A.I. Enshittifies Everything

Summary

What Next: TBD – “A.I. Enshittifies Everything”

Host: Lizzie O’Leary
Guest: Cory Doctorow
Date: June 26, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Lizzie O’Leary sits down with journalist and science fiction author Cory Doctorow to discuss his latest book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. The conversation explores Doctorow’s critical perspective on the current AI boom, where he argues that the technology’s most harmful effects come not from its technical capabilities, but from the economic incentives and management narratives driving its implementation. The discussion covers the concept of “enshittification,” the myths fueling the AI investment bubble, real-world consequences for workers, and visions for meaningful resistance.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Reverse Centaurs & Automation (01:50 – 05:14)

• I Love Lucy Analogy: Doctorow references the iconic episode where Lucy and Ethel struggle to keep up with a chocolate factory conveyor belt as a metaphor for how humans become subservient to machines in the workplace.
  • “And the human who is working with the machine is almost certainly the bottleneck.” (Cory Doctorow, 02:37)
• Reverse Centaur Concept: In classic automation, a “centaur” is a human directing a machine. The “reverse centaur” is the opposite—the human is directed by the machine to facilitate its limitations.
  • “The reverse centaur is...when the machine can't do something, and the human is directed to do what the machine needs the human to do.” (Cory Doctorow, 03:47)

2. AI Hype: Bubbles, Narratives, and Class (10:00 – 12:50)

• Scale and Perceived Urgency: Lizzie suggests the difference with AI is that it threatens professional-class jobs, making it more urgent than previous tech cycles like crypto.
• Bubble Economics: Doctorow stresses the financial scale and “vibes-based” nature of the AI investment boom.
  • “When I wrote the book, it was a $700 billion bubble. Now it’s a $1.4 trillion bubble.” (Cory Doctorow, 10:24)
• Narrative for Wall Street: The public-facing promise of AI is less about actual benefits and more about convincing investors of infinite growth potential.
  • “Tech companies are spending hundreds of billions...in a desperate gambit to convince investors that they will conquer the AI market and in so doing, continue to grow. So the audience is not you and me, right? It’s Wall Street.” (Lizzie O’Leary, 12:20)

3. The Dangers of ‘Funny Math’: Job Displacement and Misleading Metrics (15:38 – 19:24)

• Truck Driver Example: Doctorow dismantles the narrative that AI will wipe out the “number one job,” noting flawed Bureau of Labor Statistics data and practical limits on truck automation.
  • “It's not just a bad truck. It's an even shittier train... It's just a less fuel-efficient train.” (Cory Doctorow, 16:30)
• Gig Worker Realities: Many jobs targeted for AI replacement (like truck driving or commercial illustration) are already severely underpaid and precarious.
• Byzantine Premium: Complex, poorly-understood tech systems acquire inflated value because people are afraid to appear uninformed.
  • “Economists call things that are hard to understand, they say they've got a Byzantine premium… We all became very familiar with the Byzantine premium during the great financial crisis…” (Cory Doctorow, 19:38)

4. Vibes-Based Markets and the Bubble Mentality (20:33 – 23:27)

• AI Bubble Intensifies: AI firms with negative unit economics sustain sky-high valuations based on speculative narratives.
  • “Every AI customer loses money for the business… Every generation of AI loses more money than the one before.” (Cory Doctorow, 21:38)
• Musk & Index Funds: SpaceX’s IPO is used as an example of insiders cashing out, with everyday investors holding the risk (“exit liquidity”).
  • “We’re the bag holders.” (Cory Doctorow, 23:27)

5. AI in Healthcare: The Radiology Case Study (25:36 – 28:13)

• Realistic AI Benefits: Doctorow describes how AI can assist radiologists (flagging anomalies), but argues the real economic incentive is to cut headcount drastically—remaining human workers simply check the AI’s work, often at unsafe speed.
  • “Fire nine, 10 of your radiologists, save $2.7 million a year… Have the remaining radiologist mark the homework of the AI... When people die of cancer, we're going to blame them.” (Cory Doctorow, 27:00)
• Automation Blindness: Humans, when asked to confirm machine decisions continually, become desensitized—even dangerous oversights are missed.

6. The Myth of AI Inevitability and Regulatory Capture (28:48 – 29:49)

• ‘No Alternative’ Rhetoric: Tech’s claim that “there is no alternative” serves as self-fulfilling prophecy, especially as legal barriers now prevent modding or re-engineering AI tools.
  • “Inevitableism is the kind of vulgar Thatcherism of the tech sector... because it's a felony to reverse engineer and change how it works.” (Cory Doctorow, 28:54)

7. Organizing for Change: Politics, Local Action, and Labor (30:00 – 35:14)

• Politics, Not Consumer Choices: Individual consumer action is powerless against systemic economic incentives—real change requires political organization and collective action.
  • “Shopping isn't politics... you can't vote with your wallet. Billionaires love when you try to vote with your wallet because... their wallets are thicker than all of our wallets put together.” (Cory Doctorow, 30:00)
• Real-World Leverage: Local politics (data centers, police tech, schools) and union movements are practical points for exerting meaningful pressure on tech deployment.
  • “We do a lot of community outreach… There’s also a lot of local politics intersection with this, because of data centers, because of AI usage in municipal politics.” (Cory Doctorow, 31:34)
• Union Organizing: Organizing workers is dismissed as old-fashioned, but Doctorow argues it is necessary, drawing a parallel to historic anti-trust and labor movements.

