As a *technology*, AI isn't exceptional. It's not exceptionally wicked. It's not exceptionally good. Take away the accompanying, galactic-scale stock-swindle, and we'd call AI's applications "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology:
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AI as Normal Technology | Sayash Kapoor | Substack
Analyzing AI as transformative but normal technology, not superintelligence. Click to read AI as Normal Technology, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.AI as Normal Technology
Jonathan
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Marija_
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2026/07/24/sup…
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Pluralistic: AI solipsists and AI cynics (24 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
As a destructive economic pathology, AI is *extraordinary*. AI boosters have spent a baffling and terrifying sum of money - over $1.4T, most of that in the past year - on the promise of making as many workers unemployed as possible, while lowering the wages of the meager survivors of this jobspocalypse. To make things worse, AI *can't do the jobs* it's replacing.
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Cory Doctorow
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AI is predicated on the premise that the monopolies, duopolies and cartels that control the global economy can deliberately worsen their products without suffering economic or regulatory consequences, because they're the only game in town.
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Cory Doctorow
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In service to this bubble, AI companies have suborned regional governments into running roughshod over environmental and planning review in order to build endless acres of data centers, many of which will likely end up casualties of the imminent bubble-pop, never to be switched on or even completed.
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Cory Doctorow
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What an indignity to have your farm or house seized through eminent domain, only to see it razed and replaced by a weed-choked empty field, a lonely foundation slab, or an abandoned empty building that could only ever be repurposed for laser-tag or an ICE concentration-camp:
gizmodo.com/trump-on-data-cent…
This is just one of the many negative effects of AI that can be traced to the scale of the bubble.
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Trump on Data Centers: 'You Can't Fight It. You Have to Go With It'
AJ Dellinger (Gizmodo)Cory Doctorow
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Were it not for the imperative to turn more than a trillion dollars of losses into a profit, we would not have the aggressive, site-destroying scraping epidemic. Nor would we see AI crammed into every part of every product and service we use. And of course, in the absence of the investment bubble, businesses wouldn't be firing productive workers and replacing them with defective chatbots.
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Cory Doctorow
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The single most salient fact about AI is the investment bubble, not the technical characteristics of chatbots or recent advances in statistical inference.
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Cory Doctorow
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AI's investor story is an incoherent tangle of predictions about AI's future, ranging from the outlandish ("Once we spend enough money, AI will become God and solve all our problems, including our profitability crisis") to the dystopian ("The majority of jobs in the economy will be done by our chatbots, and the employers who previously employed those workers will split the wage savings with us").
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Cory Doctorow
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None of these stories are plausible, which raises an urgent question: why have the world's wealthiest investors been so eager to hand over *trillions* to finance this bubble?
I have previously written about one reason that billionaires find the AI story so compelling: at root, many billionaires just don't believe most other people are actually, fully real. How could they? Achieving billionairehood requires that you inflict pain on vast numbers of people.
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Cory Doctorow
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If you truly believed that those people were as real as you are, you'd never be able to look yourself in the mirror. Whether it's Leona Helmsley's claim that "only the little people pay taxes," or Elon Musk's habit of calling people who disagree with him "NPCs," the whole ideological project of billionaireism is shot through with a kind of solipsism:
pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fis…
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Pluralistic: A world without people (05 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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This is true even in one-on-one encounters: for the Epstein Class, the children raped on his island weren't fully real - certainly not as real as their own children. It's even more true for the people that billionaires experience as statistical artifacts, such as Jeff Bezos's vast army of drivers and warehouse workers, with their sky-high on-the-job injury rates and the everyday indignity of their piss-bottles.
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Cory Doctorow
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It gets worse for social media bosses like Mark Zuckerberg, for whom AI's principal appeal is the prospect of ending socializing on social media, swapping your mulish friends for pliable chatbots who will organize their interactions with you to maximize your platform usage and thus the number of ads you see:
pluralistic.net/2026/01/19/bil…
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Pluralistic: Social media without socializing (19 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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I think billionaire solipsism can account for much of the malinvestment in this obvious bubble, but I don't think it's the whole story. Rather, I think there's a whole cohort of investors who don't believe in AI, but believe that *other* people will believe in AI.
