When it comes to tech doomsaying, few are as cynical — or prescient — as sci-fi author and tech journalist Cory Doctorow.
His far-sighted blend of tech criticism and class analysis has found Doctorow time and again at the bleeding edge of commentary on our techno-capitalist society. In many ways, his screeds on topics like tech broligarchs and enshittification broke the mold to allow room for the kind of tech-critical reporting being done by media projects like Tech Policy Press and 404 Media, or the podcasts “Tech Won’t Save Us,” and “Better Offline.”
For better or worse, Doctorow’s insights have often been a much-needed mirror into our society’s complicated relationship with tech corporations. Now, in a recent essay posted on his blog Pluralistic, Doctorow warns of the impending collapse of the AI industry — a hype-fueled financial disaster that he says it’s too late to avoid.
In his essay, Doctorow recounts a conversation he had with an undergraduate student after delivering a lecture on the AI bubble, in which he reiterated that AI investors are propping up the US economy.
“So, you’re saying a third of the stock market is tied up in seven AI companies that have no way to become profitable and that this is a bubble that’s going to burst and take the whole economy with it?” the student asked fearfully.
“Yes, that’s right,” the tech critic responded.
“Okay, but what can we do about that?”
Doctorow answered that the bubble is being propped up by tech mega–corporations who are now begging investors to come aboard, now that their growth potential is slowing to a halt. To court investors, the monopolists are selling a lie that AI can replace human workers — when in reality, AI experiments are failing at 95 percent of companies that attempt them.
“AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100 percent convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job,” Doctorow writes. “When the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging ‘foundation models’ will be shut off and we’ll lose the AI that can’t do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or ‘discouraged’ and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job.”
“AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations,” he continued.
Given the fact that these investments are already locked in an intricate web of finance capital, Doctorow argues that the best — and only — thing to do is the “puncture the AI bubble as soon as possible, to halt this before it progresses any further and to head off the accumulation of social and economic debt.”
Popping the bubble will mean taking out the “material basis” propping it up: the myth that large language models can do our jobs.
“The most important thing about AI isn’t its technical capabilities or limitations,” Doctorow concludes. “The most important thing is the investor story and the ensuing mania that has teed up an economical catastrophe that will harm hundreds of millions or even billions of people. AI isn’t going to wake up, become superintelligent and turn you into paperclips — but rich people with AI investor psychosis are almost certainly going to make you much, much poorer.”
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