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Artifictional Intelligence
Collins's 2018 polemic against the cultural tendency to defer to fluent machines — the book that named the Surrender, developed the distinction between deep and surface AI, and articulated the standard for what real artificial intelligence would require.
Artifictional Intelligence: Against Humanity's Surrender to Computers (Polity, 2018) is Collins's most direct engagement with the AI debate, published at the moment when transformer-based language models were beginning to transform the technology's public perception. The book's central thesis is that current AI — however impressive its fluency — lacks the social embedding required for genuine understanding, and that the real danger is not that machines will exceed human capability but that humans will prematurely surrender evaluative vigilance to systems that look competent but do not understand. The book develops Collins's framework of mimeomorphic and polimorphic action, tacit knowledge taxonomy, and interactional vs. contributory expertise into a unified argument about what AI is and is not.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book was written before GPT-3 and without knowledge of the scale-driven capabilities that would emerge in subsequent years. Its core claims have nevertheless proved durable. Collins's argument that machines would achieve impressive