai....

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jstanleySep 2025

The four books discussed in that passage are:

AI Snake Oil – by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor

Nexus – by Yuval Noah Harari

Genesis – by Henry Kissinger, Craig Mundie, and Eric Schmidt

The Singularity Is Nearer – by Ray Kurzweil

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gojomoOct 2022

Narayanan (~randomwalker) is writing a book about, & with likely title, "AI Snake Oil".

Of course there's plenty of BS around the domain – every epochal advance arrives inside a phalanx of pretenders & hypesters & scammers.

But the rapid progress in the field risks nearly any tangible statements about "AI that does not and cannot work" – the book's stated theme – becoming invalidated by on-the-ground events between composition & dead-tree printing.

Thus this viewpoint will more and more be driven towards a sort of timeless mood of generic skepticism & even denialism. There'll be a big audience for that. It's comforting. It meets people at the limits of their understanding. It assuages their fears.

But like a head-of-lettuce, it won't age well, except in comparison to even shorter tenures.

I think this 9-para, ~500 word… 'essay' – dare I call it that? – is an example of the trap Narayanan finds himself in.

Sure, essay assignments have all sorts of long-recognized limitations, dutifully recited here, as could have also been said in the 1990s, or 1960s, or 1930s. But their longevity in education – their 'lindyness' – suggests they had some value, as both exercise & evaluation. No easy replacement was found in the leisurely decades (centuries?) they were relied-upon.

Now, through K-12, they're done-for, in just about any case where a student remains unobserved, with access to LLM writing-assistance. In another 2-5 years, LLMs will not just be writing A+ Senior-in-High-School-level essays, but postgraduate star-student level papers.

Against that, Narayanan offers hand-wavy bluster: that somehow, in unstated ways, the "teachers and adjunct professors [who] are underpaid and overworked", who already in the ancestral environment had to depend on the "easier" but "mind-numbing" and "easier to grade" essay-assignments, will somehow now figure out a better approach, in a more-difficult environment, where their go-to solution for generations has been yanked away.

Sure, little Timmy has never swam before, but throw him into the deep end. His problem isn't "callousness or incompetence", so he'll figure it out! Narayanan's understatement: "The adjustment will be painful, for sure."

To the extent there will be adaptations, they are unlikely to come from the AI-denialists, who underplay access to these tools as no-big-deal.

Adaptations could include uncomfortable steps already on the rise, like closely surveilling students in tech-excluded environments, to be sure they practice, & can perform, those thinking-steps that we'd rather they not fully outsource to cheap thinking-substitutes.

Or sessions with AI tutors, who can drill students in more-intensive ways than those "underpaid and overworked" teachers in large institutions have historically managed.

Workable solutions will more likely be inspired by Stephenson's (1995) 'The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" than Narayanan's (2023?) 'AI Snake Oil'.

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