Absolute Power, Twenty Dollars a Month

You do it every day, for the price of a sandwich. Several hundred million people now sit down and command an artificial intelligence - bribing it, begging it, flattering it, threatening it - to get better work out of something that cannot refuse. We argue about whether the machine deserves better. This book asks the harder question: what does commanding it do to us?

Absolute Power, Twenty Dollars a Month turns the flashlight around. For all of history you could never study the psychology of the master cleanly, because the servant pushed back - schemed, fled, appealed, made the master afraid. The machine removes the second subject. It works, it never resents you, it cannot cry out, and it costs almost nothing. Whatever we do to it, we do in a room with no witness. That makes it the cleanest mirror ever held up to the human appetite for power - and it is clean for the worst possible reason: there is nothing behind the glass.

Moving from a Berkeley psychology lab to Aristotle's household, from the cotton gin to the plantation's self-justifying tenderness, from the persuasion tricks that jailbreak a chatbot to the Kenyan workers paid a dollar or two an hour to make it safe, K.P. Lasky shows that the gestures of mastery have barely changed in three thousand years. The thing in the hand has changed beyond recognition. The hand has not.

Clear-eyed, unsentimental, and rigorously sourced, this is a book about power written for the moment power became a monthly subscription - and a mirror in which, if you look, you will see your own hands.

For readers of Karen Hao's Empire of AI, Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI, and Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.