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
And so the politics of this harvester included a certain kind of farm, a certain kind of labor relation, and a certain kind of food way.
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AI certainly has technopolitics.
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At a minimum, AI has the technopolitics of the first kind, those Robert Moses bridges.
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It has been capitalized specifically on the basis that it can be used to erode workers' wages and labor power and to foist inferior goods on the public.
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There is no other way that the AI sector's unimaginably vast capital losses can be turned into profits.
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The sums involved are so large that virtually everything everyone does all the time will need to be replaced with AI.
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And so it is also in AI's technopolitics that AI must be crammed into every activity we undertake.
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whether or not it belongs there, and whether or not it presents a danger to the user or to the people who depend on the user's work.
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Think here of cramming AI into automated systems for generating criminal accusations, which then prompt the police to make false arrests.
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Now, none of this is intrinsic to the technology.
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Remember, the technology we've been calling AI for the past decade is a set of small variations on existing machine learning techniques that yielded surprisingly large dividends relative to the size of those variations.
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This improvement was scalable, meaning that when computer scientists pushed these variations harder, they got concomitantly outsized improvements in the machine learning system's performance.
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This is one of the best kinds of technological breakthrough to be in the midst of: one where you discover a piece of low-hanging fruit that turns out to be at the edge of a whole orchard full of similarly low-hanging fruits.
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There's nothing technical about the discovery of this variation on machine learning that dictates the current AI approach.
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In an alternate universe, AI could be a $100 billion joint supercomputing effort between the International Panel on Climate Change and Cendia National Labs used to improve the fidelity of our climate models.
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This too would produce carbon emissions, but not nearly as many, and of course everything people do has an impact on the environment.
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The only way to stop impacting the environment is to a die and b decompose.
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This alternate universe might also see a proliferation of hobbyist open source open-weight models spinning out of those efforts, with online forums and social media filled with generated text and sound and images.
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As with every technology controlled by its users, some of those users will find ways to sin against the law and ethics.
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There will be some gross stuff around the edge, voice cloning for fraud, deep fake porn, etc., but for the public, the main AI event would be a bunch of plugins that were the byproducts of a big public research project.
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