8. AI’s Contradictons: Useful, Loss-Leading, and Unsustainable (35:14 – 37:28)

• Short-Term User Benefit: Users enjoy AI products as long as companies are willing to incur huge losses (“selling $100 bills for $1 each”), but this is unsustainable.
  • “The reason you're getting all that stuff and it feels great... is because the AI companies are selling you $100 bills for a dollar apiece.” (Cory Doctorow, 35:55)
• Token Crises: As soon as tech firms try to raise prices or restrict usage, the value to users plummets and the underlying unsustainable economics are exposed.
  • “They tried to clean up their balance sheets... and they said, how about if we charge everyone $5 for these hundred dollar bills? And all their major customers were like, that's too expensive.” (Cory Doctorow, 36:37)

9. Final Takeaways: The Real Harm and the Urgency to Act (37:28 – 38:27)

• Bubble’s True Risk: The AI bubble inflates because it gives companies a plausible story of firing workers for growth—whether or not the tech really works.
  • “That the bubble has a material basis. And that material basis is not that AI is going to take your job. That material basis is that companies need a growth story, and that stories about replacing workers are very attractive to financiers and bosses.” (Cory Doctorow, 37:47)
• Call to Action: The worst path is to continue building the bubble; real reform means asserting democratic, collective control and not leaving the narrative to Wall Street.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• “The reverse centaur is the opposite of what we want. The machine bosses you around, the human is subservient.” (Cory Doctorow, 03:47)
• “It’s not just a bad truck. It’s an even shittier train.” (Cory Doctorow, 16:30)
• “The reason you’re getting all that stuff... is because the AI companies are selling you $100 bills for a dollar apiece.” (Cory Doctorow, 35:55)
• “Shopping isn’t politics… Billionaires love when you try to vote with your wallet because their wallets are thicker than all of our wallets put together.” (Cory Doctorow, 30:00)
• “Whatever you think about AI, this way of delivering AI is the worst way we can imagine. And we have to stop doing it really quickly.” (Cory Doctorow, 38:00)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Reverse Centaur analogy: 03:00 – 05:00
• Narratives fueling the AI bubble: 10:24 – 12:50
• Truck driver AI myth debunked: 15:38 – 19:24
• Byzantine premium and hype: 19:24 – 20:33
• Stock valuations & Musk example: 21:06 – 23:27
• AI in healthcare (radiology): 25:36 – 28:13
• Regulatory capture & inevitability: 28:48 – 29:49
• Politics vs. consumer action: 30:00 – 31:14
• Organizing & labor: 33:24 – 35:14
• AI product unsustainability: 35:14 – 37:28
• Doctorow’s call to action: 37:28 – 38:27

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Takeaway

Cory Doctorow contends that the real harm of AI isn’t that it will replace all human labor, but that the tech industry’s insatiable need to tell growth stories leads to rushed, unsafe, and exploitative deployments. The lucrative narrative of “AI replacing workers” helps inflate a dangerous financial bubble—not because the technology is inevitable or even that effective, but because it fits management’s and Wall Street’s needs. True resistance, Doctorow argues, won’t come from careful consumption but from collective action, organizing workers, and shaping political outcomes at both local and national levels.

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For more from Cory Doctorow, check out his new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.

Transcript

[Lizzie O'Leary]

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[Cory Doctorow]

Am.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Now, the candy will pass by on this conveyor belt and continue into the next room where the girls will pack it. You probably know this classic scene from I Love Lucy. And if you've never watched it, your parents or your parents parents did. Lucy and Ethel are working at a chocolate factory. They're wrapping pieces of chocolate as they move down the conveyor belt. But the belt starts going faster and faster. Lucy and Ethel cannot handle the pace. They're fumbling. They're eating chocolate. This whole thing is going totally haywire. I think we're fighting a losing game. And this losing game from 1952 shows up in Cory Doctorow's new book.

[Cory Doctorow]

And the human who is working with the machine is almost certainly the bottleneck,

[Lizzie O'Leary]

AKA Lucy and Ethel are the problem here. Doctorow is a journalist, a sci fi author, and he coined the term inshittification, the idea that goods and services online degrade over time in the service of profit. Now, Doctorow's written about AI in his book the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life.

