AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage Cory Doctorow

AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. What I do not do is predict the future. No one can predict the future, which is a good thing, since if the future were predictable, that would mean we couldn't change it. Now, not everyone understands the distinction. They think science-fiction writers are oracles. Even some of my colleagues labor under the delusion that we can "see the future". Then there are science-fiction fans who believe that they are the future. A depressing number of those people appear to have become AI bros. These guys can't shut up about the day that their spicy autocomplete machine will wake up and turn us all into paperclips has led many confused journalists and conference organizers to try to get me to comment on the future of AI. That's something I used to strenuously resist doing, because I wasted two years of my life explaining patiently and repeatedly why I thought crypto was stupid, and getting relentlessly bollocked by cryptocurrency cultists who at first insisted that I just didn't understand crypto.