“It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our tech columnist”
Very good article, definitely worth a read
The motivation behind this religious zeal is a WORLD WITHOUT WORKERS.
All the times these fuckers tell us we can't have worker's rights, we can't have UBI, we can't have universal healthcare, we can't have subsidized housing, etc., because it's unrealistic remember that they crashed the world economy in a vain attempt to create 99% unemployment.
Yes, but I quibble only slightly here in that I think you might be implying they think or care about the larger picture. They want to not pay workers at their company. They don't really give a shit about anything else.
Here's a link to the exact same post on Cory Doctorow's (tracker-free) blog: https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/01/dare-snot/#i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again
As far as websites go, I'd trust The Nerve more than 99% of others considering who owns and runs it. Ghostery lists Sentry and Perimeterx trackers only which are internal user behaviour monitoring and security tools.
Maybe you know this but I just feel the need to slightly defend then here in case anyone assumes it's the typical far more invasive cross-site tracking.
If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country's ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again.
Contrast this with what would transpire if Trump directed his tech giants to switch off your country's Office 365 access, or to brick your Android and iOS phones, or to killswitch your John Deere tractors. Your country would effectively cease to exist.
I love you Cory, but this is bullshit.
Office 365? Maybe a few companies would loose some documents, and productivity would drop 30% for a few months until they recreated everything in LibreOffice.
iOS shares are negligible in most of the world. Google can't brick Android devices. Most people run cheap Chinese phones. Worst case, maybe 30% of phones stop working. Everyone else goes to their local phone shop (which will get slammed for business) to install Lineage or Graphene. So some people don't have smart phones for a few weeks. Annoying, but no biggie.
John Deere? Most food produced in the world is basically local and nearly organic. So some big corporate farms suffer, and there's a huge boost to the majority small farms.
In all cases, these attacks would have about the same effect as loosing access to chat bots: temporarily productivity loss until workflows are adjusted, and then better sovereignty.
Office 365? Maybe a few companies would loose some documents, and productivity would drop 30% for a few months until they recreated everything in LibreOffice.
Office 365 isn’t just access to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, it also includes Outlook, Teams, and OneDrive. Companies that lose access to all of their email, files, and team chats can’t just “recreate everything in LibreOffice.” These companies would be utterly paralyzed as businesses and would essentially have to replace all their computers and IT infrastructure.
Again, that would mean a loss of productive of like 30% until they get replacement infra. It wouldn't grind them to a complete vault like Doctrow is suggesting.
Entire government agencies would cease to operate. It would be a force majure fiasco for virtually every contract in the country.
For a few days, you're right
I can tell you, the company I work for would be completely unable to operate without access to our email and files. All of the work done here flows through email. All of our customers contact us through that channel, even when they don’t realize it (contact through the website gets forwarded through email).
There are lots of other companies that work this way. Email isn’t just for asking questions and setting up meetings, it’s the queue system through which all work gets done.
Sure, and it would take your IT department a couple days to replace your email provider. It takes about a few seconds to a few minutes for MX records to propagate.
You might loose your past emails, but critical email accounts should be back online in a few days. The biggest delay would be getting management to approve a new provider (probably about an hour when they realize the impact) and provisioning the new accounts (probably a few hours for your most critical accounts. Up to a couple weeks for the less important ones).
losing past emails is very serious.
Not saying it isn't, and I wouldn't want to be the guy stuck with 80 hour weeks to fix that shit.
But my point is that it's not existential. It would really harm productivity for a few days..
It’s not “our email provider”, it’s everything. All of the company laptops are provisioned with Windows accounts that run through Microsoft servers. Microsoft could brick every PC in the company and lock us out of all our files.
Again, a few days to fix that for the critical folks
you can't fix missing files and software
It's just the OS that failed. Install a new one that's not owned by Microsoft.
Files will have to be reconstructed from paper, memories, and your customer's/partner's data.
You're acting like this sort of thing has never happend to companies before. IT departments literally are tasked with generating business continuity plans. Maybe those plans' software copies will be lost, but they have already thought of this. And just look at what happened to Ukraine in 2017 or SaudiAramco in 2012.
These attacks would likely kill the American tech economy and might hurt the US more than the rest of the world.
I mean... Everything is changing for the worse.
That’s been happening since way before AI
Yeah well they certainly upped the tempo with this bullshit.