[Cory Doctorow]

After AI, the human can't work as long or as fast or lift things as heavy or what have you. And so when you pair the human and the machine, the human gets worked very hard, as opposed to the other way around, when you pair the machine with the human, and the human's in charge. And that brings us to reverse centers.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Centaurs.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. So a centaur in automation theory is a person assisted by a machine, you know, riding a bicycle. You don't just look like a centaur. You are one in some figurative sense.

[Podcast Announcer]

Right. You're.

[Cory Doctorow]

You're. You're a human in control of a machine. The machine can do things you can't do, move faster than you, but it doesn't tell you what to do. Right. The reverse.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

My notes right now.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, your notes. A spell checker. Right. Lots of times that a human just can't pay attention in the same way or can't lift the same weight or can't run as fast or what have you. So we use a machine. The reverse centaur is the opposite. It's when there's a thing the machine can't do, and so the human is directed by the machine to do the things that the machine needs the human to do so the machine can do its function. So Ethel and Lucy, they're the reverse centaurs.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

I wouldn't call Corey's book a polemic against AI itself, exactly. More one against the narrative around AI. The story that bosses tell each other that this tech is inevitable, that growth is unstoppable, and that we all better get on board.

[Cory Doctorow]

Every arrangement of AI that is deployed in service to that narrative has to be a reverse centaur one.

[Podcast Announcer]

Right?

[Cory Doctorow]

It has to be one where you're like, firing nine tenths of your workers, putting the remaining tenth in charge of marking the AI's homework, and then making them bear the blame when things go wrong. Which means that that's the destructive power of the bubble. And so a material critique of it has to talk about why these growth stories keep getting thought up, these sort of ever more outlandish growth stories, and also what the problems are with this idea that we can just replace humans with software.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Today on the show, Corey wants to stop the runaway AI train. Here's how he plans to do it. I'm Lizzie o', Leary, and you're listening to what Next? Tbd, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around. This episode is brought to you by Bill, the intelligent finance platform that helps businesses and accounting firms scale with proven results. Here at WhatNextBD, we know business, and in businesses across America, smart people are stuck doing the grunt work. You know the drill. Those hours when you could be brainstorming big ideas, you're instead filling in spreadsheets, filling out invoices, or hunting down somebody else's signature. Bill wants to change that. With AI powered automation, Bill removes the busywork from your accounts payables workflow. They handle capturing invoices, routing approvals, and syncing with your accounting software so that your team can focus on growth instead of paying paperwork. Bill is so reliable, 98 of the top 100 accounting firms in the US trust it to simplify and secure their bill payment processes. Bill's handled over a trillion dollars in secure payments and is ranked number one overall on G2's 2025 list of best accounting and finance products. So stop the guesswork and start scaling with the proven choice. Go with a company whose financial infrastructure is trusted by nearly half a million customers. Ready to talk with an expert? Visit bill.comproven and get a $150 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.comproven terms and conditions apply. See Offer page for details. Starting your own business is never easy. Starting your own podcast? That seems easy, but actually, there are a ton of landmines to step on along the way. Finding producers, selling ads, and connecting to WI fi. Oh, does that sound straightforward? It's not. I'm talking about sitting in coffee houses for hours after buying one scone. I'm talking about sitting in hotel lobbies and pretending your backpack is luggage. It's torture. I spent so much time making my home office look professional, but my connection didn't get the memo. The last thing you want during a major interview is for your guest's voice to turn into a stutter. When your bandwidth can't keep up with your ambition, your home office starts feeling like an amateur operation pretty fast. And for a podcast, the Internet is key. Because the Internet is how we talk to almost everyone. And no matter the guest, a laggy connection can ruin an exclusive interview. Great connectivity isn't a bonus, it's the whole game. And ATT Business is here to help. They've got the tools, team and expertise you need for a stable network you can rely on. And when you can rely on the network, you can get back to the thinking about the more important stuff, like nabbing that great guest and getting back to work. At and T Business Built to work get at&t [e-mail] if you've ever tried to hire someone globally and immediately hit a wall of paperwork rules and approvals. You know how much red tape can slow things down. That's what pebble is designed to fix. Pebble makes global hiring simple through embedded compliance and AI driven workflows. The Pebble Plat platform takes the delays and guesswork out of going global. So founders and HR leaders can move fast without adding risk. Most companies treat compliance as something to manage around. By building a decade of expertise directly into the platform, pebble removes the fear of mistakes and the dreaded regulatory blind spots. Bottom line, anywhere is possible with Pebble. With global hiring simplified, founders and HR leaders can spend their time focusing on what and where comes next for their business. And we've got a special offer for our podcast listeners. Pebble is normally $399 a month per employee. Already a no brainer for what you get. But right now there's a limited time offer on their site that makes it even easier to get started. Go to high Pebble AI before it's gone. That's High Pebl AI Terms and Conditions app. So this book is also called Life after AI, which is kind of a major promise. You and I have been doing this for a while. I've been a journalist for 25 years. Seen a lot of tech cycles. You've seen a lot of tech cycles. And I think a thing that links them all is this like, attempt to grapple with them and understand them as they are happening, which is like sometimes successful and sometimes a total failure. This AI related grappling feels different and bigger and I kind of want to understand why you think that is. I mean, my, my thesis is that it's because it affects professional class jobs. So it's like a class issue.

