{"id":655643,"date":"2026-06-24T10:47:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T10:47:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/655643\/"},"modified":"2026-06-24T10:47:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T10:47:08","slug":"you-cant-make-billions-without-hurting-people-cory-doctorow-on-elon-musk-the-ai-bubble-and-bosses-cruel-fantasies-ai-artificial-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/655643\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018You can\u2019t make billions without hurting people\u2019: Cory Doctorow on Elon Musk, the AI bubble and bosses\u2019 cruel fantasies | AI (artificial intelligence)"},"content":{"rendered":"

A \u201ccentaur\u201d, in automation theory, is a person assisted by a machine, and a \u201creverse centaur\u201d, hero of Cory Doctorow\u2019s new book, The Reverse Centaur\u2019s Guide to Life After AI<\/a>, is a \u201chuman who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine\u201d. Every warehouse worker who ever had to urinate in a water bottle because they couldn\u2019t otherwise meet the fulfilment targets set by an algorithm is a reverse centaur. Reaching into the future, everyone who has to sit in a self-driving truck to make sure it doesn\u2019t crash, presumably on minimum rather than truck-driver wages, is a reverse centaur; as is every lawyer no longer on lawyer\u2019s money checking Gemini\u2019s command of precedent, every indie band scraping a living doing covers of AI-generated hits, and so on. That, anyway, is the promise: AI is coming for your job, and it is coming for your kids\u2019 jobs, and there is no point fighting it because the future\u2019s already here.<\/p>\n

Wiping out the world of work, and with it our ability to sustain ourselves and live autonomous lives, is only the beginning, if you listen to AI\u2019s architects. Elon Musk has called it the single greatest threat to human civilisation<\/a>, Sam Altman has said it will \u201cmost likely lead to the end of the world\u201d and Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic<\/a>, memorably forecast that AI would come to see us the way we see animals<\/a>: cute to have around but ultimately a resource to be exploited. \u201cAI people claim they\u2019re about to create God, by teaching words to a word-guessing programme,\u201d Doctorow says. \u201cIt\u2019s grandiose.\u201d<\/p>\n

An inflatable caricature of Elon Musk in New York\u2019s Times Square in June 2026. Photograph: Charly Triballeau\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Doctorow bursts into our video-call conversation as if we\u2019re already two hours in, his delivery puckish and urgent. He\u2019s not happy with his new AI camera, which \u201csupposedly tracks your face, and then doesn\u2019t, and just points in arbitrary directions. I mean, this is where my camera thinks my face is,\u201d he says, and indeed, it is nowhere near his face. \u201cThanks, camera. Glad I\u2019m wearing trousers.\u201d<\/p>\n

AI cannot and will never render us obsolete, Doctorow says. \u201cIt\u2019s a conjuring trick. That\u2019s probably the most important thing to get across.\u201d A machine has been invented that is really good at building sentences by predicting what word would usually come next, and we invest it with meaning, insight, omnipotence. But we\u2019re \u201cimputing intentionality to this thing that intends nothing. It\u2019s not because, objectively, it seems intentional, but because, in a state of nature, we don\u2019t encounter sentences that don\u2019t have sentence writers, we don\u2019t encounter images that don\u2019t have painters, and so on.\u201d We marvel when it does things right, and conveniently ignore what it gets wrong, or indulge its \u201challucinations\u201d, which is just a fancy word for \u201cerrors\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere I think the word \u2018hallucination\u2019 is useful,\u201d he says, \u201cis not to describe what the AI is doing, but what we do when we encounter a word salad, and we impute a writer to the word salad.\u201d If you think AI can become conscious, he suggests, it\u2019s because you\u2019ve forgotten what consciousness is.<\/p>\n

double quotation markDo you not remember when they said cryptocurrency would replace all of the world\u2019s financial systems?<\/p>\n

But that doesn\u2019t mean there\u2019s no threat. This technology can absolutely wreak global havoc; it\u2019ll just be of a very old-fashioned kind. A vast amount of investment has gone into AI. \u201cWhen I wrote this book [last year], it was a $700bn bubble. It\u2019s a $1.4tn bubble now. The only thing worse than a $1.4tn bubble is a $2.4tn bubble, which we\u2019re headed for,\u201d he says. Nine tech companies in the US account for 35% of its entire stock market valuation, which was illustrated rather sharply when the war in Iran had a greater impact on European and Asian stock markets than America\u2019s \u2013 they were \u201cinsulated\u201d by the dominance of the tech sector, people said at the time.<\/p>\n

\u2018We have a quarter of a century\u2019s experience with popped bubbles\u2019 \u2026 Doctorow in his massage chair, at home in LA. Photograph: Jessica Pons\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

