How to Think About AI Before It’s Too Late - The Atlantic

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Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube<br>Cory Doctorow has a refrain: “The most important thing about a gadget isn’t what it does; it’s who it does it for and what it does it to.” In this episode of Galaxy Brain, he sits down with Charlie Warzel to talk about the AI boom, making the case that the hype, vision, and dreams of endless growth are unsustainable. Doctorow expands on his viral “enshittification” thesis: a critique of AI based around power and whether we are using AI tools or being used by them.

The following is a transcript of the episode:<br>Cory Doctorow: Bosses are infinitely horny for firing workers and replacing them with machines. And they have been since forever, right? That’s the story of the Industrial Revolution. They just—there’s something about this, and it’s not just cutting costs. I think that if you’re the boss, you are haunted by the knowledge that if you don’t show up for work, the business just ticks over as per normal. But if all the workers don’t show up, that’s “You’re out of business.” And so maybe you tell yourself you’re driving the car, but secretly you worry that you’re in the back seat with a Fisher Price steering wheel. And one of the things about AI is: It dangles the possibility of wiring the toy steering wheel into the car’s drivetrain.

[Music]<br>Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re going to examine the case against AI.<br>Well, sort of.<br>What follows isn’t a case against the technology: machine learning, generative AI, coding agents. It is instead a case against this particular ideology behind AI: how it’s built, how it’s implemented. Cory Doctorow is a little bit of everything. He’s a science-fiction writer; he’s a technologist himself; he’s a prolific blogger and a journalist. He’s also an activist who has been working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation on digital-rights management, among other issues.<br>And it’s this combination of all of these jobs that make Doctorow this particularly shrewd critic of technology. He’s somebody who has both the skill set to see how technologies are being implemented in ways that work against human flourishing, while also being able to imagine all the ways that the future might be different.<br>And most recently, Doctorow gained notoriety for coining the term enshittification. This has become the shorthand for the way that companies and their platforms start out with this promise of empowerment. But then once they’ve captured the market share, they begin to degrade their services and extract more from their users. Now, enshittification put a name to this pervasive feeling about technology, and especially the tools of the Web 2 era. But a lot of the dynamics of Doctorow’s work are extremely relevant to the AI boom, which is dominated by many of the same personalities of the platform era.<br>Doctorow has a new book. It’s called The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, and it builds on a lot of this past work. We’ll get into what a reverse centaur is in just a moment, I promise. But it’s the book’s subtitle that got my attention: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late.<br>The AI conversation is, as we’ve explored before, intensely polarized, and you have some critics who just seem unable to engage with the usefulness of this technology. But what makes Doctorow’s perspective different is that his critique is not purely about the technology itself. It’s about the power dynamics that surround it. Again and again in his book, he comes back to the same refrain. “The most important thing about a gadget isn’t what it does; it’s who it does it for and what it does it to.” Doctorow’s animating questions needle at something bigger. This question that I think is shared by so many people right now. Why, in this era of intense technological progress, do so many things feel like they’re getting worse and more exhausting?<br>Who really benefits from these tools? Which groups of workers are actually using them, and which groups are being used by them? Is there an AI bubble? What does it look like if it pops? What does meaningful resistance to AI look like, in an era of growth at all costs? Cory Doctorow joins me now to talk about it all.<br>[Music]<br>Warzel: Cory, welcome to Galaxy Brain.<br>Doctorow: Thank you, Charlie. It’s a pleasure to be on.<br>Warzel: So in the intro to your book, you’re talking about different ways that people use artificial intelligence, and you mention that you use it in certain instances. What is your relationship to artificial intelligence in terms of tools you use?<br>Doctorow: The most common use I make of AI—and it’s daily, and I just did it again—is I publish a blog, at pluralistic.net. And because I am keenly aware of how the platforms trap us, I control that blog. I publish it on my own self-hosted WordPress site, on a server on a shelf that I own. So my prompt for...