[Cory Doctorow]

Sure.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

But I want, I'm, I'm wondering why you think it feels so meaty and urgent in a way that crypto maybe didn't.

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, there's, there's a causal arrow question that I don't know which error, which direction it runs. But this is bigger. Right? So is it bigger because of whatever that special zhuzh is that's making it more, you know, more ubiquitous? Or is it more ubiquitous because it's big just because the dollar figures are larger and like, you know, dollar figures are very big. Right. Like when I wrote the book, it was a $700 billion bubble. Now it's a $1.4 trillion bubble. And so these are, you know, much, much bigger. Right. And so I don't know if it's bigger because the story is different or if the story is different because it's so Much bigger. But I do think there's something to this idea that especially stuff that media people care about gets written about. I also think that the AI boosters had some very canny demos. So, you know, if you remember that the. In my view anyways, that the basis for AI and the bubble is displacing high wage labor. It's amazing how many of the stories we have about AI and the concerns we have about AI relate exclusively to some of the lowest wage labor we have. Taxi drivers, commercial illustrators. Come on. Right?

[Lizzie O'Leary]

It's not a very large sector of the economy.

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, but also the most precaritized sector of the economy. Zero out the wage bill of every commercial illustrator in America. Give it to Sam Altman. It won't cover the kombucha bill for the engineers who oversee a single image models training run. Right. So the idea that this, like, proves something about the market opportunity, it doesn't accept in a kind of emotional way, even. Even stuff like deepfake porn. You know, like one of the things I say in the book is that while deepfake porn is horrible and they should feel bad about making it, if you go into the prospectus for one of these AI companies and you remove the line item for expected return on deepfake porn, their total expected revenue doesn't change. Right? That's not what the money is coming from.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

So actually, you're teeing me up for the part of your book that I wanted to read from, which is a chapter called the Funny Math Gets Dangerous. Tech companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI and cramming it into your every orifice with every hour that God sends in a desperate gambit to convince investors that they will conquer the AI market and in so doing, continue to grow. So the audience is not you and me, Right. It's Wall Street.

[Cory Doctorow]

We're the convincers. Yeah, we. All of these things are the convincers

[Lizzie O'Leary]

because, like a Ponzi scheme.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, Well, I mean, every investment bubble has Ponzi vibes for sure.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

But.

[Cory Doctorow]

But it's true that in many cases what you need is a kind of Greek chorus of people saying this is really big. In order to get the people who do all the big capital allocation to say it's really big. And it is amazing the extent to which this has worked. So I was in Toronto yesterday, like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian and I did a panel on digital sovereignty in Canada. It's an issue I'm like really interested in. My next book is about this called the Post American Internet. I write when I'm anxious, dude. I know.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

It's a lot of writing.

[Cory Doctorow]

I know. And I don't use AI to write them. So I'm like going in there thinking, well, you know, Trump just shut off the Microsoft 365 accounts of a bunch of public officials abroad that he doesn't like. Right? Like if he does it to like a government ministry, that country shuts down, right? This is the digital sovereignty risk. And we go into the pre meeting for the panel and the other panelists are all like, well, what are we going to do about Canadian sovereign AI? I'm like, wait, what? Like if we shut off all the chatbots in Canada, what changes? Some kids have to do their own homework, right? Like we get less slop, right? Like even, even if you're using it for workplace automation, like what's the big deal? Whereas if you shut off Office365 for Canada or you know, John Deere tractors can be remotely bricked.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

They don't have their software update.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yes.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

So.

[Cory Doctorow]

Or not. Just you can push a software update to them that permanently immobilizes them, which is what happened after a bunch of Russian soldiers looted some Ukrainian tractors. So, you know, Canada decides not to give Alberta to America. Donald Trump bricks all the tractors in the prairies, right? That's like game over, right? So you know, like that's the digital sovereignty risk. And they're just like, no, it's AI. And I'm like, look what that feels like a nice to have folks. Like, what do we.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

But even if you're a company that's using AI to now replace your junior software engineers, that, that does feel like it's a risk.

[Cory Doctorow]

But the idea that the national risk is that we're going to get rid of the AI and that like all the, I don't know, SMEs that are doing like multivariate analysis to figure out what fridge to put the milk in at the convenience store are going to have to like go back to, you know, wild ass guessing it or whatever. It's just, it's just, it's not, it's deeply unserious, right. To talk about the, the AI sovereignty risk. I mean, not, not least because AI is the money losing thing the human race has ever done. And so if Canada managed to roll out a sovereign AI, it would have successfully launched itself into a phase of its economic development where it loses more money than it ever has. Right? Like, I still don't understand how this is contributing to the sovereignty picture.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

In the funny Math chapter. You have a really good example using truck drivers.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

I wonder if you could explain that, because I think these really tangible examples are helpful to people if the big concepts are hard to get your fingers on.