But insulated might not be the right word. Doctorow describes \u201ctwo poles in finance law. One is Stein\u2019s Law: anything that can\u2019t go on for ever eventually stops. And the other is Keynes: the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. So it\u2019s hard to predict when bubbles are gonna pop. But it\u2019s easy to predict that bubbles will pop.\u201d<\/p>\n

Doctorow, 54, is in Los Angeles; he divides his time between there and London (his British wife, Alice Taylor, runs the BBC\u2019s AI Creative Lab, which isn\u2019t ironic but it would slow us down to explain why not). He came to mass attention as a tech writer with his book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It<\/a>; it\u2019s hard to believe it was only published last year, and impossible to remember what we did without that word. People now use \u201censhittification\u201d for everything, from the degradation of public services post-austerity to climate-crisis-related chaos events, when in fact Doctorow\u2019s proposition had quite a specific use regarding tech: giant platforms lock you in and then make your experience worse on purpose. \u201cI\u2019m not frustrated by that at all. I think it\u2019s glorious. My first two languages are English and Yiddish, languages that don\u2019t have language academies, where dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive, where words change meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s Canadian, his early life dotted with signs of an independent spirit and tech-curious mind: he dropped out of high school and graduated from Seed, an \u201calternative\u201d school in Toronto; he spent time in the 00s setting up OpenCola, a free peer-to-peer software company, then editing Boing Boing, which was vastly popular for a time as an online muster point for discussing tech, futurism and the left. He has an honorary doctorate in computer science from the Open University, has held numerous academic residencies and is professor-at-large at Cornell University.<\/p>\n

Alongside his nonfiction, he\u2019s an extremely prolific sci-fi writer, three-time winner of the Prometheus award (for young adult novels Little Brother, Pirate Cinema and Homeland). He writes graphic novels, authored a children\u2019s picture book named after his daughter, Poesy, who is now 18, and publishes a newsletter almost daily. I wonder whether he\u2019s dismissive of AI\u2019s takeover because he finds writing, creating and communicating so effortless that maybe he doesn\u2019t realise that for many people it\u2019s like pulling teeth, and they wish a machine would do it. Absolutely not, he says \u2013 but more important than all the things AI can\u2019t do, and will never be able to do, from call centre operations to radiology, is to understand the motivation behind all the feverish claims for it.<\/p>\n

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (left), who said AI will \u2018most likely lead to the end of the world\u2019; and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who forecast that AI would come to see us the way we see animals. Photograph: Jason Redmond,ludovic Marin\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Why, he wonders, are capital allocators allocating so much capital to this? It\u2019s because of a promise as old as the loom: that bosses will be able to replace their workers with machines. This isn\u2019t just about money \u2013 often, when the machine is ultimately not as good as a human, or needs so much supervision from a human that it becomes more expensive, there\u2019s still tremendous appetite for automation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe one thing a boss does not want is co-determination. Bosses are haunted by the knowledge that even though they fancy that they\u2019re driving the car, if they don\u2019t show up, everything continues to work. Whereas if the workers don\u2019t show up, everything shuts down. And so perhaps they\u2019re in the back seat with a toy steering wheel. AI is the promise of wiring that toy steering wheel directly into the drivetrain of the car. It\u2019s products without product designers. Workplaces without workers, screenplays without screenwriters, movies without actors, hospitals without doctors and nurses. This is the promise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once that promise is made, of course, it feeds an insecurity in the workforce, because if we all really were obsolete, that would be pretty consequential, and we can already see harbingers in our youth unemployment figures and our self-service checkouts. But then we become our own (second) worst enemy, because of what Doctorow, quoting Lee Vinsel from Virginia Tech, calls \u201ccriti-hype\u201d \u2013 critique that both feeds off and feeds into the hype, and makes the doomsday scenarios more plausible. This may never have been more pronounced \u2013 government ministers have spoken openly about all the time and money they\u2019ll save once routine tasks are automated.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you not remember when they said cryptocurrency would replace all of the world\u2019s financial systems? They told us that the metaverse would be the default, that we wouldn\u2019t have tourism or sex any more,\u201d Doctorow says, with vaudeville outrage. \u201cWe have such poor object permanence!\u201d (This is fancy, child-development vocabulary for \u201creally bad memories\u201d.)<\/p>\n

double quotation markIf we want to actually target the harm that Musk is doing, we have to make his investors think he can\u2019t make money<\/p>\n

