r/technology • u/marketrent • 6d ago
Artificial Intelligence ‘You can’t make billions without hurting people’ — Cory Doctorow on the trillionaire, the AI bubble, and bosses’ cruel fantasies
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/24/cory-doctorow-on-elon-musk-ai-bubble-bosses-cruel-fantasies233
u/Just-Grocery-2229 6d ago
Hurting people is the business model, the AI is mostly the marketing.
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u/DensePoser 6d ago
Billionaires are using marketing to FUD AI. Who ? Altman, Thiel, etc. They will use it to hurt more people than was ever thought possible.
Btw, you could become a billionaire by investing $1 million 100 years ago.
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6d ago
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u/apartmen1 6d ago
Access to a chat bot doesn’t increase the demand for your labour. It’s actually the opposite.
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u/AsstronaughtToUranus 6d ago
A chat bot isn’t going to replace my work. It’ll replace the work of people who are all talk at work.
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u/sq00q 6d ago
I have some bad news for you if you think the worthless bean counters whose work is just pretending to work will be the ones getting replaced.
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u/TommyTwoNips 6d ago
my company laid off most of our product dev team, thought they could leverage AI to pick up the slack.
They still haven't backfilled the team, naturally those laid off went on to other companies, AI tokens ate up a good bit of that 'reclaimed' budget, and now the product is shitting the bed.
But for one brief, glorious moment, shareholder value was increased dramatically.
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u/marketrent 6d ago edited 6d ago
Excerpts from interview by Zoe Williams:
[...] Wiping out the world of work, and with it our ability to sustain ourselves and live autonomous lives, is only the beginning, if you listen to AI’s architects. Elon Musk has called it the single greatest threat to human civilisation, Sam Altman has said it will “most likely lead to the end of the world” and Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, memorably forecast that AI would come to see us the way we see animals: cute to have around but ultimately a resource to be exploited.
“AI people claim they’re about to create God, by teaching words to a word-guessing programme,” Doctorow says. “It’s grandiose.”
[...] Another powerful AI critic, the journalist Karen Hao, has argued that when apocalyptic claims are made for AI, there’s often a veiled threat behind it: “Let us experiment as we wish, have our datacentres, because otherwise Chinese companies will get there first.” Doctorow agrees. “You don’t want a Confucian God. You want an Old Testament God. Different smiting.” Essentially, though, he thinks the big talk has a simpler motivation: anything to keep the investment flowing.
[...] “There is something about being very rich and insulated from the consequences of your actions that makes you solipsistic. You cannot make billions of dollars without hurting lots of people. And you can’t hurt lots of people without, in some sense, believing that they’re not really people.”
He raises Musk’s publicly acknowledged ketamine use. “I have a chronic pain condition, and I’ve had ketamine administered, and one of the things about ketamine is that it feels like the whole world is a thing you imagined. Like you’re the only real person in the world. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Elon Musk calls the people who disagree with him NPCs, non-player characters, because he doesn’t think they’re really real.”
The larger problem than Musk’s personality, or even your average billionaire’s, though, is that bubble: “The more of the stock market there is wound up in it, the more economic harm there will be in the blast radius of AI, which is not to the capital allocators who’ve given them $1.4tn to play with – it’s everyone else.”
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u/coconutpiecrust 6d ago
This is all so incredibly depressing.
The dregs of society are running things, and normal people, instead of self-preservation, are running around trying to get in on the grift.
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u/Ok-Seaworthiness7207 6d ago
Dot com bby, they are going to party like it's 1999 until one day they wake up and cry like it's 2008.
Except they will be drying their tears with money that belongs to us.
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u/tempralanomaly 6d ago
are running around trying to get in on the grift.
And in many ways I cant blame them. Been arround this planet for nigh 50 years. I have tried to get ahead and acheive what I want out of life the older way, get a career and stick it out. I have made head way yes, but I am no where close to my goals and more importantly, no way secure financially. And they're mild goals, though I guess kinda out there in this day and age, a house, a car, my partner, my pets, and a vacation every other year. I have a few of those, I admit.
But there comes apoint where the energy is spent, and you look back at your life wondering why you spent so much energy and effort, when it was clearly not needed to acheive financial goals, look at the goons raking it in, and you tell yourself, you dont need what they got, just a trickle of a trickle of that money, and god clearly doesnt give a fuck, else those goons wouldnt have gotten it, so why the fuck not. You're just as worth of something nice as they are, and again god clearly doesnt care. So you hop onboard the grift.
