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

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

by kawera • 6 months ago

107 95 6 months ago

jongjong2• 6 months ago

It's disappointing how so many people blame AI for our problems. I see this pattern over and over; people never blame the socio-economic system and blame technology instead. Technological improvement is the only thing which allows us to survive the social, cultural and moral decline that we've been experiencing. People blame tech because it allows the system to be highly inefficient and still hold together. But if people blame tech, root issues will not be addressed.

Avicebron• 6 months ago

But if people blame tech, root issues will not be addressed.

Agreed. I think people would be open to suggestions if you have actionable ways to improve the current socio-economic system.

hackable_sand• 6 months ago

If it involves work then no, people are not open to suggestions.

DetectDefect3• 6 months ago

It is pretty plain to see technology enables socio-economic disharmony, to say the least. While it may not be the "cause" it is certainly a potent accelerant.

jongjong2• 6 months ago

Yes but we can't stop progress while scarcity is still causing suffering. I think that communication works long term, even with algorithm suppression. Insightful ideas tend to bubble up, especially during chaotic times.

kuerbel2• 6 months ago

I don’t think the article is blaming AI as a technology. It’s criticizing how the current socio-economic system uses AI.

The argument isn’t “tech is the problem,” but that autonomy narratives are used to shift risk, degrade labor, and justify valuations without real system-level productivity gains. That’s a critique of incentives and power structures, not of technological progress itself.

In that sense, “don’t blame tech, blame the system” is very close to the article’s point, not opposed to it.

netsharc• 6 months ago

How to fix the human/society instead? Technology has enabled a lot of evil: the society that had guns came and colonized the society without, and made them slaves (here's the opening to argue that Genghis Khan managed to enslave many societies without guns). The rise of the Internet and online shopping ruined "main street shops". "Uber for ___" enabled the exploitative gig-economy with retirement meaning dropping dead...

Yeah, we're back to feudal lords having the power to control society, they can even easily buy governments... Seems like the problem is with neo-liberalist capitalism, without any controls coming from the society (i.e. democractically elected governments) it will maximize exploitation.

ares6232• 6 months ago

I think technology has always been a tool to impose will over others. Computing was just such a unique kind of technology where, for a decently long time, only a subset of people knew how to use it, and that subset didn’t have existing wealth and power (or not enough). It’s taken upto now for the ones with real power to catch up, or a mix of the ones who didn’t now have real power. And they will use technology for what it ultimately is for, to impose their will on others.

SideburnsOfDoom• 6 months ago

people never blame the socio-economic system and blame technology instead.

If by "people" you mean "Cory Doctorow, the author of the article", then you really don't know anything about their work.

For example, he coined the term "enshitifacation" and talks often about the "enshitogenic policy environment" that gives rise to it.

thundergolfer• 6 months ago

The first 500+ words of this article are focused almost exclusively on the dynamics of corporate capitalism, not AI.

Read the article.

sodapopcan6• 6 months ago

Well it's kinda both. One step towards socio-economic change would be if everyone just stopped giving billionaires upwards of $200/month, and didn't have their companies give it to them on their behalf.

pixl973• 6 months ago

Any problem that is solved by "if everyone just" changed what they are doing is not solvable by everyone just changing what they are doing.

dayofthedaleks• 6 months ago

Maybe worth noting in the title this is from Cory Doctorow.

https://archive.is/ctuVG

jader201• 6 months ago

HN rarely (never?) attributes authors in the titles of articles.

Why should we make an exception in this case?

nemo• 6 months ago

For me it would be a strong signal to skip the article and discussion, YMMV.

whimsicalism12• 6 months ago

It’s funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves.

It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Salvage the wreckage? Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.

kuerbel2• 6 months ago

I think this comment is reacting to a different argument than the one the article is actually making.

The piece isn’t claiming that AI tools are useless or that they don’t materially improve day-to-day work. In fact, it more or less assumes the opposite. The critique is about the economic and organizational story being told around AI, not about whether an individual developer can ship faster today.

Saying “these tools now do a considerable portion of my work” operates on the micro level of personal productivity. Doctorow is operating on the macro level: how firms reframe human labor as “automation,” push humans into oversight and liability roles, and use exaggerated autonomy claims to justify valuations, layoffs, and cost-cutting.

Ironically, the “Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff” metaphor aligns more with the article than against it. The whole “reverse centaur” idea is that jobs don’t disappear instantly; they degrade first. People keep running because the system still sort of works, until the ground is gone and the responsibility snaps back onto humans.