Another powerful AI critic, the journalist Karen Hao<\/a>, has argued that when apocalyptic claims are made for AI, there\u2019s often a veiled threat behind it: \u201cLet us experiment as we wish, have our datacentres, because otherwise Chinese companies will get there first.\u201d Doctorow agrees. \u201cYou don\u2019t want a Confucian God. You want an Old Testament God. Different smiting.\u201d Essentially, though, he thinks the big talk has a simpler motivation: anything to keep the investment flowing.<\/p>\n

Whenever an exercise in automation fails and is abandoned \u2013 you may remember Amazon\u2019s staff-less grocery stores, which actually required three people to be constantly watching each shopper on CCTV and guessing what they were putting in their baskets \u2013 it never dents the AI cheerleaders\u2019 confidence that they\u2019re speeding towards a post-worker world; nor, so far, the enthusiasm of investors. It\u2019s got to the point where it\u2019s more important to keep the narrative afloat than to consider whether it\u2019s realistic.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t have to believe that a face cream is gonna make women look younger to believe that there will be women who will buy a face cream marketed to make them look younger. It doesn\u2019t have to work. Are investors investing in the face cream because they think the face cream works? What I\u2019m saying is maybe they\u2019re investing in the face cream because they\u2019re familiar with patriarchy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The problem is, people can see AI all around them, working better today than it did yesterday \u2013 turning out more convincing AI slop<\/a>, answering their personal problems, turning fully clothed women into naked ones, analysing 18th-century poetry. It feels as if it can do anything, but none of that is the material basis for the investment. \u201cI think it\u2019s very important to be critical of things like Elon Musk\u2019s Grok AI that allow users to turn out child porn [in January, Musk\u2019s Grok AI was found to be capable of generating non-consensual sexualised images<\/a> of people, including children, and xAI was rolling out \u2018technological measures\u2019 to restrict Grok\u2019s ability to undress people in photos]. But we can\u2019t pretend that there\u2019s anyone who invested in his AI company, who looked at the prospectus and said, \u2018I see you have a line item here for the expected revenues for child porn \u2013 that\u2019s great, that\u2019s why I\u2019m here.\u2019\u201d In other words, go ahead and ban child porn \u2013 \u201cwe should do that anyway\u201d \u2013 but no one\u2019s going to take their money out. \u201cIf we want to actually target the harm that Musk is doing, we have to make his investors think he can\u2019t make money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Doctorow at a digital society conference in Berlin, May 2026. Photograph: Sean Gallup\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Fundamentally, this is a Marxist analysis, I suggest: that labour and capital are elementally at odds, and the latter will exploit the former even if all value is lost in the process. \u201cI don\u2019t necessarily disagree, but that\u2019s not the argument I\u2019m making. The argument I\u2019m making is that bosses resent and work relentlessly to end co-determination as a class.\u201d But that\u2019s the same, I insist, and he shrugs, as if to say: we can bicker about Marx after we\u2019ve stopped this runaway train.<\/p>\n

What Marx didn\u2019t have to contend with is the trillionaire, even in old money. \u201cThere is something about being very rich and insulated from the consequences of your actions that makes you solipsistic. You cannot make billions of dollars without hurting lots of people. And you can\u2019t hurt lots of people without, in some sense, believing that they\u2019re not really people.\u201d<\/p>\n

He raises Musk\u2019s publicly acknowledged ketamine use. \u201cI have a chronic pain condition, and I\u2019ve had ketamine administered, and one of the things about ketamine is that it feels like the whole world is a thing you imagined. Like you\u2019re the only real person in the world. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a coincidence that Elon Musk<\/a> calls the people who disagree with him NPCs, non-player characters, because he doesn\u2019t think they\u2019re really real.\u201d<\/p>\n

The larger problem than Musk\u2019s personality, or even your average billionaire\u2019s, though, is that bubble: \u201cThe more of the stock market there is wound up in it, the more economic harm there will be in the blast radius of AI, which is not to the capital allocators who\u2019ve given them $1.4tn to play with \u2013 it\u2019s everyone else. We have a quarter of a century\u2019s experience now with popped bubbles, and we use them as an excuse to do the austerity that our politicians dream of doing anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the unloveliest of all dilemmas, wishing for a global crash now to forestall a worse one later, when there\u2019s not much you can do to bring it about anyway. But is it better than worrying about your children toiling for robot overlords? It has the advantage of not being a fever dream.<\/p>\n

The Reverse Centaur\u2019s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It\u2019s Too Late is published by Verso (\u00a316.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A \u201ccentaur\u201d, in automation theory, is a person assisted by a machine, and a \u201creverse centaur\u201d, hero of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":655644,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-655643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=655643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/655644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=655643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=655643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=655643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}