Cory Doctorow
speaker
2,525 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 3d ago
Cory Doctorow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Anyone who claims that they live a life that isn't steeped in blood, both old and fresh, is kidding themselves.
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By all means, do everything you can to right wrongs.
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But if you only permit yourself to act in ways that avoid contact with the product of sin, you won't do anything, let alone anything to right wrongs.
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Imagine a new generation of buses that could handily fit under Robert Moses' Long Island overpasses, such that the overpasses could no longer be used to racially and economically segregate the city's beaches.
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At that point, the overpasses' technopolitics change.
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They may have been made for an evil purpose, but now that they no longer serve that purpose, they're just bridges.
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The mere fact of their historical sin is no reason to tear them down today.
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A less extreme version of the Sinful Origins argument is that the ongoing use of a sin-steeped object is the source of fresh evil in the world.
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Museums that display the looted remains of indigenous people don't merely dishonor those long-dead people, they inflict ongoing harm on living indigenous people whose elders are reduced to colonial curiosities, making indigeniety itself a relic,
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I think a version of this can be applied to some of the hyperscalers models.
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Models that have been trained on and retain the ill-gotten private information of millions of people are indeed so wicked that they should just be deleted.
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Just as the mere existence of pornographic images of children is an ongoing harm to the people who were abused to create them, the mere existence of databases of ill-gotten private information is an ongoing source of harm and risk to the people in the database.
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If there's a chance that an AI model can be made to yield up your personal sensitive information,
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We should destroy it.
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But if there are databases, models that were trained on private information in such a way that they no longer retain that information,
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then they are more like the Autobahn than they are like a trove of child sex abuse material.
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They are steeped in sin.
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They should not have been made in the way they were.
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But the ongoing use of them causes no new harm to anyone.
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And so if they are useful, we should use them, even as we erect protections to prevent anyone else from engaging in mass privacy invasions for any purpose, including AI, ever again.
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Showing 201–220 of 2,525 · page 11 of 127
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