So there’s no contradiction between “this saves me hours a day” and “this is being oversold in ways that will destabilize jobs and business models.” Those two things can be true at the same time. The comment seems to rebut “AI doesn’t work,” which isn’t really the claim being made.

sodapopcan6• 6 months ago

I think this comment is reacting to a different argument than the one the article is actually making.

The headline.

whimsicalism12• 6 months ago

You can read my reply to another comment making a similar point. In short, I think you are giving Doctorow far too much credit - the assumption that these tools are fundamentally incapable is woven throughout the essay, the risk always comes from the fact that managers might think these tools (which are obviously inferior) can do your job. The notion that they can actually do your job is treated as invariable absurd, pie-in-the-sky, bubble thinking, or unmentionable.

My point is I don’t think a technology that went from chatgpt (cool, useless) to opus-4.5+ in 3 years is obviously being oversold when it says that it can do your entire job beyond being just a useful tool.

artninja1988• 6 months ago

The piece isn’t claiming that AI tools are useless or that they don’t materially improve day-to-day work

Would you call something that could replace your labor "spicy auto complete"? He also evokes nfts and blockchain, for some reason. To me this phrasing makes it sound like he thinks they are damn near useless.

kalkin5• 6 months ago

AI is a statistical inference engine. All it can do is predict what word will come next based on all the words that have been typed in the past.

If we keep saying this hard enough over and over, maybe model capabilities will stop advancing.

Hey, there's even a causal story here! A million variations of this cope enter the pretraining data, the model decides the assistant character it's supposed to be playing really is dumb, human triumph follows. It's not _crazier_ than Roko's Basilisk.

prmoustache• 6 months ago

AI is a statistical inference engine. All it can do is predict what word will come next based on all the words that have been typed in the past.

Ironically, that is also how humans "think" 99.9% of the time.

Sharlin• 6 months ago

I think you’ll find the essay much more nuanced than that. It only incidentally discusses what you’re thinking about.

Think of AI software generation: there are plenty of coders who love using AI. Using AI for simple tasks can genuinely make them more efficient and give them more time to do the fun part of coding, namely, solving really gnarly, abstract puzzles. But when you listen to business leaders talk about their AI plans for coders, it’s clear they are not hoping to make some centaurs.

whimsicalism12• 6 months ago

I disagree. The article leads with the sentiment that I mention and has it woven throughout. The theme is AI is obviously not capable of doing your job, the problem is that the stupid managerial class will get convinced it is and make things shitty.

This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can’t do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job.
Now, AI is a statistical inference engine. All it can do is predict what word will come next based on all the words that have been typed in the past. That means that it will “hallucinate” a library called lib.pdf.text.parsing,

I think it is a convenient, palatable, and obviously comforting lie that lots of people right now are telling themselves.

To me, all the ‘nuance’ in this article is just because the coyote in Doctorow has begun looking down but still cannot quite believe it. He is still leaning on the same tropes of statistical autocomplete that have been a mainstay of the fingers-in-ears gang for the last 3 years.

kalkin5• 6 months ago

The article does a pretty lazy* job of defending its assumption that "solving really gnarly, abstract puzzles" is going to remain beyond AI capabilities indefinitely, but that is a load-bearing part of the argument and Doctorow does try to substantiate it by dismissing LLMs as next-word predictors. This is a description which is roughly accurate at some level of reduction but has not helped anyone predict the last three years of advances and so seems pretty unlikely to be a helpful guide to the next three years.

The other argument Doctorow gives for the limits of LLMs is the example of typo-squatting. This isn't an attack that's new to LLMs and, while I don't know if anyone has done a study, I suspect it's already the case in January 2026 that a frontier model is no more susceptible to this than the median human, or perhaps less; certainly in general Claude is less likely to make a typo than I am. There are categories of mistakes it's still more likely to make than me, but the example here is already looking out of date, which isn't promising for the wider argument.

*to be fair, it's clearly not aimed at a technical audience.

meroes• 6 months ago

What masterful framing AI leaders developed that people say, “AI is doing my work”.

Did other technologies get phrased this way? The accounting software is doing my work? The locomotive is doing my work?

whimsicalism12• 6 months ago

yeah it’s all branding. there is totally nothing different about this technology that might cause someone to say that…

e:tone

TiredOfLife• 6 months ago

The accounting software is doing my work?

