I mean, I’m glad he said it but anyone who’s been paying attention already knows this. The entire country is collectively waiting for the bubble to burst as it is. You also have to separate things like Machine Learning from LLMs. Two totally different use cases. They’ve not even clearly articulated any end goals. Even NASA had ‘put a man on the moon’, not just ‘more space’. From what I can tell their goals boil down to either ‘make money’ or ‘make God’. The former works great for individuals but not a whole class of technology and the latter would surely not garner trillions in investment dollars. LLMs are certainly great productivity tools but what is their goal really for a CEO to be able to fire their entire staff so they can sit down at a computer and type in ‘make my business better’ and they think that’ll work?
I’m gonna go ahead and assume that Doctorow’s actual stance isn’t as idiotic as the title suggests.
Unfortunately I don’t think they are wrong about it changing everything, I just don’t think it will be a positive change for most people.
It’s changed the price of RAM, that much is assured.
The story itself is pretty ridiculous. He starts with a conclusion, and then looks for stories to support that narrative. What should happen, is first establish criteria to measure if an AI project has been successful or not and then measure projects against that criteria. Instead the author uses anecdotal stories of projects he has heard failed, so it must all wrong.
Not one mention of the advances in medical research using AI, because it goes against his narrative.
The whole world is lying because that’s how we get fucking money. What a stupid hole we’ve dug ourselves.
I’m so happy everyone in the comments is engaging in a thoughtful and informed manner and not just spouts uninformed nonsensical talking points from both sides to see who can shout the loudest.
I mean, the article actually says that they are not lying.
But the truth they are telling is that this kind of tools is like Yuuzhan-Vong assistants in Star Wars NJO era. It’s just further in the direction of auto-complete and recommendations.
That’s good. It also means that a real job can’t be “done by AI”.
It’s another kind of data compression, in a very fundamental and general way.
It accelerates the most things that shouldn’t be done at all. Boilerplate code that’s written again and again because of wrong processes, which are taught as standard way of thinking and doing development. Other things that could be a higher-level programming/markup language or a library. Just a frontal way of solving things that were done by hand.
That’s useful, one can’t do everything by hand.
Just - things that require real human decisions, understanding, responsibility, choice, or semantic and semiotic context that has formed in the course of one’s own life for like 20 years - that they can’t do. And that’s what forms a professional. They can extrapolate stuff that doesn’t matter.
Here’s a link to the exact same post on Cory Doctorow’s (tracker-free) blog: https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/01/dare-snot/#i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again
I can only speak to my own area of expertise, biotechnology
and it appears that AI is in fact changing everything and doing so fast eg
Work keeps insisting we use it and I keep telling them to fuck off.
I get more done than my colleagues BECAUSE i don’t use the not-actually-AI “AI” tool.
I can’t say AI hasn’t changed how I work, it has. Instead of going to Google, vendor docs, or the manpage for whatever code or system I am working on I will ask Claude or Gemini to take a stab at building the initial pass of the code or to look up what some cryptic error code means for me. Or even a better way to write some code that I think can be more concise.
The key I think is I never let it make the final decisions for me. The workflow is always look up information > shows it to me > ask for permission to do the thing > do the thing.
But none of that is “changing everything” in the way executives and the Sam Altman’s of the world want to profess. It is just a sometimes more efficient for me way of doing the same thing I was doing before.
A lot of people I have seen that crow about how they are using AI to change their work lives are just doing really fancy Github workflows and actions to automate something they used to still do manually for some reason. They rarely are doing anything that couldn’t be done with the time to research and test without AI.
AI would be great if(currently its mixed for me,and whats the best thing you can do ATM ):
- The Datacenters didnt drain like 3 oceans and half of the power grid(or used solar energy + air cooling only,the only way to solve this is Local LLMs currently or specific AI solutions that isnt ChatGPT or Gemini. )
- the LLM is not trained on copyrighted data(non-public domain) and not Paying the artists or not ask the original creator to train on their work.(Local LLMS partially solve this,and this requires specific LLMS too.)
- People did not use AI mindlessly to write Code for you(well i think this requires the user to use their brain)
and so on…
and AI should stay as a “TOOL”, not a full replacement for human work like most sane people do.Meh, he’s one to talk. He admits to regularly using AI in his writing—maybe this very piece you’re reading—so it has clearly changed something in his workflow.
Nikhil Suresh’s opinion piece stands up on its own without Cory Doctorow’s platitudes.
