Pluralistic: The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh (27 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: “Open” “AI” isn’t (18 August 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

The crybabies who freak out about The Communist Manifesto appearing on university curriculum clearly never read it – chapter one is basically a long hymn to capitalism's flexibility and inventiveness, its ability to change form and adapt itself to everything the world throws at it and come out on top:

Pluralistic: IP can’t save you from AI (18 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

You don't have to believe that AI "art" is any good (I don't), nor do you have to believe that AI "art" can be any good (I don't) to understand that the reason that the capital markets are putting trillions into AI is that they believe they can fire workers of every kind and replace them with AI:

Pluralistic: When AI prophecy fails (29 Oct 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Amazon made $35 billion in profit last year, so they're celebrating by laying off 14,000 workers (a number they say will rise to 30,000). This is the kind of thing that Wall Street loves, and this layoff comes after a string of pronouncements from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy about how AI is going to let them fire tons of workers.

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):

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:

The AI Apocalypse Is Already Here | Compact

Americans do not care for artificial intelligence. Recent polling shows that their attitudes mostly range from ambivalence to horror.

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’s pogo-stick grift (02 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Not only is agentic AI bullshit, but it's a specific kind of bullshit that AI hucksters have busted out in the past, and will bust out in the future, so it's worth spending a minute to unpack this bullshit and catalog its traits so that we don't fall for it. As GW Bush says, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, we don't get fooled again."

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!).

Pluralistic: Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon (29 Oct 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

I think it behooves us to be a little skeptical of stories about AI driving people to believe wrong things and commit ugly actions. Not that I like the AI slop that is filling up our social media, but when we look at the ways that AI is harming us, slop is pretty low on the list.

Pluralistic: What kind of bubble is AI? (19 Dec 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

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: AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers (27 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

On a recent This Machine Kills episode, guest Hagen Blix described the ultimate form of "AI therapy" with a "human in the loop":