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Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
It's changed the price of RAM, that much is assured.
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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And SSD’s and HDD’s. Made pretty much all new computer hardware much more expensive.
I'm gonna go ahead and assume that Doctorow's actual stance isn't as idiotic as the title suggests.
The stance is that chatbota aren't essential to the economy the way smartphones or computers are.
The story itself is pretty ridiculous. He starts with a conclusion, and then looks for stories to support that narrative. What should happen, is first establish criteria to measure if an AI project has been successful or not and then measure projects against that criteria. Instead the author uses anecdotal stories of projects he has heard failed, so it must all be wrong.
Not one mention of the advances in medical research using AI, because it goes against his narrative.
If you read the article, he talks specifically about that. The people using AI for real shit, like protein folding, can use it to improve their work, because they're experts at it, and know when the AI is fucking up. The AI helps, but could never, ever, replace them.
The other question Suresh implicitly raises is: "How can you reconcile the failure of AI in the enterprise with the individual claims of skilled technologists who insist that AI is helping them do great work?" The answer is that these AI users are "centaurs" – experienced workers who are assisted by automation on terms that they set for themselves.
Thanks to their skill and experience, these workers possess discernment, the ability to tell good code from bad, and (more importantly) good uses of code-generation tools from bad.
Give some anecdotal stories of AI advancing healthcare.
You think AI isn't being used for medical research?
https://www.cancer.gov/research/infrastructure/artificial-intelligence
The whole world is lying because that's how we get fucking money. What a stupid hole we've dug ourselves.
stupid is the new normal. act accordingly
Unfortunately I don't think they are wrong about it changing everything, I just don't think it will be a positive change for most people.
Yeah this couldn't be more of a bad opinion that doesn't reflect what is actually happening if it tried. The entire world is racing to create an AI nightmare, and because game theory safety isn't even happening and some people imagine themselves ushering in the next age of evolution only to find we'll be turned into paperclips and the intelligence they gave birth to is so misaligned as to follow us perfectly of the cliff holding us in their hand.
I'm so happy everyone in the comments is engaging in a thoughtful and informed manner and not just spouts uninformed nonsensical talking points from both sides to see who can shout the loudest.
I mean, the article actually says that they are not lying.
But the truth they are telling is that this kind of tools is like Yuuzhan-Vong assistants in Star Wars NJO era. It's just further in the direction of auto-complete and recommendations.
That's good. It also means that a real job can't be "done by AI".
It's another kind of data compression, in a very fundamental and general way.
It accelerates the most things that shouldn't be done at all. Boilerplate code that's written again and again because of wrong processes, which are taught as standard way of thinking and doing development. Other things that could be a higher-level programming/markup language or a library. Just a frontal way of solving things that were done by hand.
That's useful, one can't do everything by hand.
Just - things that require real human decisions, understanding, responsibility, choice, or semantic and semiotic context that has formed in the course of one's own life for like 20 years - that they can't do. And that's what forms a professional. They can extrapolate stuff that doesn't matter.
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Here's a link to the exact same post on Cory Doctorow's (tracker-free) blog: https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/01/dare-snot/#i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again
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