That is literally what accounting software did. It made the work of 10 people into work of 3 people with software

ninkendo2• 6 months ago

It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work.

Agreed.

Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.

Eh… some people maybe. But history shows nearly every time a tool makes people more efficient, we get more jobs, not less. Jevon’s paradox and all that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

sodapopcan6• 6 months ago

But history shows nearly every time a tool makes people more efficient, we get more jobs, not less.

I hope so, but you have any ideas what they could be? This time feels different, especially because all the ultra-pro-AI people keep saying that "this time it's different" from a technological revolution. This is aiming to replaces people across many industries whereas historically it has been in smaller increments as new inventions are (more slowly) rolled out.

pixl973• 6 months ago

Right, cars lead to more horses... except it didn't.

DetectDefect3• 6 months ago

It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work.

Is this really something you want to have proudly said? Because it makes it sound like your "work" is not very important.

whimsicalism12• 6 months ago

My work involves reading papers, doing high level math, coding it, reasoning about the business environment, etc. etc. My work is important and I find the classic HN impulse to stigmatize people for saying this to be silly.

It is you who is the fool if you haven’t managed to use these things to massively accelerate what you can do and if you cannot see the clear trend. Again, it has been three years since chatgpt came out.

an0malous• 6 months ago

What is your day to day work?

widowlark2• 6 months ago

Nothing AI can do replaces the important part of my work.

widowlark2• 6 months ago

If your job can be done with AI, why should your employer still pay you? Let us know what the title is so we can work to outmode your career

eudamoniac• 6 months ago

I mostly do normal React crap, ostensibly the easiest thing for these tools to do, and these tools cannot do a considerable portion of my work. Yes I've used the latest model. Yes I've used the latest agentic IDE. Yes I've tweaked my prompts and added repository rule files. Yes I've done this approximately every three months for the last two years. This shit does not work. Nobody ever posts proof of it working well in any <great project>.

I am at the point where if I read something from a software developer like, "these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work", I have to just assume that person's day to day work was garbage. And this is not terribly surprising, because a lot of software developers I have personally worked with did produce mostly garbage. Some amount of those people are surely using AI and posting about it, and that explains what we continually see online. Sorry to any offended.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 6 months ago

"It's funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves."

Funnily enough, there was a story today in the WSJ about "a parallel world some portion of people have constructed for themselves"

Why the Tech World Thinks the American Dream Is Dying

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/why-the-tech-world-thinks-the-am...

baron8162• 6 months ago

Start with monopolies: tech companies are gigantic and they don’t compete, they just take over whole sectors, either on their own or in cartels.
Google and Meta control the ad market. Google and Apple control the mobile market,

“Tech companies are monopolies”, proceeds to describe how tech companies compete with each other.

hippo22• 6 months ago

A market with only two players isn't much of a market.

NitpickLawyer2• 6 months ago

TBF on the LLM side we currently have 4 big players, and a bunch of smaller ones. Plus a healthy bunch of open models, lagging ~1y behind SotA. The best thing for us consumers is that it stays this way. Any of them winning would be bad in general.

ares6232• 6 months ago

Or nowadays, any number of players.

Now that market data is made available by brokers and decisions can be colluded based on such data.

hamdingers2• 6 months ago

or in cartels

ahachete2• 6 months ago

There's a fundamental disconnect: OP refers to senior engineers being replaced with AI, whereas the evidence and logical reasoning points much more to junior engineers being replaced by AI. And that premise seems like a quite plausible one...

NitpickLawyer2• 6 months ago

I think the junior thing started ~24, early ~25. Because back then the level of the current models was at or above that level, with somewhat flaky reliability. In the past year that's changed. We are now at "mostly reliable" in any junior-level stuff, and "surprisingly capable, maybe still needs some hand-holding" at advanced / senior-level stuff. And somewhat super-human if the problem is easily verifiable in a feedback loop (see the atcoder stuff).

ahachete2• 6 months ago

Not my experience.

It's junior level coding and maybe senior level advising, but even then only when clearly directed with the right questions and guardrails.

As an autonomous thing? Junior at best.

That's why I think it's extremely helpful for seniors: with proper guidance, it really boosts your productivity, writing notable parts of the code.

johnnyanmac9• 6 months ago

OP refers to senior engineers being replaced with AI, whereas the evidence and logical reasoning points much more to junior engineers being replaced by AI.