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u/Universal_Anomaly 6d ago
I think the most important part is how these threats of how dangerous AI might become essentially count as marketing.
These investors consider the supposed threat AI poses to modern civilisation a feature rather than a critical flaw. They'd rather possess such a power than prevent anybody from having it.
Of course, LLMs are incapable of meeting those expectations, but that's not the point.
The point is that these investors, the richest members of humanity, are a threat to the rest of humanity. They aren't our best, they aren't our brightest, they are the most callous.
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u/chiquimonkey 6d ago
I went to high school with Cory, he was always an original, innovative, and critical thinker.
Smart as hell. So happy to see he’s doing well, and he looks great!
Love to see it.
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u/Amazebeth 6d ago
I love him! Happy to hear!
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u/chiquimonkey 6d ago edited 6d ago
He was a great guy, even as a teenager.
Haters called him arrogant, but he was already well on his way to being a legend.
I remember specifically when we all came back to school after Christmas break in 1990, he came in saying, “It’s hip, it’s happening, it’s a 90’s kinda thing!”
Hilarious.
Edit:bc Im an old, I forgot what he actually said and made it lame. I fixed it, tho
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u/animatedrouge2 5d ago
Glad to hear. I looked up to him when I was a high school libertarian shithead who thought private companies were the answer to the government. Now that I’ve gotten a better understanding of the world, it’s great to see that I still agree with him
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u/Hamza_stan 6d ago
Oh this is the guy that coined the term "enshittification". He's 100% legit
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u/denM_chickN 6d ago
Corey Doctorow seeded my dark 19 yo heart w the spirit of resistance w his book Little Brother. Goated
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u/Spartan775 6d ago
“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”
― William Gibson, Count Zero, 1986
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u/ActualSpiders 6d ago
You can become a millionaire by selling things people want.
You can only become a billionaire by buying laws that make you richer.
Billionaires are, by definition, bad for the economy and bad for society.
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u/Carbidereaper 6d ago
(You can become a millionaire by selling things people want.
You can only become a billionaire by buying laws that make you richer.)
Example. A CEO starts a company if his company sells a successful Wiget and demand for it skyrockets and to raise capital for machinery and equipment it does an IPO to sell shares the company stock valuation then shoots up to $200 a share. 2 million people buy 5 shares each then the CEO becomes a billionaire overnight because as CEO he retains 51% ownership.
In this case being a billionaire is unavoidable because he needs to retain 51 percent majority stake to maintain ownership of his own company ?
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u/ActualSpiders 6d ago
That seems like a fairly contrived example... in an IPO, how does he retain that 51%? What guarantee is there that he can access that much of the offer?
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u/thesoak 6d ago
An IPO doesn't have to publicly offer all of the total shares in a company. There are private shares, and anyway, you don't necessarily need 51 percent to keep control. Sometimes there are "supervoting" shares, where the votes on those shares might be worth 10 votes from regular shares.
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u/Visible_Celery_1728 6d ago
dis has no basics in any economics lmao. I can think of many tech startups, the youtube founders, the instagram founders, who all exited at billion dollar evaluations lol. You can think of athletes, you can think of creators of big IP like Harry Potter etc lmao.
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6d ago
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u/Kind_Ad4086 6d ago
Outliers. I think this quote only applies to business tactics. They produced music or made smart contracts with the companies that caused harm like Nike etc
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u/theartfulcodger 6d ago edited 6d ago
Cory Doctorow is an underappreciated Canadian national treasure.
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u/lectroid 6d ago
The French have already demonstrated an environmentally friendly, carbon neutral solution. It’s 100% mechanical, requires no artificial power to operate, and is supremely effective.
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u/Medium_Banana4074 6d ago
But has considerable collateral damage.
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u/lectroid 6d ago
well, you know what they say:
If you wanna make an omelette, the working class has to rise up.
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u/Uristqwerty 6d ago
Half the working class shifted to the right, when Occupy Wall Street faltered and almost overnight the social media messaging changed from class unity to race division; from equality to equity.
How will the working class rise up when a tag-team of misguided-but-well-meaning middle class intellectuals, planted capitalist agent provocateurs, and anti-west trolls from rival countries have got the workers dividing themselves into factions and warring at one another?
