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

Cory Doctorow offers a characteristically sharp critique of the AI bubble, but what I found most useful here is his framing of how these systems are actually meant to be deployed: not to empower workers, but to turn them into “reverse centaurs.”

That framing cuts through a lot of the marketing nonsense. The promise is always that AI will help people do their jobs better. The deployment story, far too often, is that a human gets stuck reviewing machine output at impossible speed while absorbing the blame when things go wrong. That’s not augmentation; it’s a liability dump.