[Cory Doctorow]

So you and I have been around a bit. You probably remember about 10 years ago there was a lot of truck driver discourse.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Yes.

[Cory Doctorow]

Because the Bureau of Labor Statistics category for commercial drivers, I forget what it's called. It's got a long name. It's a number, says that it's the number one job in every state. The truck driver's the number one job in every state. And so you get these people just as like the AI is achieving liftoff. And, you know, I want to say there is like another material basis for the AI bubble, which is that the software is interesting.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

There are 2.2 million heavy tractor trailer drivers.

[Cory Doctorow]

That's right.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Based on 20, 24 numbers. Right, continue.

[Cory Doctorow]

So the software is taking off. It's all these dividends to scale are pouring in. Right. They do the same trick that they did to get more performance out of these existing machine learning techniques. And instead of getting diminishing returns to scale, they get flat returns to scale. Every time they do more of it, they get more out. So people are getting really excited and they go, guess what? We could take trucks and we could give them their own lane and we could have AI coordinate among them to create like a constant flow where you wouldn't need a driver. And we would offset all of the wage bill for those drivers. And then the number one job in every state would go away. And that's a huge automation labor crisis. Can we believe how crazy this is going to be? So it turns out the number is deceptive in many ways. Well, first of all, this is a bad truck, right? It's not just a bad truck. It's an even shittier train. Right. A thing with its own lane that is just a bunch of container cars together. It's just like a less fuel efficient train.

[Podcast Announcer]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

We don't need that. Okay, but also the BLS category encompasses everyone who drives heavy goods vehicles or commercial vehicles, including like florist vans. And so now we've got these florist vans that are being incorporated into this number that was being bandied about at the time. And you know, the number of people you need in the florist van, whether or not it's driving itself is one. Because you can't just like catapult the flowers onto someone's, you know, porch or into someone's apartment.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

I guess the theory is A little robot could do it, but that's.

[Cory Doctorow]

Now we're citing facts not in evidence, right? Where is that robot and how reliably does it work? So this idea that we've invented the shitty train and that it's going to put everyone at a work when in fact the number of workers you need hold steady is silly enough, but then you actually get granular on the way that heavy goods vehicles drivers operate. And like illustrators, they're among the most immiserated workers in America. So they are basically gig workers. They are not paid for time when they're waiting. So if you're like waiting at the Port of Los Angeles for 16 hours, that's unpaid wages. They buy their trucks on higher purchase through these installment sale agreements where if you miss a single payment, it's a full repossession. So you might have paid like $90,000 of the $95,000 in. And you miss a payment and then they take it back and sell it to a different driver and start all over again. So they're like the, the worst treated workers in America whose wages have been eroded to the point of nothing. And so now we've got this thing where it's like, well, we're going to spend billions and billions of dollars and also have a national freakout about the coming robot apocalypse because we think maybe we can make a shitty train. And that might put some of the worst paid workers in America out of work.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

But this is, this is the Byzantine premium, right? People, I think, don't like to look dumb in front of other people. And so if AI is there and it's a. They don't totally understand, but someone says it's good.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, well, and that's. Yeah, so. So economists call things that are hard to understand, they say they've got a Byzantine premium. They sometimes trade it more than they would if you understood them. We all became very familiar with the Byzantine premium during the great financial crisis because we had these complex derivatives. And I was at a conference a little while ago and a fairly famous AI booster came up to me and said, you know, we've got the AI that's now 51% of the way to being human and conscious. Now, human intelligence, I'm like, really? What's a 52% intelligent AI look like? And how is that different from a 51%? And he's like, it's just a benchmark. And I'm like, so I don't even know that we have a consensus agreement of what human intelligence is. And he's like, well, if you don't know what it is, then how do you know I'm not making it? And I'm like, well, I don't know what the weather is in Paris and I don't know what the weather is in Lisbon. That doesn't mean that they're the same thing, right?

[Lizzie O'Leary]

But here we are. It is late June, as you yourself say. Seven giant AI companies account for 35% of the US stock market. We are talking in a week where major tech stocks have freaked out and indexes have bounced around a little bit. We don't totally know where that's going. How do you understand the way public markets are reacting to this now? And I guess the place we are in, in this arc or bubble or like, where are we?

[Cory Doctorow]

Corey Robin wrote something really good about this, that we can see the crazy valuations of the AI companies, especially now the SpaceX IPO as reflecting something that started to happen in the cryptocurrency era where it's really just vibes based, that fundamentals have gone out the window. Firms that lose money are getting crazy valuations and they don't just lose money, they also have bad unit economics. You know, one of the comparisons you often.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

But your Morgan Stanley's, your JP Morgans, they're all attached to this, they're buying in.

