Pluralistic: Big Tech’s “attention rents” (03 Nov 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Google’s AI pricing plan (21 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Google is spending a lot on AI, but what's not clear is how Google will make a lot from AI. Or, you know, even break even. Given, you know, that businesses are seeing zero return from AI:

Pluralistic: AI solipsists and AI cynics (24 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

As a technology, AI isn't exceptional. It's not exceptionally wicked. It's not exceptionally good. Take away the accompanying, galactic-scale stock-swindle, and we'd call AI's applications "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology:

Pluralistic: “Rights for robots” and the AI slavery fantasy (10 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

While the AI bubble is primarily a material phenomenon (driven by the calculation that bosses are easy marks for a sales pitch that sees them replacing workers with software), there is an inescapable ideological component to it: the desire for a world without people in it:

Pluralistic: AI and the fatfinger economy (02 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Have you noticed that all the buttons you click most frequently to invoke routine, useful functions in your device have been moved, and their former place is now taken up by a curiously butthole-esque icon that summons an unwanted AI?

Pluralistic: How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses (16 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

There's lots of reasons to believe the "hyperscaler" model of AI can never be profitable, and not just because of its gigantic expenditures and negative unit economics (the companies lose money with every new customer and every new use, and they lose more money with each generation of their products):

Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring

Many employers procure hiring algorithms from the same third-party vendors. Over 60% of the Fortune 100 use HireVue's algorithms. When hiring algorithms from a single vendor mediate hiring decisions at multiple employers, they constitute an algorithmic monoculture.

Science says X algorithmic feed makes users favor conservative views

A new study found that users who rely on algorithmic rather than chronological X feed become more supportive of conservative opinions, including about Ukraine and investigations into Donald Trump.

Algorithmic Choice with Custom Feeds - Bluesky

Our implementation of algorithmic choice lets users customize one of the most important parts of their social media experience: their feed.

Algorithmic choice - Bluesky

Your attention is an invaluable resource. We want a future where you control what you see on social media.

Google Search’s AI evolution includes more ads

Is this Google’s AI or ad era?

Pluralistic: Reverse engineers bust sleazy gig work platform (23 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Supposedly, these lines were included in a 1979 internal presentation at IBM; screenshots of them routinely go viral:

Social Media Algorithms Distort Social Instincts and Fuel Misinformation - Neuroscience News

Social media algorithms, designed to boost user engagement for advertising revenue, amplify the biases inherent in human social learning processes, leading to misinformation and polarization.

Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion

For decades, the artificial intelligence (AI) “singularity” has been heralded as a single, titanic mind bootstrapping itself to godlike intelligence, consolidating all cognition into a cold silicon point. But this vision is almost certainly wrong in its most fundamental assumption. If AI development follows the path of previous major evolutionary transitions or “intelligence explosions,” our current step-change in computational intelligence will be plural, social, and deeply entangled with its forebears (us!).