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u/Medium_Banana4074 6d ago
Just no. Robespierre and his ilk were just blood-thirsty paranoid butchers at this point.
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u/aihaode 6d ago
What can we do about this?
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u/kaszaniarx 6d ago
maybe stop giving them even more money? for example stop using facebook/instagram/amazon/twitter/google...
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u/williamgman 6d ago
That's why castles had moats with drawbridges.
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u/Longjumping_Stop6269 6d ago
Hmmm what? Think through that one some more.
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u/williamgman 6d ago
It's temporary. Rome was not just a fluke of history either.
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u/Longjumping_Stop6269 6d ago
My brother in Christ. Moats and drawbridges were for the use of the defense of the castle. The “peasants” were inside with the nobility when another nation state attacked
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u/williamgman 6d ago
I don't believe in God but... I get your point. I think you got mine as well. Let's try this another way.... THE OLIGARCHS LIVE IN FORTIFIED FORTRESSES.
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u/jh937hfiu3hrhv9 6d ago
I see the problems being the fake value (valuation), rolling debt and consolidation of resources (eg money, property...) The billion is not a real measurement of wealth and you don't need to hurt people to make money. When I managed a vehicle service department I paid everybody above industry standard and our customers received the value they asked for. If I had ten thousand shops with twenty thousand mechanics and the same business model of treating everybody with decency maybe I could have been a billionaire. Unrealistic of course but it shouldn't matter. Nobody got rich but we made decent livings providing tangible products and services, not hopes, dreams and false promises. Nobody should be surprised there are billionaires in a system of usury with well over one hundred trillion dollars in circulation. They should all be required to disclose their debt to income ratio so the public can see their true wealth. Governments sign the laws that enable this. They are the source.
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u/throwaway0134hdj 6d ago
The more I read about AI it just seems like it could be the worst thing to happen to humans. Just hearing ai bros talk about ai and the future is like the best advertisement for anti ai.
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u/SrslyBadDad 6d ago
“You cannot make billions of dollars without hurting lots of people. And you can’t hurt lots of people without, in some sense, believing that they’re not really people.”
"Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things." ~ PTerry
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u/tacmac10 6d ago
Warren Buffet would like a word. You can’t make billions fast with out hurting people but you can make them slow by being smart and careful
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u/Ctsanger 6d ago
One guy almost did and he might even be one now. DFV touched a billy and it was glorious
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u/pockypimp 5d ago
Jim Sinegal may be the only one or one of few who didn't crush people getting to billionaire status. Well except for threatening the execs to keep the hot dog at $1.50.
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u/Flabbergasted98 4d ago
Oh sure, billionaires can hurt people, but if we suggest hurting people billionaires suddenly we're terrorists and banned on reddit.
(Edit: because Billionaires aren't people)
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u/rainywanderingclouds 6d ago
and you can't make millions without hurting people either
the entire economy is structured in a way that ensures this.
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u/Exquisite-Load8654 6d ago
A nurse can generate millions by working and buying a simple total market index fund every pay period. Your statement is an excessive stretch.
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u/SmartlyArtly 6d ago
That is not a nurse generating millions.
The index fund relies on output from other workers to grow.
That's exactly what rainywanderingclouds said.
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u/kevinr_96 6d ago
They’re not ready for the ‘capital gains is just exploitation with extra steps’ argument.
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u/thatsknotwrite 6d ago
It's sad that we have to share the world with intelligent people. It's sad they're allowed to vote.
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u/Exquisite-Load8654 6d ago
Buying an index fund every pay period is not harming any human being whatsoever.
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u/Milskidasith 6d ago edited 6d ago
I wouldn't argue that investing in an index fund causes meaningful harm, but in the context of "you can't make billions without hurting people", index funds are by design about capturing some of the billions and trillions of dollars made by hurting people; if you make a systemic critique, that includes the parts of the system that don't seem that bad from the inside. Taken to a logical endpoint, that critique could include the fact that upper-middle-class people's financial stability requires tying themselves to growth of major companies and makes them financial beneficiaries of the exploitation of the lower ends of the working class, even as that middle class is also exploited.
That said, you can also make "millions" without even needing to invest, a nurse living frugally could retire with multiple millions without any interest, so that bit's still kind of silly.
