Cory Doctorow has posted the text of a speech he gave about AI. It is very long, but absolutely worth setting aside some time to read, whether you’re an AI skeptic or enthusiast or somewhere in between.
I was actually a little nervous to read it. Cory is an incredible writer. I was reminded when searching my blog that our paths briefly crossed two decades ago now. (This is why you should have a blog, even for short posts, for the mundane but interesting in hindsight stories.) I loved Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Enshittification is legendary. But AI is so divisive, nearly every post about it seems to turn extreme, squeezing out all the nuance from a complicated subject.
I needn’t have worried. Cory goes deep on lost jobs, coding, art, medicine, copyright law, the bubble. It’s really well done.
Perhaps it works because while his overall view is negative, the individual sections don’t neatly fall into existing this is all bad talking points. For example, I agree with him on copyright and the open web. I’ve tried to reason this out in a couple of my own posts. Cory takes it further in terms of how new laws might backfire for artists:
A new copyright to train models won’t get us a world where models aren’t used to destroy artists, it’ll just get us a world where the standard contracts of the handful of companies that control all creative labor markets are updated to require us to hand over those new training rights to those companies.
On data centers, he argues that this is all wasted infrastructure. GPUs don’t last very long, unlike the fiber optic cables we got from the dot-com boom:
AI is a bubble and it will burst. Most of the companies will fail. Most of the data-centers will be shuttered or sold for parts. So what will be left behind?
I was listening to the recent Decoder interview that covered this and I came away mostly persuaded by Arvind Krishna. We’ll use the data centers for something, and new solar farms and nuclear power will benefit the grid. We need to keep building clean energy, and AI labs are currently writing the checks.
In a way, Cory’s focus is as much about how big companies treat employees as it is about AI. Companies that only care about money will use AI to justify layoffs. But the strength of AI is letting humans do their jobs better, not getting rid of them, and not turning them into soulless, blind followers of the machine.
I remain hopeful that AI can have a positive impact on the world, possibly a profound one. So I guess although I really enjoyed the post, I’m not convinced by it. At least I hope Cory’s wrong, because it feels like the whole economy is propped up by this one thing, and it’s going to be very bad if everything crashes… But it’s certainly possible that he’s right, and he has some great insight along the way.
