Cory Doctorow
speaker
2,714 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 2d ago
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 — 9 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Yeah.
Yes.
So what I would say is that the idea that someday we're all going to go to work in the metaverse and we're not going to have Disneyland anymore because you'll just go there in the metaverse and the sex trade will collapse because it'll just be in the metaverse and so on and so on and so on, that that requires an enormous amount of belief, as does the belief that this thing that is, again, from a computer science perspective, very interesting, will take everyone's job.
um that uh it will um uh not only continue to uh grow uh in terms of refining the capabilities it has but that at a certain time uh quantity will take on a quality all its own and by by becoming better at guessing words it will become uh actually intelligent and maybe them become god uh and this this requires a leap of faith right that i think um
is very, it's become very doctrinal, like we have a hard time getting away from it.
But when you step back one step and you say, wait, the word guessing program waking up and becoming intelligent, I mean, to use an example from Stanford where they bred horses, this is like saying, if you breed horses to run faster and faster, surely one of them will give birth to a locomotive.
The idea that just guessing words better is the same thing as consciousness does require this leap that I think is not present.
And it has become so saturated in our culture.
So I'm flying on the red-eye tonight to Toronto and doing a conference talk and a panel on Tuesday and then a bookstore event.
And I was on the call with my panelists, and the panel's about digital sovereignty and the risks of digital sovereignty.
And all the co-panelists were talking about how Canada needs its own sovereign AI.
I'm like, wait a second.
What happens to Canada if we switch off the AI?
Like, which firms fail?
right?
Which government functions can no longer proceed?
And I'm like, well, I guess none of them.
And I'm like, well, what happens if Trump orders Microsoft to turn off M365 for every ministry of every province in the federal government?
Oh, well, Canada's bricked.
And I'm like, so why is your entire focus of digital sovereignty a thing that no one uses for anything important to the exclusion of the thing that is actually very important?
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