Cory Doctorow: The real economic AI apocalypse is nigh

[Beebo Brink]

Pluralistic: The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh (27 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

...the AI bubble is driven by monopolists who've conquered their markets and have no more growth potential, who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow by moving into some other sector, e.g. "pivot to video," crypto, blockchain, NFTs, AI, and now "super-intelligence." Further: the topline growth that AI companies are selling comes from replacing most workers with AI, and re-tasking the surviving workers as AI babysitters ("humans in the loop"), which won't work.

Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging "foundation models" will be shut off and we'll lose the AI that can't do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or "discouraged" and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations

 

[Archer]

This is insane!

The data-center buildout has genuinely absurd finances – there are data-center companies that are collateralizing their loans by staking their giant Nvidia GPUs as collateral. This is wild: there's pretty much nothing (apart from fresh-caught fish) that loses its value faster than silicon chips. That goes triple for GPUs used in AI data-centers, where it's normal for tens of thousands of chips to burn out over a single, 54-day training run

 

[Noodles]

God Ilove Cory Doctorow's articles but they always are sooooooo loooooong.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

God Ilove Cory Doctorow's articles but they always are sooooooo loooooong.

Yeah, I don't think he needed quite so much verbiage to get the critical points across. The AI bubble has to burst eventually and it will make the dot-com bubble look tame. My biggest hope is that it won't hurt my company (which isn't directly tied to AI sales at all) and then I get to buy cheap stock for a while...

 

[Beebo Brink]

This is insane!

My jaw dropped when I read this:

Microsoft "invests" in Openai by giving the company free access to its servers. Openai reports this as a ten billion dollar investment, then redeems these "tokens" at Microsoft's data-centers. Microsoft then books this as ten billion in revenue.

That's par for the course in AI, where it's normal for Nvidia to "invest" tens of billions in a data-center company, which then spends that investment buying Nvidia chips. The same chunk of money being energetically passed back and forth between these closely related companies, all of which claim it as investment, as an asset, or as revenue (or all three).

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

My jaw dropped when I read this:

I feel like that has to be some sort of accounting fraud.. But I don't claim to be an expert on the subject so maybe this is just a massive loophole. But yes, this is a huge bubble and when it pops, it will be a disaster.

 

[Free]

Yes, everything online sucks now—but it doesn’t have to

Ars chats with Cory Doctorow about his new book Enshittification.

arstechnica.com