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Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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I generally respect this guy's opinion (I probably use the term "enshitification" multiple times a week!), but pretending that "AI" and "Chabot" are interchangeable terms seems wildly reductive, and the subtle presumption that the process of changing is a binary changed/non-changed situation instead of a curve is just ignorant.
If the internet was "turned off" after 4 or so years not much would have changed, either.
I think you're making a strawman argument here. He isn't arguing that it's a binary switch that has failed to throw, he's arguing that we don't have compelling evidence that the ends justify the means:
And this is completely true! Supposedly "data informed" organizations are trying to find a yardstick that shows actual, meaningful improvement in business outcomes from AI. In my own organization we have people touting LOC yet again because "big number", but anyone who's ever worked in software can tell you it's an asinine metric to use as a KPI.
It's inherently unscientific to start with the answer and work backwards to a satisfactory question. His point that this push is coming from the least knowledgeable of real processes- and more closely resembles religious fervor than business acumen- seems to at least warrant consideration.
He is definitely pretending that change is either on or off.
Are CEOs jumping the gun on how quickly they adopt AI into workflows? Definitely. However, there's a big difference between "AI isn't at a threshold where it is disruptive" and "AI isn't disruptive". Or, to belabor the metaphor: CEOs are jumping the gun, but the race is about to start and they're on the correct track.
A key word in that sentence is "if", it is a rhetorical example, that's probably pretty much correct at this point. It's not a recommended course of action, it's a declaration that it contrary to crazed hype, it isn't currently as core to everything as would be befitting the current hype level.
I would argue that the CEOs aren't on the correct track, they aren't really in a particularly specific trajectory. I just had a debate with someone on this and their stance was "well in a hundred years do you expect things to be like they are". My response "I cannot possibly speak to that, but we need to speak to today instead of pretending we know how things will be in a hundred years and pretending they are already at that level". The "imagine a hundred years from now" by a relative outsider to the tech is dominating CEO mindset, and that's problematic.
Once the bubble pops, we will almost certainly see a more durable and sane adoption for these technologies. For now, the hype is a problem as it enables some of the worst possible stewards of the technology and favors grift over progress.