Cory Doctorow: AI isn't Dangerous. America Is.

Cory Doctorow (0:00)

Am I tough enough?

Ava Santina (0:01)

Strong and stable leadership. Total ruba.

Cory Doctorow (0:03)

Hell yes, I'm tough enough. Shut the fridge. Not another once.

Ava Santina (0:07)

It's the PoliticsJOE Podcast. Cory Doctorow, you have written a very timely book.

Cory Doctorow (0:14)

Yeah, greatest miscalculation of my literary career. I got so sick of people insisting that I talked to them about AI, a subject that I think is grossly overblown, that I thought I will just lay out the case for paying less attention to AI in a book, and then I can stop talking about it. And of course, now I have to talk about the book all the time. So just a reminder to self, writing a book about a subject is not a way to avoid talking about it.

Ava Santina (0:39)

I think the worry as well when you're writing about new tech at the moment is that it can expire, the thoughts that you have can expire very quickly. However, I would say I've just finished it. So actually, I listened to the last chapter last night, I listened to it. So people are going to comment saying, you know, that's not really. It's really, it's probably the way to go about it.

Cory Doctorow (0:57)

Tell Homer that.

Ava Santina (0:58)

But it feels very, well, thank you. He feels very, it feels very current. It feels very topical. I mean, particularly in light of what's happened in the last week or so.

I'm going to start a little bit off piece. In the book, you talk about Thatcher and you talk about inevitableism.

Cory Doctorow (1:14)

Yeah.

Ava Santina (1:14)

That feels, that feels important right now.

Cory Doctorow (1:18)

Yeah, you know, the reason I raised Thatcher in the book is because her motto was obviously, There is no alternative. A thing she repeated so often, they called her Tina, there is no alternative.

And as a science fiction writer, I'm grossly offended by this because it's really a way of saying, stop trying to think of alternatives. And that is in fact my job. I come up with six alternatives every morning before breakfast. And so, you know, I think that tech bosses have long practiced a form of vulgar Thatcherism. You know, Mark Zuckerberg would like you to think that the idea of you having a conversation with your friends to which he's not privy is just irrational. I think that the two things go together like peanut butter and chocolate and wanting a private conversation space or, you know, a phone that works without Tim Cook having a veto over it or the ability to search the web without some dark pinch eye, knowing what color underwear you're wearing is like wanting water that's not wet. And of course, there are alternatives and whether and how we use AI is not a thing that's foredained, it didn't come down off a mountain on two stone tablets. It is being driven by certain prerogatives and imperatives of a certain kind of large firm that has saturated its market in an era in which capital has moved from production to rent extraction. And that's why we got the AI we got. And there's nothing about theory-free inference that says that it has to be this way. We could have theory-free inference where we just let workers decide which tools they want to use, and if they judge in their skilled judgment that it will make their job better, they would use it and we wouldn't fire anyone or stick them in the woodchipper. And we wouldn't bet the world's economy on it, and it would just be a normal technology. That's a thing we could have had because there's nothing wrong with statistical inference, right? Like knowing what happened before in order to make guesses about what happens next is a perfectly natural, reasonable thing to do.

Ava Santina (3:07)

But then you're putting a lot of expectation on the consumer, right?

You're expecting a lot from people. And I think that the idea, particularly in Britain over the last 15 years, is that most people are too stupid to critically think. Actually, that probably applies even better to America. That's the inference that you get from government. So perhaps you're expecting too much from people.

Cory Doctorow (3:30)

You know, I don't think the problem with our criticism is that people aren't critical enough. There's actually a lot, I mean, no one would say that people aren't critical of AI right now.

There's a lot of criticism of AI, just like there's a lot of criticism about social media and other technologies that I think are, if not bad, then at least badly deployed and in need of being sort of dismantled and rebuilt in a better form.