‘You Can’t Make Billions Without Hurting People’: So Says Cory Doctorow, on Elon Musk, the AI Bubble and Bosses’ Cruel Fantasies
My immediate reaction to that headline by Zoe Williams, in my June 24th edition of the Guardian UK, was to wonder if it was an admission of defeat or a call to arms.
Zoe subtitles her review of Doctorow’s book: The writer who coined the word ‘enshittification’ tells us why AI will never deliver what it promises – and why it still appeals so much to those in power.
So, there’s the clue, and we can settle down to see what Zoe says Cory says, interpreted by me, which I will now deliver ‘third hand.’ I seldom do that, but I have yet to read the book.
All aboard?
Cory minces few words:
“A “centaur”, in automation theory, is a person assisted by a machine, and a “reverse centaur”, hero of Cory Doctorow’s new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, is a “human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine”. Every warehouse worker who ever had to urinate in a water bottle because they couldn’t 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’t crash, presumably on minimum rather than truck-driver wages, is a reverse centaur; as is every lawyer no longer on lawyer’s money checking Gemini’s 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’ jobs, and there is no point fighting it because the future’s already here.”
Okay, just by that opener, I gotta buy the book. Maybe you should as well, but let’s take the next leap.
Quoting Zoe’s article, which you can read in full at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/24/cory-doctorow-on-elon-musk-ai-bubble-bosses-cruel-fantasies
“AI cannot and will never render us obsolete,” Doctorow says. “It’s a conjuring trick. That’s probably the most important thing to get across.” 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’re “imputing intentionality to this thing that intends nothing. It’s not because, objectively, it seems intentional, but because, in a state of nature, we don’t encounter sentences that don’t have sentence writers, we don’t encounter images that don’t have painters, and so on. We marvel when it does things right, and conveniently ignore what it gets wrong, or indulge its “hallucinations”, which is just a fancy word for “errors.”
Well, thank god for that, but what about all the concern that artificial intelligence will become sentient, and throw we humans out with its robot enabled garbage collector, once it finds it no longer needs us?
AI apparently scares the shit out of us because we confuse the knowledge of everything created by humans, with the human weaknesses of greed, an absence of care for our fellow humans, a tendency towards war to settle grievances.
AI doesn’t share those weaknesses and goals. Similarly, your calculator doesn’t have an opinion on whether you’re successful or going broke…it simply spits out numbers.
On the other hand (and there’s ALWAYS another hand)
Just as ‘figures don’t lie, but liars figure,’ AI can enable some outrageous and damaging behavior by its human creators:
An image of Barack Obama, looking perfect and speaking with his voice (lips synched and all) can tell you he has become a MAGA Republican,
Promises (but cannot deliver) products without product designers, workplaces without workers, screenplays without screenwriters, movies without actors, and hospitals without doctors and nurses,
Turns out incredibly convincing AI slop, on a daily basis,
Answers to complicated personal problems, particularly those of the heart,
Turns fully clothed women (and children) into naked ones,
Analyzes 18th-century poetry,
And promises 10,000 instant stock options that beat the market averages in 1/10th of a second
There are so many more, including military targeting-data quicker than field commanders can think. The bombed girl’s school in Iran that killed 170 students was AI targeted, relying on outdated maps.
But we must go forth, spending $trillions we don’t have in the process, because China may get there first.
Doctorow comments on that with a magical response, my favorite in the entire article: “You don’t want a Confucian God. You want an Old Testament God. Different smiting.”
But certainly one (and possibly two) AI competitors are going to grab the golden hoop on this merry-go-round, and it may even be Elon, who has thus far used it profitably to disrobe children.
If that’s the case, he (and any other survivors) will take all the text, art, music, and knowledge of human history, pay absolutely nothing to its creators…and sell it bit-by-bit to you and I for a profit.
In a criminally indictable act of largesse, that knowledge will be accessible to every miscreant worldwide, including dictators, banking institutions (pardon me for naming the same conspirators twice), political adversaries, and the dark world of the internet.
Big net.
Huge fish.
Illegal profits beyond human understanding.
And all of that, not because we should, but because we can.
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late is published by Verso (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.