Prominent science-fiction author and activist Cory Doctorow has issued a stark warning about the current artificial intelligence boom, labelling it an unsustainable bubble built by monopolistic tech giants. He argues that its inevitable collapse will leave behind a damaging legacy comparable to "asbestos in the walls of our technological society."
The Growth Stock Paradox and the AI Pump
Doctorow identifies the root cause of the AI investment mania in the structure of modern tech monopolies. Companies like Google, Meta, and Apple dominate their sectors, but this dominance creates a crisis. The market values them as "growth stocks," trading at high multiples of their earnings. However, once growth plateaus, they risk a catastrophic revaluation into "mature" stocks with much lower valuations.
The precedent is stark: in early 2022, Meta lost $240 billion in a single day after reporting slightly slower-than-expected user growth in the US. To avoid this fate, dominant companies must constantly pump new narratives—from the metaverse to cryptocurrency—to convince investors of future growth. AI is the latest and most expensive of these bubbles, with Doctorow stating its primary purpose is to maintain stock valuations until the next hype cycle arrives.
Creating an Army of 'Reverse Centaurs'
Central to Doctorow's critique is the concept of the "reverse centaur." In automation, a centaur is a human augmented by a machine, like a driver using a car. A reverse centaur flips this: a human becomes a "squishy meat appendage" for an AI system.
He cites the example of an Amazon delivery driver monitored by AI cameras that track eye movements and penalise singing. The driver serves as a peripheral for the van, not the other way around. In professional settings, the dynamic becomes an "accountability sink." Doctorow uses radiology as an example: the promise isn't that AI will make diagnosis better, but that hospitals can fire nine out of ten radiologists, making the sole remaining human oversee the AI's work and take the blame for its inevitable, catastrophic errors.
"The AI can't do your job," Doctorow asserts, "but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job." This is particularly dangerous in fields like software coding, where AI-generated code contains subtle, statistically camouflaged bugs that only experienced, high-wage senior developers might catch—precisely the employees tech bosses aim to replace.
Why Expanding Copyright is a Dead End
Doctorow forcefully rejects a common proposed solution from the creative industries: expanding copyright law to cover AI training data. He argues this would not help artists but instead empower the "five publishers, four studios, three labels" that dominate creative markets. New rights would simply be clawed back in standard contracts, making artists "useful idiots for your boss."
Instead, he highlights a more powerful existing defence: the US Copyright Office's position that AI-generated works cannot be copyrighted because copyright requires human authorship. This means any AI-generated content by corporations like Disney or Getty enters the public domain, allowing anyone to copy and use it. This creates a powerful commercial disincentive for companies to replace human creators with AI.
What Will Be Left When the Bubble Bursts?
Doctorow is convinced the AI bubble will burst, with most companies failing and datacenters shuttered. The salvage, however, will be mixed. We will be left with "a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics" and a glut of cheap GPUs useful for climate science and visual effects. Open-source models for useful tasks like transcription, summarisation, and photo editing will persist on local devices.
The toxic legacy will be the embedded, wasteful systems—the "asbestos"— and the normalisation of the reverse-centaur model of labour. To fight this, Doctorow urges a coalition between workers and the public, stressing that substandard AI products harm everyone. The real battle is not against the technology itself, but against the material forces of monopoly capital and growth-stock mania that are spending hundreds of billions to fill our societal walls with high-tech hazards.