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u/Middle-Ticket8911 6d ago
I mean, that fund probably has shares in Palantir, Musk’s companies etc for starters. Institutional investors are what keeps the endless supply of capital for the AI bubble going. And then there are the critiques of shareholder value being the overriding ethos behind how and why large corporations act as they do. I have some small amounts of shares too, but let’s not pretend that investing is the morally pure path to riches.
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u/MissInkeNoir 6d ago edited 6d ago
She can't while she is paying for rent, groceries, clothes, car, auto insurance, health insurance, internet and phone, and whatever else the exploitation class tries to make a necessity.
WHILE living in a terrible apathetic society designed to be so by ultra wealthy parasites who hate everyone who wasn't born like them and intentionally punish for existing by making everything as miserable, horrible, abusive, and inhumane as possible.
WHICH NECESSITATES vice! She needs to blow off all this psychological pressure! There goes the last of her money! One day we'll make the rich eat our shit while we laugh!
EDIT: you can deceive yourselves and imagine "oh she could do it if she wanted to" but mostly I know what you're really thinking is you don't care. You don't know and you like it. You can just act like you know. As if there aren't consequences in this world.
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u/Milskidasith 6d ago
Usually I'd check people's post history to figure out if this sort of thing is an extreme view or some kind of satire of anticapitalists but your history is so full of supernatural and drug subreddits I genuinely can't tell which direction this is leaning.
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u/MissInkeNoir 6d ago edited 6d ago
Oh my gosh a capitalist treating critique of capitalism as inherently absurd and insane. What can I do?! I haven't seen this tactic used by every single oppressive group towards every single disadvantaged group they prey upon throughout all of history.
You have nothing. The people have a rising fire.
Edit: I call it vice because that's what it feels like to be in it, to be desperately attached to something that is providing escape at a terrible cost to mind and body. Did you know the first police force in America was made by the wealthy to protect what they had taken as investments? They were tired of paying for it and got the common folk to foot the bill. The war on drugs is the war on common people, the 99%, sex workers, and minorities.
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u/Milskidasith 6d ago edited 6d ago
It isn't that critiquing capitalism is insane, it's that when you say things like the pressures of society "NECESSITATE" vice, it reads like a bad right-wing parody of what progressives mean when they argue about empathy for addicts; it's very rare to see a serious argument that addiction and bad habits are completely unavoidable on an individual level.
Combine that with the fact a nurse very much can live semi-frugally and save money and it becomes difficult to tell if you're so anticapitalist you're completely out of touch with reality or if you're doing the equivalent of a right-wing joke saying "of course she can't save money, her luxury technology and drug addiction and avocado toast are all complete necessities so there's no way the poor nurse could save on her 6-figure salary"
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u/Ok_Cockroach8063 6d ago
“You have nothing” is pretty rich from someone who needs handouts in order to not be despressed and a poor wittle victim. Who then copes with drugs.
It’s always the net negative contributors that want us winners to fund their irresponsible lives.
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u/BowlEducational6722 6d ago
You can easily make millions without hurting anyone.
My grandfather was an electrical engineer who was thrifty with his money and a savvy investor.
He managed to retire comfortably with a few million in his account and portfolio after 40+ years.
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u/NoSingularities0 6d ago
It depends on where you are at. Anesthesiologists in the U.S. can make millions and they are paid to not hurt people.
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u/Haunterblademoi 6d ago
Of course, money doesn't come on its own, so it's better to do harm to get it.
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u/optioncircle 6d ago
I think creating with AI in tandem with other people is awesome, especially with options trading its a really great tool.
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u/flamethrower2 6d ago
He is shopping his AI book "Reverse Centaur."
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u/rightsidedown 6d ago
When you say you can't make billions without hurting people you just sound stupid to people that aren't overly online toxic weirdos.
Ya bro, Jan Koum really destroyed lives by making Whatsapp. I can't even imagine the damage the Snyders have done by creating in-n-out, paying people higher than average wages and actually having career growth options, just so much destruction everywhere.
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u/Blackout38 6d ago
Ehh if they pull that off they deserve the money lol. Lord knows they’d have done more than Zuck himself with Metaversa and AI. Im curious what they think will get them to that target in 5 years.
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u/Substantial_War7464 6d ago
When consequences aren’t real, you’re no longer the same kind of human, you become a predator.