AI Won’t Replace Jobs, but Tech Bros Want You to Be Afraid It Will

AI is overrated, according to author Cory Doctorow.

“I don’t think AI can do your job,” Doctorow said, but despite that, bosses across industries are “insatiably horny” about the idea that AI will replace jobs. Top of the list is tech bosses.

Tech is one of the industries where AI is scaling significantly faster in the workforce than average (the bigger picture corporate AI adoption is much slower, and some studies claim the returns on investments are low). Many tech CEOs have made statements expressing their wishes to automate tasks that would have regularly gone to human workers. A new report by Source, a consulting firm that works with the tech industry, claimed that over half of tech companies are considering restructuring because of AI.

“Tech bosses love the story of AI replacing programmers,” Doctorow said at an event hosted by the Brooklyn Public Library last week, where he was answering former FTC chair Lina Khan’s questions. During her tenure in the Biden administration, Khan was known for her firm regulatory stance against big tech monopolies.

Computer programming was once the most lucrative industry to go into, with a surplus of demand for workers; there were numerous job opportunities with great pay and benefits, and cushy amenities. Now, the script has completely switched. Many have blamed the rise of generative AI for it.

But Doctorow argues “that’s just not a thing AI is doing” or even can do.

“AI can write sub-routines, it can’t do software architecture. Can’t do engineering, because engineering is about having a long, broad context window to understand all the pieces that came before, all the pieces that are coming in the future, and the pieces that sit adjacent to code, and if you know anything about AI, the one thing that is most expensive to do with AI is expanding the context window,” Doctorow said.

Doctorow is famous for having coined the term “enshittification” to describe the common, modern-day phenomenon of almost every tech platform becoming soulless, dysfunctional and widely-hated corpses that internet users are still trapped under. It’s a cathartically profane critique of capitalism in the tech age that Macquaire Dictionary picked as its word of the year in 2024.

He argues that what tech bosses actually like is to have tech workers “terrified that they’re about to be replaced by a chatbot, it gives them a chance to put them in their place.”

To understand why, you need to look into how the dynamic has changed in the tech workplace in the past two decades.

“The way that tech bosses motivated tech workers was appealing to their sense of mission,” Doctorow said.

It was a double-edged sword: it both motivated the tech workers to work grueling hours, but it also made them passionate about the product and its purpose. So, if the boss decided to make changes at the expense of that vision of greater good and in the pursuit of greater margins, the workers tended to fight for the user.

One example of that was the Google employee protests over the controversial military AI initiative Project Maven, which successfully saw the tech giant walk back its involvement.

Back then, Doctorow argues, tech workers were a good way to keep the industry in check because they had a sense of purpose and they had power. Demand for workers far exceeded the supply, so if things were going awry in the company’s progress towards its mission, they could threaten to leave. There were many other opportunities that they could switch to. But things have since changed, and supply has caught up with demand.

Roughly 400,000 tech employees have been laid off in the past two years alone. Silicon Valley companies are asking their employees to work 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week, a schedule known as “996” that was popularized in China.

Meanwhile, big tech companies are spending big and making record profits. Nvidia just became the first and only company to hit a $4.5 trillion market cap.

The power dynamic has now switched, and the power is with the bosses. And this time around, according to Doctorow, they want to make sure that the power dynamic stays that way.

“Tech bosses have shown us how they treat workers they’re not afraid of,” Doctorow said, pointing the finger at Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Federal injury data from 2022 found that Amazon warehouse workers were seriously injured at more than twice the rate at other warehouses. A subsequent Senate probe from 2024 concluded that Amazon had been manipulating its self-reported injury data to make its warehouses appear safer.

“The minute Jeff Bezos can put a piss jar next to your workstation, he will,” Doctorow said.

“At this point, when Google is firing 12,000 workers, and then doing a $70 billion stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, you need a union,” he advised.

The AI bubble is worse than 2008

If Doctorow’s estimates are true, then AI won’t take over any jobs. But then what about the billions and billions of dollars that have been poured into the AI industry, so much so that those investments are almost entirely driving American economic growth?

“The great kind of tragedy and terror of all of this is that AI, if it can’t do your job, then whatever benefits we get from it are not commensurate with the capital expenditures that we’ve made for it, nor will they be sufficiently profitable to incur the operational expenses associated with maintaining these large foundation models,” Doctorow said.

TLDR on that: He thinks there is an AI bubble. And he is not alone in thinking like this; many other experts have been sounding the alarms of a rapidly growing AI bubble.

In a notable addition this week, the United Kingdom’s central bank said that “equity market valuations appear stretched, particularly for technology companies focused on Artificial Intelligence,” and that this could lead to a sudden, sharp correction.

The Bank said that stock market price valuations were comparable to the peak of the dot-com bubble, and that the market share of the top five members of the S&P 500 was at its highest concentration in 50 years. Those five are the AI-heavy big tech giants Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Meta.

Lina Khan painted a picture of some other reasons why experts believe there is an AI bubble at the event on Thursday.

“There have been increasing discussion about how we may actually be just seeing a big AI bubble,” the former FTC chair said. “We’re seeing all of these circular investments where it’s like the same five to seven companies just handing each other big bags of cash, saying, IOU, we’re seeing, you know, increasing reporting in the business press that even though we’re seeing such significant investment in AI, increasingly, firms are being candid that they don’t know what the profitable use case is going to be, but are just kind of afraid of missing out.”

In her time in office, Khan’s FTC opened inquiries into the various deals and partnerships between big tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft and the then-rising, now-reigning AI labs OpenAI and Anthropic.

A bubble is worrying. A pop is even more worrisome.

“I think we’re going to see a collapse, and it’s going to be very bad,” Doctorow said. “I think 2008 is going to look like a golden age when AI pops.”