[Cory Doctorow]

And you know, there was a story at least in the web one days that okay, the web is losing money, but every user of the web makes more money for the web and every use of the web makes more money for the web. And every generation of the web is more profitable than the previous one. So we can see that eventually we're going to reach a point where the we will go from no profitability, profitability and then growth. But AI is the opposite, right? Like every AI customer loses money for the business. The most prolific customers lose the most money for them. And every generation of AI loses more money than the one before. So there's this like great decoupling and I think that the Musk IPO really shows just how sweaty it's all getting because you really gotta find bag holders for a bubble. And Musk initially talked the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ 100 into allowing him to S and pulled back only because everyone freaked out. Yes, but NASDAQ hung in there, right? And so SpaceX debuts in the NASDAQ index. So if your retirement savings is in an index fund, the manager, the fund manager had to go and buy a bunch of SpaceX.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

They have no choice but not only

[Cory Doctorow]

that, they got an exemption to the rule against insiders selling their shares. And then they restricted the amount of company shares they floated so that those fund managers all had to buy the shares from insiders. From his buddies, right? From whatever, you know, Emirates and from Deutsche bank and from everyone who gave him money for Twitter. Everyone who gave him money for Grok X. And so this is his exit. Liquidity, right? We're the bag holders.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

When we come back, we often hear that AI can detect cancer. Is that actually true?

[Podcast Announcer]

Foreign.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

This episode is brought to you by Bill, the intelligent finance platform that helps businesses and accounting firms scale with proven results. Here at what Next tbd. We know business, and in businesses across America, smart people are stuck doing the grunt work. You know the drill. Those hours when you could be brainstorming big ideas, you're instead filling in spreadsheets, filling out invoices, or hunting down somebody else's signature. Bill wants to change that. With AI powered automation, Bill removes the busywork from your accounts payables workflow. They handle capturing invoices, routing approvals, and syncing with your accounting software so that your team can focus on growth instead of paperwork. Bill is so reliable, 98 of the top 100 accounting firms in the US trust it to simplify and secure their bill payment processes. Bill's handled over a trillion dollars in secure payments and is ranked number one overall on G2's 2025 list of best accounting and finance products. So stop the guesswork and start scaling with the proven choice. Go with a company whose financial infrastructure is trusted by nearly half a million customers. Ready to talk with an expert? Visit bill.comproven and get a $150 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.comproven. terms and conditions apply. See Offer page for details. A beautiful home deserves a beautiful scent in every room. From the open living room to the cozy guest bath, Pura makes whole home scenting effortless, control intensity and swap fragrances with a tap on the Pura app. Ready to transform your space? Discover smart home [e-mail] wholehome I actually now want to talk about cancer.

[Cory Doctorow]

Okay.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Because there's this part in the book where you say, look, this is not about AI taking your job. It's more that an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and then the AI will not be able to do your job. So you and I are uniquely qualified to talk about this. I've had cancer. You've had cancer?

[Cory Doctorow]

Indeed.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

You seem to be doing well.

[Cory Doctorow]

I got my cancer Free diagnosis four days ago.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

High five.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, five now.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Okay. Yeah, but companies love to say that AI can detect cancer.

[Cory Doctorow]

Sure.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

So I think who better to, like, try to puncture this a little bit than, like, we have some moral authority?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Okay. So there's this example that you can use AI to find solid mass tumors and that maybe people can get rid of some radiologists. Talk me through the example.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, sure. So, you know, if I. If I imagine a sales call down at the Kaiser Hospital in LA where I get my treatment, where there's a sales guy in there talking to the CEO of the hospital system, and they're like, look, you've got 10 radiologists on staff at $300,000 a piece. That's $3 million in your wage bill. I'm gonna sell you a chatbot for another million dollars a year. And it's gonna sit on their shoulders, and twice a day it's just gonna whisper in their ear. Take another look at that one. Because sometimes it can detect things that humans miss. Then I'd be like, this sounds great.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Yeah, that's okay.

[Cory Doctorow]

I mean, you know, I don't want my premiums to go up, but this seems great. If, on the other hand, there was a pitch that was like, we've got the software that works so well that we can fire all the radiologists, and they weren't lying, and they were saying, let's get rid of all the radiologists. We'll have software do it. It'll be too cheap to meter. I can imagine a potential cancer patient or someone who loves someone with cancer who says, look, the point of radiology is to fight cancer and not to pay the mortgage of radiologists. And so let's find a soft landing for those people. But I think that what the sales call actually consists of is something that that person wouldn't like, even if they don't give a damn about the radiologist, which is what I think the sales call is. Fire nine, 10 of your radiologists, save $2.7 million a year on the wage bill. Split it between Sam Altman and your shareholders or however you want to distribute it. Have the remaining radiologist mark the homework of the AI at a speed that no human being could ever pay attention to. Have the X rays be more or less correct most of the time so that all they're doing is clicking, okay, over and over and over again and become inured to it. Get automation, blindness. And then when people die of cancer, we're going to blame them because it's their signature at the bottom of it,

[Lizzie O'Leary]

they're the accountability and it's the automation blindness. Because most of the time it's right.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

I mean, just like. Yeah, yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

If you've been through a TSA checkpoint, you know how this works, right? So we have. Can I swear on this podcast, of course we have created.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

You're literally wearing a poop.

