Cory Doctorow
speaker
115 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 27 Jul
Cory Doctorow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
When capital drives automation, they want to maximize quantity, not quality.
And often it's quantity at the expense of quality.
And so
We see automation now in AI being driven almost exclusively by capital.
When you read the business press, it's not like the early 2000s where Harvard Business Review was publishing panicked articles about what CEOs were going to do about all the young workers who expected to use the web at the office.
Now it's full of articles about how CEOs are threatening to fire workers unless they use AI.
This is very much capital-driven automation.
But when you are the weakest link in the chain, when you're the bottleneck in the output of the machine, then you're going to be worked at the absolute limit of your capacity by a machine that by definition can last longer than you, move faster than you, and is stronger than you, which means that the minute you make a mistake, you're in for a world of hurt.
You know, Amazon built the world's most automated warehouses.
They're also the warehouses with the highest rate of injury.
That's not a coincidence.
It's the consequence.
You don't pay eight figures for warehouse automation.
and run the machine slower than you need to.
And when you run the machine at the maximum speed of the people who operate in it and around it, that means that the minute someone gets something wrong they get impaled on a forklift.
Yeah, well, you know, I think you just have to understand that like bosses are infinitely horny to get rid of workers because every day they have ego shattering confrontations with people who know how to do things that they don't know how to do and who, you know, tell them every time they show up with a great idea that it's illegal or immoral or it's going to kill a bunch of people.
And you can, you know, dispel that fear that you're in the backseat with a Fisher-Price steering wheel instead of in the driver's seat by using AI to like
Come up with a product idea and the AI craps it out and you don't have to like actually talk to people about it.
And what you get is a very dim world for workers, which is not to say that AI isn't useful for workers.
I mean, I think the way to resolve the paradox of, for example, programmers who sometimes say, well, I use AI and my code is better than it's ever been.
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