What if artificial intelligence isn’t the most transformative technology in the history of humanity? What if what we are actually facing is a financial bubble comparable to that of 2008? What if the services on offer from the major technology platforms don’t improve over time, but actually get worse—on purpose? Cory Doctorow is one of the heretics who have no qualms about answering these questions straight from the hip. As a writer, journalist and digital rights advocate, he is one of the most dynamic and inquisitive figures who engage systematically with technology issues. To Vima spoke with him about the promises technology has failed to keep, and how we have been led inexorably down the road to what he has provocatively dubbed the “enshittification” of the Internet.
Is artificial intelligence the new financial bubble? Is our reality going to be like something from the Book of Revelations before we know it?
“Absolutely. The question is whether we can avoid at least some of the fallout and stop throwing good money after bad, given that every dollar invested in AI is a dollar wasted. We’re talking about a sector that has had 700 billion dollars of capital expenditure sunk in it, when by the Tech Bros’ own pumped-up calculations, it has only generated 60. Which depreciates its assets in five years, when its executives admit in private that those assets are worth precisely nothing after three. A sector which, according to Bain and Company, has to make three trillion dollars by 2030 or face collapse, and which only ever spends other people’s money. Seven giant AI companies now account for between 29% and 31% of the US stock market, the S&P 500, and all of them are losing money. I think the crisis, when it comes, will be worse than 2008.”
So, what is this: a case of mass hallucination?
“But isn’t that what happens with every bubble? The idea prevails that there’s no way it could be a bubble, because everyone else is spending so much money. So I’d better start spending too—either that, or miss the boat. Bubbles are a way of siphoning off the savings of ordinary savers. I think a lot of the big AI goliaths may make billions out of this, just like the titans did in the housing crisis. But most people will lose everything when artificial intelligence collapses.”
Every bubble is based on a promise. What is the promise here?
“That artificial intelligence will replace human labor. If a saleswoman contacts an employer and proposes a product that will allow him to lay off workers, she’ll definitely have his attention. Bosses are always enthusiastic about the idea of downsizing. The problem is, there are very few jobs AI can actually replace, and most of those don’t come with high wage costs. So even if the salaries of the people it puts out of work were funneled into the AI company that provided the product that made them redundant, it still wouldn’t make up for the billions it had spent to develop it.”
An example?
“You can’t really replace programmers with AI, because AI can write code, but it can’t do software engineering. And, instead of trying to use AI to provide experienced programmers with the tools they need to become more productive, the companies are trying to fire all their experienced—and therefore expensive—programmers and replace them with easily intimidated younger coders. But, needless to say, the relative beginners aren’t able to detect the subtle errors artificial intelligence makes (see ‘slopsquatting’). So, we’re going to see a lot of programmers getting fired. Not because AI can actually do their jobs, but rather because their boss has convinced themselves it can.”
So what can we do?
“The best thing we could do would be to travel back in time and stop funding Open AI. But we can’t. The second-best option is to bring this gross misallocation of capital to a stop before it’s too late. We’re going to lose a lot of people who do jobs that matter, and which we rely on, as they’re replaced by artificial intelligence. And then, when the collapse comes and they turn AI off, we won’t have anybody to do those jobs. So things are going to be very bad.”
Can we talk a little bit about your concept of “enshittification”?
“It’s based on an observation of how digital platforms are changing for the worse, and offers a theory as to why this is happening. Platforms are good for the end user, at first. But then they find a way to lock their end users in, and once they realize that it’s difficult for them to leave, they downgrade the services they provide them in order to attract more business customers. And once the business users are locked in, too, they degrade their offering to them, as well. Finally, in the third stage of the process, they harvest all the value for themselves, meaning for their executives and shareholders. These are the three stages of what I call the ‘enshittification” process.
Could you give us an example here, too.
“Think of Google. The image we have is of a tremendously innovative business. But take a closer look, and you realize that its only genuinely successful and innovative product is the search engine, which it created many years ago. All its other successful products were bought, with each new acquisition raising competition concerns. It took the other kids’ toys and is playing with them now. The result: Google has captured the search engine market with a 90% market share. And it used the profits it earned from acquiring all the companies that could have replaced it one day to hoover up everything else on the shelves: every operating system, every mobile device, every provider. Which is how, in 2020, it reached the point where it couldn’t grow any more, as it already had a 90% market share.”
And so?
“And so, when the US Department of Justice took Google to court for antitrust practices, the company’s internal memos were released relating to how the company responded to the growth crisis, when it erupted in 2020. Well, we now know there were two views. On the one hand, there were those whose focus was on revenues. And that the head of the relevant department, Prabhakar Raghavan, suggested solving the problem by making Google search worse. Because making users search more than once to find their answer was more profitable, since Google would get to show you ads every time you searched. But while the head of Google search technology, Ben Gomes, hated the idea, his only counterargument was that he’d feel bad if they went ahead and did it. At the end of the day, of course, “when money talks, bullshit walks”, as they say.”
Why is this happening?
“It’s due to what I call an ‘enshittified policy environment’ that allows companies that are bad for consumers to prevail over companies that provide good services. And it starts with the failure to enforce antitrust competition law. This leads to regulatory capture, because when a few companies control most of the market in a sector, they can gang up against the regulators. In the case of the tech giants, all the other safety valves that could have prevented the enshittification of their products were also dismantled—due, once again, to the same over-concentration.”
