Cory Doctorow
speaker
2,525 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 4d 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
And that would be true even if the factory that produced these decentralized pocket reactors ran on a $10 billion nuke filled with traditional enriched uranium.
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The technopolitics aren't tied to the fact that the nuke produces energy by splitting atoms.
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It's tied to the technical reality of the only way we know how to accomplish that feat.
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If we learn new atom splitting techniques, they can have different technopolitics.
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By the same token, a language model, even one released by a despicable Amoday or Altman, has embedded technopolitics because of the kind of infrastructure it requires, not because it guesses words.
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Guessing words is fine.
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It's sometimes useful.
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The open models that OpenAI and Anthropic have put into the world and can never claw back will be guessing words long after those companies are dust.
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We can use those open models for good or ill.
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We can choose their technopolitics.
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Technopolitics are a matter of what happens when you use a technology and what you have to do to maintain and improve that technology.
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Optimizing open models is a matter for collaborative open effort, not closed labs fueled by investors centabilliens.
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AI has technopolitics, but those politics are neither inevitable nor immutable.
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Sam Altman's lurking presence in a language model is no more politically disqualifying than William Shockley's residue in your microchips.
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AI today might be a defective tomato harvester, immiserating workers and driving out good tomatoes with bad.
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But there's nothing intrinsic in the idea of a tool for harvesting a tomato that is bad for workers or tomatoes.
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It's because we let bosses choose which tomato harvester was suitable for use that we ended up in this place.
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Put the pickers in charge of that decision?
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And we'd have a very different harvesting technology.
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And far more delicious tomatoes.
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Showing 261–280 of 2,525 · page 14 of 127
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