AI is overrated, according to author Cory Doctorow.
“I don’t think AI can do your job,” Doctorow said, but despite that, bosses across industries are “insatiably horny” about the idea that AI will replace jobs. Top of the list is tech bosses.
Tech is one of the industries where AI is scaling significantly faster in the workforce than average (the bigger picture corporate AI adoption is much slower, and some studies claim the returns on investments are low). Many tech CEOs have made statements expressing their wishes to automate tasks that would have regularly gone to human workers. A new report by Source, a consulting firm that works with the tech industry, claimed that over half of tech companies are considering restructuring because of AI.
“Tech bosses love the story of AI replacing programmers,” Doctorow said at an event hosted by the Brooklyn Public Library last week, where he was answering former FTC chair Lina Khan’s questions. During her tenure in the Biden administration, Khan was known for her firm regulatory stance against big tech monopolies.
Computer programming was once the most lucrative industry to go into, with a surplus of demand for workers; there were numerous job opportunities with great pay and benefits, and cushy amenities. Now, the script has completely switched. Many have blamed the rise of generative AI for it.
But Doctorow argues “that’s just not a thing AI is doing” or even can do.
“AI can write sub-routines, it can’t do software architecture. Can’t do engineering, because engineering is about having a long, broad context window to understand all the pieces that came before, all the pieces that are coming in the future, and the pieces that sit adjacent to code, and if you know anything about AI, the one thing that is most expensive to do with AI is expanding the context window,” Doctorow said.
Doctorow is famous for having coined the term “enshittification” to describe the common, modern-day phenomenon of almost every tech platform becoming soulless, dysfunctional and widely-hated corpses that internet users are still trapped under. It’s a cathartically profane critique of capitalism in the tech age that Macquaire Dictionary picked as its word of the year in 2024.
He argues that what tech bosses actually like is to have tech workers “terrified that they’re about to be replaced by a chatbot, it gives them a chance to put them in their place.”
To understand why, you need to look into how the dynamic has changed in the tech workplace in the past two decades.
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