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Cory Doctorow
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This is a well-established investment principle. As Keynes wrote, the point of investing isn't necessarily to pick the most beautiful contestant to win the beauty contest - it's to pick the contestant that the *other judges* will hand the crown to:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesia…
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economic concept
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Cory Doctorow
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In other words, you don't get rich from stock speculation by identifying the businesses whose profitability will grow the most - you get rich by identifying the businesses that *other investors* will pile into, pushing the price up. All you need to do is sell your shares *after* the price spike, but *before* anyone else figures out that the business is a turkey. It's like that old joke: "I don't need to run faster than the bear (market), I just have to run faster than *you*."
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Cory Doctorow
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From the perspective of a cynical AI investor, the question isn't, "Can AI do your job?" The question is, "Can an AI salesman convince your boss that an AI can do your job?" So long as enough bosses are convinced to fire workers and replace them with AI, AI valuation will continue to climb, and if they time the market right, they can get out before those valuations crash.
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Cory Doctorow
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This proposition gets even sweeter if the CEO of the AI company is in bed with financial regulators and stock exchanges, and can force your financial advisor to buy his worthless AI stock with "little people's" retirement savings:
fortune.com/2026/06/13/spacex-…
A bet that bosses will fire workers and replace them with AI is a *good* wager. Bosses are absolute suckers for this scam.
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You can ignore AI giants like SpaceX, but your 401(k) won’t
Stan Choe (Fortune)Cory Doctorow
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Bosses *hate* the fact that they can't translate their plans into action without first having a series of ego-shattering confrontations with workers who actually know how to do things, who insist that those plans are illegal, stupid, impossible or will kill people:
pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/nor…
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Pluralistic: Three more AI psychoses (12 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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For these bosses, AI is the chance to wire the toy steering wheel they play with all day directly into the corporate drive-train. With enough AI slaves, the boss can run the company all on their own:
pluralistic.net/2026/07/10/pos…
In other words, you don't need to be a solipsist to bet on AI. It is sufficient to believe that *bosses* are solipsists, who can be relied upon to empty the corporate coffers in exchange for worker-replacing magic beans.
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Pluralistic: “Rights for robots” and the AI slavery fantasy (10 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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This is true in many scam sectors. I'm sure that most of the people who finance the supplements that Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan hawk understand that they're just a way to give yourself *very* expensive piss. They don't have to believe supplements work to believe that there is an army of desperate and credulous young men who will give *anything* for the promise they dangle.
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Cory Doctorow
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Likewise, you don't have to believe that Gwyneth Paltrow can help women "regulate their periods" and "correct their hormonal imbalances" by selling them rocks to stuff in their vaginas. You just have to believe that between patriarchy-induced body shame and patriarchy-driven medical neglect, there's an army of desperate women out there who will buy those rocks and risk their lives by sticking them inside their bodies:
web.archive.org/web/2018122503…
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Goop’s Vaginal Jade Egg Just Sparked a $145,000 Lawsuit Settlement
Sara Gaynes Levy (Vogue)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
AI is even worse than vagina-rocks, of course. When the bubble bursts, when the seven AI companies that make up 35% of the S&P 500 tank, when a third of the US stock market is vaporized overnight, our governments will reflexively turn to austerity, the go-to response to every financial crisis. Austerity is fascism's best recruiting tool:
pluralistic.net/2026/04/12/alw…
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Pluralistic: Austerity creates fascism (13 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netuis
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www.youtube.comCory Doctorow reshared this.
Jack William Bell
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •> … we'd call AI's applications "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology…
I believe you are deliberately overstating your case for effect and ignoring the cost/benefit ratio problem: The benefits of using AI are dwarfed by the costs of training and running LLMs. With current technology frontier models are simply not economically feasible and smaller models barely work.
But then, that's all part of the bezzle. Ain't it?
Raven Luni
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •That's a straw man argument that sidesteps the core problem of AI.
AI refers to a set of systems built around statistical models designed to converge on a desired outcome. It is a completely opaque process being used as a replacement for actual problem solving. There will always be unknown variables and there will never be 100% reliability.
Knowledge and skills are lost, as is the empowerment that goes with them. Having a tool that does everything for you including your thinking is not empowerment. It is provision without ownership. It is exploitation. It is subjigation.
AI is a technological mistake, potentially even the last one humanity will ever make.