- Cory Doctorow is a snappy writer whose insight into all dimensions of AI companies and their scamming techniques is comprehensive. He’s always worth reading.
- His new book is a fascinating social and economic take on how AI is influencing virtually all dimensions of business, employment and income, and not in a good way. He's probing deeply into the business side of AI corporations and who they’re screwing. He's not fooled at all by their pretentious rhetoric about how productive our future can be.
- He delves deeply into the appalling way tech companies like Google and Amazon treat their workers. 'Amazon's coders are now being worked like Amazon's warehouse workers and delivery drivers, among the most abused workforce in the wealthy world'. They're not even allowed to take toilet breaks.
- He also addresses the contentious copyright issue. Most authors and artists are loudly proclaiming they are not being paid for the scraping of their content and that this is a breach of copyright law. Legally this isn't true. And 'every search engine makes a copy of every web page it can find, without taking a license or seeking permission to do so'. The substantive issue is that the huge dominant corporations all agree on paying their workers, including creative ones, as little as possible. Their wages are there for the taking. That is the principal issue we should be focused on. 'Scraping in order to make a transient copy of a work for the purposes of analysis, indexing, and so on, is legal'.
- Doctorow is convinced that AI is a bubble, which will burst. ‘Every AI company is losing money, and the bigger the AI company is, the more money it’s losing. The biggest AI companies are losing billions per quarter…. even if one AI company survives most or all of the rest of them will fail. When that happens the AI bubble will burst. Investors will panic-sell their holdings. Companies will collapse. In other words the bubble will burst as all bubbles do, always....Remember: seven giant AI companies account for 35% of the US stock market...We're talking about a crash that will put 2008 in the shade and meet or exceed the pandemic sell-off'. The economic costs will be felt around the world for generations to come. It will be 'a prolonged, brutal, global crash'.
- What's more 'The serious environmental costs of AI will be borne by everyone on the planet, and all the animals and plants we share it with, for hundreds of years to come’.
- Cory Doctorow has written by far the most informed and enlightening book on AI and its consequences I've ever read. I highly recommend it.
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