AI Hype and the Truth

After watching Cory Doctorow’s commentary on Al Jazeera English about the AI “hype machine,” I found myself both nodding along and feeling uneasy about how accurately he describes the current tech landscape. His argument isn’t that AI has no value, but that the way it’s being sold to us—by corporations, investors, and tech bosses—is deeply misleading and potentially dangerous.

What struck me most was his idea that companies aren’t excited about AI because it will make life more creative or meaningful, but because they see it as a way to “zero out” labor costs. That framing cuts through a lot of the glossy marketing we see every day. We’re told AI will boost productivity and unlock innovation, but Doctorow suggests the real motivation is power: replacing workers, weakening labor, and increasing control. The “boss fantasy” he describes—a workplace with no workers, just one boss and a machine—feels uncomfortably believable.

I also appreciated his comparison between the AI boom and past tech bubbles like crypto, NFTs, and Web3. The pattern is familiar: promise an enormous, vaguely defined future market, inflate expectations, attract investment, and move on to the next hype cycle when reality fails to deliver. His warning that we might fire skilled people, replace them with bad chatbots, and then lose critical institutional knowledge when the bubble bursts feels less like speculation and more like a preview of what’s already happening.

The metaphor of AI as “asbestos in the walls” stayed with me. It suggests that the real damage may not be immediate, but long-term and structural. Overall, the video didn’t make me anti-technology—but it did make me far more skeptical of the narratives pushed by big tech, and more convinced that we need to question who truly benefits from the AI revolution.