If industry cared about future seniors, they'd invest in juniors. But that's not what's happening. AI will effectively replace seniors in 20 years with the current trajectory. Whether or not that replacement is adequate or not is the bigger question.

baron8162• 6 months ago

It’s so strange to see people accusing tech companies of using AI to concentrate power and wealth when thus far, AI has almost entirely been all consumer surplus. You have crazily high competition in the industry that allows you the consumer to use SOTA models for free, or even run them yourself.

My prediction is that this will keep going all the way to the AGI stage. Someone will release (or leak) an AGI capable model that’s able to design AI chips, as well as the Fabs needed to build them, as well as robots to build and operate the Fabs and robot factories and raw material mines and refineries.

Eggpants• 6 months ago

OpenAI and Microsoft have defined AGI as a revenue number so yeah maybe using that definition.

I believe AGI will require the ability to self tune its own Neutral network coefficients which the current tech cannot do because I can’t deduce it’s own errors. Oh sorry “hallucinations”. Developing brains learn from both pain and verbal feedback (no, not food!) etc.

It’s an interesting problem where just telling a LLM model it’s wrong is not enough to adjust Billions of parameters with.

johnnyanmac9• 6 months ago

when thus far, AI has almost entirely been all consumer surplus.

Tell that to the 2025 job numbers. Who do you think benefits from a millipn+ layoffs? The consumers? The new grads who can't even get their career started?

pessimizer• 6 months ago

They're so obviously going to fail, but in a good way. The idea is that they were going to get the world addicted then raise the prices, but the reality is that there's going to be a race for the bottom in pricing because none of them are significantly better than the others. They don't own anything, it's just math; they can be undercut by an OSS bomb from China at any given moment.

Even worse, they've bet against the math not advancing. If it gets significantly more power-efficient, which literally could happen tomorrow if the right paper goes up on arxiv, maybe a 10 year old laptop could give "good enough" results. All those data centers are now trash and your companies are now worth a negative trillion dollars.

I think all of these factors are completely independent of whether AI works or not, or how well it works. Personally, I don't care if it replaces programmers: get another job. I just have experienced it, and it is at this point mediocre.

Of course I am not using the bleeding edge, and I am not privy to the top secret insider stuff which may well be orders of magnitude better. But if they've got it, why would they keep it a secret when people are desperate to give them money? If they're hiding it, it's something that they know that somebody could analyze and knock off, and then it's a race for the bottom again.

In a race for the bottom, we all win. Except the people and economies who bet their lives on it being a race to the top.

johnnyanmac9• 6 months ago

Personally, I don't care if it replaces programmers: get another job.

In this economy? Restarting in a world that doesn't want to train is expensive at best and suicide at worst.

stephc_int13• 6 months ago

How ironic would it be if the AI productivity miracle ends up being negative growth because of the cost of cleaning up of slop?

takeda• 6 months ago

Honestly I think it already is.

A lot of people who talk about massive gains seem to forget about code review.

Then in a company someone who has to review is is f*cked because that code is much more complex and takes much longer to review.

winstonwinston• 6 months ago

The race to the bottom of software quality accelerates using AI to generate software. Based on my experience using Claude for software development.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 6 months ago

"I'm a science-fiction writer - my job is to think of a dozen alternatives before breakfast."

The author should have a team of programmers trying to implement some of these alternatives

I'm confident "new method of collecting data, performing surveillance and providing ad services" would not be one of them

Programmers are generally not good sources of novel ideas

They tend to focus on copying ("implementing") the ideas of others

Today's "AI", designed by programmers, IMO (other opinions may differ), is an automated form of copying

daxfohl• 6 months ago

The whole AGI industry is like one of those projects that claims "90% finished" from the time of the first demo, then for the next N years, all the way up until the project is eventually canceled.

Yeah we can spew out millions of lines of unmaintainable slop code! Now we can even write a slop unusable browser!

All this shit looks like progress, but it's all really a cover for lack of progress. And now we've got the entire economy as a bet on it.

None of this is to say there's nothing useful coming out of the industry. I use it productively for a ton of things. But, the reverse centaur thing is a great analogy. The money getting ploughed into it is assuming reverse centaur will be the final outcome, not a set of useful productivity tools. Once investors start to realize that all we're going to get out of it is the latter, we'll be in for a world of hurt.

Granted, one nice thing about the AI wave is that I bet it'll be able to keep slinging new and idiotic slop for decades that'll keep successfully unburdening investors from their money, because, "hey look, it's 90% finished!" Who knows, maybe that's the point.

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

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