Downstream: The Big AI Lie w/ Cory Doctorow

Michael Walker (0:08)

AI is set to take all of our jobs. It's set to irrevocably transform our interpersonal relationships. It could even kill us all.

Those are claims that both supporters and critics of AI now regularly make. And they're claims that I take seriously very often over on Novara Live. My guest today on Downstream, though, as I replace Aaron Bastani, who's off on paternity leave, thinks that this is a mistake. He thinks that by amping up the capacity, the ability of artificial intelligence, both critics and supporters are doing tech CEOs a favor.

Cory Doctorow is the writer and author, I mean, famous for many things, but especially his concept of inshitification, which explains how the Internet got so much worse. He's now turned his attention to artificial intelligence in a brilliant book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. I'm so excited that I get to stand in for Aaron Bastani for this episode and talk to the fantastic Cory Doctorow. I've really lucked out here. Cory Doctorow, welcome to Downstream.

Cory Doctorow (1:17)

Thank you very much. Pleasure to be on.

Michael Walker (1:18)

Your last book, Inshitification, massive hit. Also a mainstream here, was nominated for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year.

I don't know if you expected that. Sort of was a young sci-fi writer that you'd be in that category.

Cory Doctorow (1:29)

Very exciting. I also got in the OED, which like talk about a bucket list item. I have a friend who got a much ruder word in the OED, Dan Savage, who got the name of a US Senator, which he used as a euphemism for a very disgusting sexual fluid.

And he got that in Santorum. He got that into the OED as an official synonym for, I'm not even going to say it. It starts with a frothy mix of lube and goes downhill from there.

Michael Walker (1:57)

Oh, my God.

Cory Doctorow (1:58)

And it is an official OED synonym for Santorum, also a Conservative Senator who opposed marriage equality.

Michael Walker (2:06)

I think in shitification was also Word of the Year. Several. One of them.

Cory Doctorow (2:10)

Yeah, New Scientist made a UK, well, made it in shiticing the UK Word of the Year. Macquarie made it the Australian Word of the Year. The American Dialect Society made it the American Word of the Year. My dad was very disappointed. It wasn't the American Dialectic Society, but there we go.

Michael Walker (2:25)

And I mean, now we're talking about it. You've already done an interview with us on the shitification, sort of a Novara IRL. And we were just saying before we went live, I wasn't there because I was doing my own show, but I could hear how you were working the crowd. Very impressive stuff. But in case anyone hasn't seen that very briefly, what was the in shitification idea?

Cory Doctorow (2:42)

So I've worked for this nonprofit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I'm going into my 25th year on trying to get people to care about tech policy. And it's really hard because it's abstract things that are in the future and people care about concrete things that are happening now. And so you have to come up with gimmicks, framing devices, similes, narratives. I write science fiction novels and it turned out the dirty word was the thing that got people to engage with it. So I coined this term in shitification to both describe a process of platform decay, how they go bad, but also to hypothesize a theory about why they're going bad now, because I'm a materialist, I don't think we got hit by a platform destroying meteor in the mid-teens. I think that like the conditions around the world, change such that the worst ideas of the worst people made the most money. And so wherever there was a factional dispute within a firm or wherever someone was tempted as a decision maker to take their platform in a worse direction, they did. And so we end up with the Enchidocene when everything's turning into shit because a policy maker is creating an Enchidogenic policy environment where they took decisions that had the foreseeable and foreseen outcome of creating this milieu. And the process is pretty straightforward. Platforms are first good to their end users and they lock them in. That's stage one. Stage two, you're locked in. It's hard for you to leave. So they make things worse for you in order to provide benefit to businesses, which they also lock in. And then having locked in those businesses, they withdraw value from them as well. The idea is to find an equilibrium where you have like the mingiest kind of homeopathic residue of value sufficient to keep users locked to the platform, businesses locked to the users, everything else withdrawn and apportioned among executives and shareholders.