Idk man, there's great drugs to prevent the spread of HIV now
I mean it does change everything in that you quickly find out who is paying attention.
Yup. Ed ZItron is a programmer (I guess) and he had another programmer on his show and they both agreed: AI is extremely helpful in finding them clients they want to work with. That is to say, clients who are constantly asking for full AI-integration are going to be garbage to work for, clients who please say do not use AI in the product in any way are going to be great to work for.
This is the article they were talking about https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking
That is an excellent read!
He is not a programmer, he's actually into PR.
And Ludic, the guy he had on, said exactly the opposite.
AI is very unhelpful because it excites the terrible customers you don't want to deal with, and puts off the good ones you would have been happy with.
Either way it ends the possibility of a fruitful exchange of Information.
Listen to the whole thing. It's in there a good deal after your bit.
Curious how Cory sidesteps the way that AI has affected cybersecuity.
Mythos broke into almost all of the NSA's classified systems in the matter of hours. It's damn good at breaking things.
Edit: wow, I'm really surprised by the ignorance of down voters here. Look at the security bugs found in FOSS by AI. AI is trash for writing code, but it's way faster than humans at breaking code.
There is a huge conflict of interest with that claim being from the AI industry and the US government, with both being interested in overstating the capabilities of the model.
Also, Romanian college kids used to routinely break into US military webpages in the 90s, so IDK what the novelty is.
Tell me when they cause damage or are prosecuted, until then, it's just an as, likely exaggerated or straight up false.
Especially from Anthropic, who has long maintained the position that their AI is dangerous, and is currently in a cock counting competition with OpenAI about who can hack the most companies first, and thus has the most dangerous model.
The whole thing has just started turning into a farce of "oh, well actually, my AI hacked companies before yours and did it to more companies than your AI".
The US outlawed selling this product after that happend. That cuts your claim of marketing for CoI down.
And comparing a public website with a secured intranet is absured. As is comparing security systems of the 90s (when we used DES) to modern security systems.
Tell me when they cause damage or are prosecuted, until then, it's just an as, likely exaggerated or straight up false.
Again, it sounds like you didn't read the article. They were hired for this security audit. It wasn't rogue. There won't be a prosecution of their contractor lol.
They were just shocked at how effective it was. Most penetration tests don't have that many critical vulnerability findings.
No, they outlawed it way before, but they didn't outlaw that of OpenAI that also claimed to hack HuggingFace.
It's also very convenient to outlaw a product that does not exist as advertised.
And "they were shocked" is not a metric. Compare it to the existing state of the art in a test controlled by a party with no conflict of interest and I'll believe it happened.
You obviously didn't read the article. Those are entirely different things.
Your obvious ignorance is showing.
Am I just expected to trust Cory Doctorow?
He has deep ties with the tech industry tyrants. He "parties" with tech billionaires and Hollywood nutjobs at Burning Man.
Dudes worked at the EFF for, what, decades?!?
Am I expected to trust you?
Trust no one.
Not even yourself
Uhh, well everything I've heard from him, including the book Enshittification, has a sole purpose: calling these capitalist assholes out for the fraud and general shitty behavior they tend to have. Zero punches are pulled in that book. I have no idea why you think he's a tech bro or whatever, but if he is, those parties are either pretty awkward for him or there's some 4d chess with kickbacks involved here somewhere and that doesn't make much sense at all.
Link some evidence?
By their fruits ye shall know them.
Faith without works is dead.
Doctorow coined enshittification and is tirelessly fighting it and advocating for legislation against it.
you're aggressively ignorant. easy block.
And he literally wrote an entire book crammed full of criticism of the tech companies' bad behavior. He's probably the person singularly most responsible for the public being aware of this shit. Yeah, this commenter is pretty stupid.
i think the guy just really hates rich people. it's a purity thing.
More likely they just think:
more cycnisim = better understanding of reality
How many books have you written solely focused on exposing tech company misdeeds? Guessing it's zero compared to Doctorow's >= 1, so by your own words here, you statements are dead.
The people who I work with will spend 15 minutes telling me both how great AI is and how hard it is to get it to do what you want it to do. They just don’t even listen to what they are saying.
Example: “What did you do on the weekend?” “Oh I found this cool new AI tool that lets you do . It only did and I had to do a bit of work to fix it up. But how cool?!”
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.