AI Is a Finance-Driven Bet on Substituting Money for Expertise to Displace Workers, Best Countered by Competition and Worker Power
Source: Cory Doctorow. "Is There Life After AI? Cory Doctorow Thinks So.." October 29, 2026. jacobin.com
The Gist
Doctorow argues that today's AI isn't really about building smart machines; it's about letting rich investors replace expensive experts and frighten workers into line. The technology is overhyped and in a bubble, but he thinks the answer isn't despair. It's to rebuild competition, worker rights, and public power so that people stay in control of the machines instead of serving them.
Conclusion
The current AI boom is a bubble driven by finance capital's wish to replace expertise with money and to discipline workers, so the proper response is to build worker rights, public power, and market competition rather than to accept AI doomerism or rely on copyright maximalism.
Premises
- Current AI is 'theory-free': it brute-forces statistical relationships from huge datasets and computing power instead of modeling how the world works, so it can mimic competence without understanding (e.g., LLMs making illegal chess moves).
- Because this approach substitutes brute force (money for data and compute) for theory (expertise), it removes the last hurdle to finance capital's power, since expert labor was a durable source of bargaining power that money could not simply buy.
- This AI is extremely expensive and only pays off if it displaces large amounts of high-wage labor. Replacing low-wage workers like taxi drivers is a demonstration of power, not a profit source, and signals to workers in professions such as medicine, law, and teaching that they are replaceable.
- Backers do not need the software to actually do the job well: the narrative scares workers into docility, and with enough market power firms can force the public to consume inferior outputs, which is the monopolist's goal.
- Competition constrains firms and makes it harder for them to coordinate to capture regulators and workforces; the large-firm wage premium was a contingent post–New Deal moment, not a durable state of nature.
- The AI boom is a bubble, rooted in material conditions (shares as claims on future earnings and as liquid currency for acquisitions and hiring) and in billionaires' pathological aversion to being thwarted or called on their errors.
Assumptions
- Ideology is downstream of material conditions, so the AI boom is best explained by class interests and financial incentives.
- The economics of AI do not make sense unless the goal is labor displacement and disciplining workers.
- Expertise-based bargaining power is a meaningful check on capital, and eroding it shifts power toward finance.
- Market power allows firms to degrade quality without losing customers.
- Competition and worker organizing are achievable and effective levers against concentrated power.
- Current LLM limitations (lack of world models) are representative of the technology's fundamental character.