Cory Doctorow, a journalist and science fiction author, is coming to Australia to warn that when the AI bubble bursts, executives who replaced their staff with AI tools will find it takes a “really long time” to replace those lost skills. He also cautioned creative workers not to rely solely on copyright to protect their work, just a week after Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised to ramp up protection against AI companies that refuse to pay.
The AI bubble is brittle and fraught
In his new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, Doctorow says the question isn’t “are we in an AI bubble?” but “When will the bubble burst?” He explains that after bubbles burst, we look back and see the weak links that were always there.
The AI bubble is kept afloat by massive investments from Gulf sovereign wealth funds and billionaires into new datacentres. If some of those deals collapse, the bubble could burst. The circular investment between chip manufacturers, AI companies, and tech companies using AI “could easily” be the first domino to fall, Doctorow adds. Alternatively, if AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI delay their IPOs and struggle to get new funding, the bubble could deflate.
“We can see in retrospect, when we don’t have to continue pretending that this thing is going to go on for ever, that it was always very, very brittle. It was always very fraught,” he says.
Lost skills will be hard to recover
Executives in industries promised by AI sellers that the technology could cheaply replace workers will find those skills hard to bring back after the bubble bursts. Workers fired, pushed into retirement, or retrained in other fields will leave gaps of knowledge. Doctorow says detailed knowledge of business processes cannot be readily transferred or recovered, “and you can’t just recover it like the workers who have it when you scatter them to the four winds”.
“It’s going to be a bit a little like Fury Road where there’s just going to be stuff you have, but we don’t know how to do again. And it’s going to take a really long time to figure out how to do it again,” he adds.
Copyright is not the solution
Albanese last week said the Australian government would have “plain as day” laws on copyright to ensure AI companies pay for training on creative works. This followed reports of lobbying by AI companies to introduce a text and data mining exception into Australian copyright law. The announcement was broadly welcomed by creative sectors, but Doctorow argues using copyright law “won’t solve anyone’s problems”.
He says this position does not put him on the side of AI companies or large media companies. “It’s not like the media companies suing the AI companies want to pay media professionals, right? Like, no one has ever accused Rupert Murdoch of feeling that journalists don’t get enough money,” he says. “The only other constituency, apart from a few creative workers, for a new copyright is our bosses.”
Doctorow suggests ensuring workers have labour law rights over the terms in which they use AI and over their creative output would be better.
Governments should wait for the crash
Doctorow also says governments should not invest in AI right now, but should wait for the market to crash and then build based on open-source AI models. “Let’s not be suckers. We’re going to have tons of hardware. We’re going to have tons of people who know how to use the hardware to do useful things. And we’re going to have means, motive and opportunity to improve these open source [AI] models,” he says.
What will be left for the average person is “a bunch of useful tools”. He adds, “Putting vibe coded stuff into production [in companies] is creating tech debt at unimaginable scale. But vibe coding for the thing that you use to connect your smart alarm clock into your smart coffee-maker is fine. Who gives a shit if it stops working? You just do it again.”
Cory Doctorow appears at Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas from 22-23 August and Melbourne’s The Capitol on 25 August, presented by The Wheeler Centre and Now or Never. The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI published by Verso is released 4 August and available for pre-order now.