[Cory Doctorow]

I am wearing a poop. We've created the world's most water bottle finding as motherfuckers the human race has ever seen, because those people spend all day looking at different angles of water bottles. And yet whenever a red team carries a fake bomb or gun through the checkpoint, they miss it. Because you cannot remain attuned to things that don't happen. This is just not how human attention works.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

So why does AI feel so inevitable right now?

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, inevitableism is the kind of vulgar Thatcherism of the tech sector, right? There is no alternative. They have always said this, that there is only one way to configure these gadgets. It has to be the way that is optimal for us and non optimal for you. They kind of make it stick too. In the old days, we used to have this idea of moving fast and breaking everyone's things, not just the things of people who couldn't fight back. Where you were allowed to hack stuff and change how it worked and reverse engineer it, make mods for it, alternative firmware. And then for the last 25 years, the period during which the Digital Millennium Copyright act has been enforced. And as it's been expanding, it's become more and more illegal to do that kind of reverse engineering and modification. And so now we have this thing where it's inevitable, not because this is the only way that someone could make it work, but because it's a felony to reverse engineer and change how it works. Sort of felony contempt of business model.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

So I guess the question then, the pushback question is like, okay, well, how does one who, if you object to this idea of the future, have any control?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, well, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that shopping isn't politics. And as much as it would be really nice if you could resolve all of the world's political problems just by shopping really carefully. I like shopping. Right. It's fun. You don't need to get anyone else to come along and do it with you. It's quite solitary. Hella's other people. You don't have to convince anyone else to come and shop with you. I think that would be very nice. If you could just vote with your wallet. You can't vote with your wallet. Billionaires love when you try to vote with your wallet because they can vote with their wallets because their wallets are thicker than all of our wallets put together, but we can't vote with our wallets. It. So we always get outvoted. So the way that you do politics is by doing politics. So even like a boycott, you know, the Montgomery bus boycott was not like a bunch of people waking up every morning for 380 days and deciding to walk to work. Right. It was a cohesive movement where they had, like, meetings, but those meetings were to organize carpools and also to put pressure on bosses that were leaning on workers who were late because they were in the carpools and to articulate a crisp set of demands and to get the whole community behind them. And while this is the good news, while it was a pain in the ass to have to do all of that work rather than just shopping, on the other hand, the residue of that effort was the backbone of the civil rights movement.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

But that is also a group of people who could very easily identify and see the material harm to them, their families, society, etc. This is much more diffuse.

[Cory Doctorow]

It is. Well, okay, I don't think there's any shortage of people who are correctly worried about AI, but maybe incorrectly understand, but

[Lizzie O'Leary]

maybe they're not bound together.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. And so that's how you get a movement, right. Is by, like, articulating a kind of agenda and a set of causal explanations for things that a lot of people are worried about but don't really understand what to do with. And so, you know, I've worked for the Electronic Frontier foundation for 25 years now. And Eff, we do a lot of community outreach. We organize a lot of local groups. If you go to eff.org, you can find ways to do that. There's also a lot of local politics intersection with this because of data centers, because of data centers, because of AI usage in municipal politics. So flock cameras, automated decision making. Your kids being taken away from you by CPS or flagged as disciplinary problems by their school because of AI or the cops deciding where to police or the local courts deciding who gets parole. And, you know, if there's one thing we learn from Moms for Liberty, it's that, like, the stupidest people in the world can take over unregarded local offices and completely upend the material conditions for people around them for the worse. Which means that people who aren't just total idiots could do stuff for the better. And, you know, a failure to involve yourself in this ends up resulting not just in data centers and like all the farmland being taken over by eminent domain for data centers and all your water and energy being siphoned off and so on. It also determines whether or not there's flock cameras that are used by chuds to kidnap your neighbors and send them to Salvador enslaved labor camps. So this is like getting involved in local politics is good. And you can move the needle on local politics in a way that's much harder than moving state or federal politics. So there's a lot of opportunities to get involved there. And then the last place to get involved is in your workplace.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Right. I was going to say you were a big advocate of unionization. Full disclosure, I am a WGA member. I'm unionized. But that also does seem like a very old fashioned answer to what feels like a modern problem.

