Are We Done?

I am so onboard with almost all of Cory Doctorow's analyses. This recent post of his touches on so many relevant points.

Last night I talked to a guy who was a huge AI cheerleader. I would rate him an intellectual lightweight - exactly the type that likes "AI". They can generate bullshit that makes them sound like a heavyweight!

Doctorow gives me moral support in opposing the Bullshit Apocalypse. Hmmm, I hadn't heard that Leon Skunk was proposing a Dyson sphere around our sun for the express purpose of powering "AI". Barf.

AGI isn't enough for the hardcore techbros, they want ASI - Artificial Super-Intelligence. The title of this post echoes Doctorow's question: when do you determine that you have wasted enough resources & energy on an unattainable goal?

I'm including a pretty big chunk here, it does not do justice to Doctorow's analysis. Go read it, please.

A Pascal's Wager for AI Doomers

Now, as I've stated (and as I said onstage) I am not worried about any of this. I am worried about AI, though. I'm worried a fast-talking AI salesman will convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job (the salesman will be pushing on an open door, since if there's one thing bosses hate, it's paying workers).

I'm worried that the seven companies that comprise 35% of the S&P 500 are headed for bankruptcy, as soon as someone makes them stop passing around the same $100b IOU while pretending it's in all their bank accounts at once. I'm worried that when that happens, the chatbots that badly do the jobs of the people who were fired because of the AI salesman will go away, and nothing and no one will do those jobs. I'm worried that the chaos caused by vaporizing a third of the stock market will lead to austerity and thence to fascism:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/13/always-great/#our-nhs

I worry that the workers who did those jobs will be scattered to the four winds, retrained or "discouraged" or retired, and that the priceless process knowledge they developed over generations will be wiped out and we will have to rebuild it amidst the economic and political chaos of the burst AI bubble:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/08/process-knowledge-vs-bosses/#wash-dishes-cut-wood

In short, I worry that AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into our civilization's walls, and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes

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From NYT News Service/Syndicate Stories, via the Lexington Herald-Leader:

How Accurate are Google's AI Overviews?

A recent analysis of AI Overviews found that they were accurate approximately 9 out of 10 times.

I don't think we can live with a 9% error rate. & I don't think that "autocomplete on steroids" is ever going to improve on that much.

Google search is now basically a front-end for Google's LLM, Gemini. All your queries are belong to us, to train our AI! I'm so glad I've switched to DuckDuckGo & Kagi!

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From the people formerly known as AI Snake Oil, a framework for evaluating AIs. It includes a review of current capabilities, a very mixed report.

Open-world evaluations for measuring frontier AI capabilities

Introducing CRUX, a new project for evaluating AI on long, messy tasks

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #117.