Prominent science fiction author and journalist, Cory Doctorow, is sounding the alarm over what he describes as an impending “AI bubble burst,” cautioning businesses and governments alike about the long-term consequences of rapidly replacing human workers with artificial intelligence tools. Doctorow, known for coining the term “enshittification,” argues that the critical question is not if the AI bubble exists, but when it will inevitably collapse.
Doctorow suggests that the current AI boom is being sustained by substantial investments from Gulf sovereign wealth funds and billionaires into new data centres. He warns that a collapse could be triggered if some of these major deals falter, or if key AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI continue to delay their initial public offerings and struggle to secure fresh funding. The interconnected nature of investment within the AI sector – spanning chip manufacturers, AI developers, and tech companies utilising AI – represents a potential domino effect, he explains.
A significant concern raised by Doctorow is the irreversible loss of expertise once companies enthusiastically replace their human workforce with AI. He posits that executives, enticed by promises of cheap labour replacement, will discover that the detailed knowledge of business processes and accumulated skills held by employees cannot be easily recovered once those workers are dismissed, retired, or retrained into other fields. This, he likens to a post-apocalyptic scenario, where essential ‘how-to’ knowledge is lost and takes an extensive period to rediscover.
Beyond the economic bubble, Doctorow also challenges the efficacy of copyright law as the primary safeguard for creative professionals against AI exploitation. His comments come just a week after Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese pledged to strengthen copyright protections to ensure AI companies pay for using creative works such as music, books, and news to train their models. While this move was largely welcomed by Australia’s creative sectors, Doctorow contends that a copyright-centric approach will not genuinely solve the problems faced by individual creators, suggesting it primarily benefits large media corporations rather than individual professionals.
Instead of focusing on copyright, Doctorow advocates for robust labour law rights that empower workers regarding the terms of AI use and the protection of their creative output. He further advises governments against current investments in AI, suggesting a more prudent approach would be to wait for the market to crash. This, he argues, would allow for the development of open-source AI models when the market stabilises, leveraging the abundance of hardware and skilled individuals that will remain.