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, it's funny because we used to not have a lot of the problems that we have now. We used to have, like, ways of addressing them. And then we stopped doing things like trust busting and organizing workers in unions. And then the problem. And now when we say maybe we should do trust busting in unions, it's sort of like, well, those are very old fashioned. But, you know, it's kind of like we used to not have a rat problem because we had all this rat poison. And then these neoliberal economists from the Chicago school said, you don't need the rat poison. And now rats are eating our faces off. And they're like, why are you blaming us for the rat problem? This is the great forces of history creating the time of the rat, making them more fecund than at any time in history. And while the rats did buy and shut down all the rat poison factories, that's just economically rational when you're not using rat poison. Rat poison. Poison is so old fashioned. What would we use the rat poison for? I mean, I don't think a union in 2026 is the same thing as a union in 1936, but I also think that it shares a lot of DNA with it. And the problems that we have are not dissimilar to the problems we had then. And in fact, like, the material conditions are not a lot dissimilar. You know, the origin of American antitrust law, which grows in lockstep with the union movement, the origin of the American antitrust law was a labor uprising. It was the Grangers, right, who were these very Luigi Mangioni ish farmers who are very angry at railroad Barons and like, threatening to kill. Well, Luigi Mangione, allegedly and threatening and threatening to kill them and sometimes enacting spectacular acts of violence on them. And so that was the circumstances under which John Sherman, brother of Tecumseh Sherman, a US Senator, passed this, the Sherman Act.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

So there will be people who listen to watch this interview and say, like, yeah, okay, I, I agree with you, but like, I find Claude very useful for double checking my taxes. Or, you know, one parent I know said, like, actually I dumped the IKEA instructions into ChatGPT and it, you know, regurgitated in a way that makes more sense to me. What, what do you say to that?

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, I think that we might be able to have that stuff. I mean, right now, the reason you're getting all that stuff and it feels great to you is because the AI companies are selling you $100 bills for a dollar apiece.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

What do you mean?

[Cory Doctorow]

They're just losing gigantic amounts of money. There's this whole question about what Mythos model was. I was speaking to a friend of mine who's quite a well known security expert who said, you know, and also a big AI guy. And he said, you know, what I think they've done is they figured out how to make an AI that can produce a $20,000 security audit for about $100,000. And that's why they don't want to release it to the public, because they are going to lose a lot of money on it. And you may remember a couple of weeks ago, they tried to clean up their balance sheets preparatory to these IPOs that are being teed up. And they said, how about if we charge everyone $5 for these hundred dollar bills? And all their major customers were like, that's too expensive. We are not getting $5 worth of value from these hundred dollars.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Well, we're now starting to see companies be in these token crises where they're like, wait, we've used all our tokens?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, and they can buy more, Right? But they're like, well, yeah, these hundred dollar bills were a bargain at a dollar apiece, but they're not at $5 a piece. So you might like Claude, but do you like Claude well enough to pay $1,000 a month for it? That's one question. But the other question is, like, what do we do when the bubble's over? Like, what AI will we have? Because there's this bedrock of finance, Stein's Law, that anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. They're either going to unload on Normies and we're going to stop subsidizing them and then we'll all go broke or they won't find suckers and then they'll stop subsidizing them and the companies will fail. But one way or the other, this selling $100 bills at a dollar apiece just can't go on forever. You can't keep shoveling money into the money furnace.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Before I let you go, you are wearing your inshinification pin.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yes.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Inshidification just like has gone everywhere. Right? People understand what that costs, so to speak. So to speak. What is the thing you want people to take away from this?

[Cory Doctorow]

That the bubble has a material basis. And that material basis is not that AI is going to take your job. That material basis is that companies need a growth story and that stories about replacing workers are very attractive to financiers and to bosses. And that the worse the bubble gets, the worse the reckoning will be. And that whatever you think about AI, that this way of delivering AI is the worst way we can imagine. And we have to stop doing it really quickly. Because the only thing worse than a $1.4 trillion bubble is a $2.8 trillion bubble.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Corey, thank you for your time.

[Cory Doctorow]

Thank you.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Cory Doctorow is the author of the Reverse Centaur's Guide to life after AI in addition to 30 other books. And that is the show for today. What Next TBD is produced by Rob Gunther, Evan Campbell, Madeline Thames Ducharme and Pat Patrick Ford. Paige Osborne is the senior supervising producer of what Next and what Next tbd. Mia Lobel is the executive producer of Podcasts here at Slate and Ben Richmond is the senior director of Podcast operations. I'm Lizzie O'. Leary. You can find me on Bluesky. I'm Izzy O'Reilly. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you soon.

[Podcast Announcer]

This episode is brought to you by Capital One.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called chat concierge and it's simplifying car shopping using self reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks. It doesn't just help buyers find a car they love.

[Podcast Announcer]

It helps schedule a test drive, get

[Lizzie O'Leary]

pre approved for financing and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

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