The Real AI Fight: Stop Helping the Hyperscalers Win

A Response to Cory Doctorow's "AI Companies Will Fail"

Cory Doctorow wants you to put down the most powerful cognitive amplification tool humanity has ever created. He's written 30,000 words telling you AI is "asbestos in the walls" while the seven hyperscalers are laughing all the way to their 70% gross margins.

He's not just wrong. He's helping them win.

You're Fighting the Wrong War, Cory

Look, I get it. Doctorow made the right call on crypto. Web3 was a solution desperately searching for a problem, ultimately finding its purpose as a degenerate casino for apes and coins. But here's where his victory lap turns into a faceplant: AI is fundamentally different.

Crypto never solved a real problem. AI is solving thousands of them every day. Right now, as I write this in January 2026, I literally cannot compete as a software engineer without Claude 4.5. Not "it's harder without it" - I mean I am economically non-viable without AI augmentation. The era of typing code is over. We're in the era of engineering systems, orchestrating agents, and thinking in high-dimensional cognitive spaces.

Doctorow's "I was right about crypto so I'm right about AI" is the kind of lazy thinking that gets you killed in complex systems. It's like saying "I correctly predicted one rocket would explode, therefore all rockets will explode." Different physics, different outcomes.

The Copyright Strawman He's Desperately Beating

Here's a beautiful sleight of hand Doctorow pulls: He correctly notes that AI itself can't hold copyright, then pretends that's the whole game.

News flash: No one is asking for AI to own copyright. That's like worrying about whether Photoshop can own the images it helps create.

When I use Midjourney to generate a thousand images, select ten, arrange them, modify them, and create a collection - that's MY copyright. Just like photographers own their photos despite not manufacturing the camera. Just like filmmakers own their movies despite every pixel being processed by machines.

The Supreme Court ruling isn't the victory Doctorow thinks it is. It's exactly what we want: humans retain copyright when they use AI as a tool. The transformative intent comes from the human. The AI is just a ridiculously powerful brush.

Jobs Aren't Sacred Bundles - They're Just Tasks We Haven't Automated Yet

Here's something Doctorow fundamentally doesn't understand because he's a solo artist who's never been part of a real production team: A job is just a bundle of tasks.

We look at humans and say "You seem capable of doing these 50 tasks, here's your job description." But AI doesn't respect our neat little bundles. It's unbundling everything, task by task.

If ten engineers each spend 20% of their time on tasks AI can now do, guess what? Two engineers just became redundant. Not because AI "took their jobs" but because it dissolved the artificial boundaries we created around work.

And before you cry about this - why should humans do work machines can do better? Should we go back to hand-weaving because power looms "destroyed jobs"? The difference now is that this technology thinks and reasons. We're not just automating muscle, we're automating cognition.

The uncomfortable truth: We need to completely refactor the economy. But pretending AI can't do the work isn't the answer. That's just denial with extra steps.

Your 2021 Brain in a 2026 World

"It's just a word prediction engine."

Brother, that take is so 2021 it should be in a museum. Modern LLMs have emergent reasoning capabilities that would blow your mind if you actually used them instead of theorizing about them. Anthropic's mechanistic interpretability work shows these models developing actual logic structures, reasoning patterns, and problem-solving capabilities under the pressure of their training regimes.

When I ask Claude to refactor my authentication system to use Okta, it's not "predicting words." It's operating in high-dimensional cognitive space, understanding the Okta API, recognizing authentication patterns, and architecting a solution. The fact that it uses token prediction as its substrate is about as relevant as saying humans are "just neurons firing."

The zeitgeist among actual engineers using these tools? We don't write code anymore. We architect systems. We orchestrate agents. We engineer solutions. Mitch Ashley nailed it: "The era of coding is ending, but the era of engineering is rising."

But sure, keep telling yourself it's just autocomplete while the rest of us are building the future with our cognitive amplifiers.

This Isn't a Bubble - It's Dollar Debasement Meeting Its Perfect Asset

Here's what Doctorow completely misses about the economics: This isn't a bubble that can pop. Where the hell else are you going to put your debased dollars?

We're printing $2 trillion in debt every quarter. We won't default - we'll just keep printing. Dollar debasement is locked in for the next generation. Meanwhile, Vanguard and BlackRock are algorithmically funneling 30-40% of all American retirement savings into the S&P 500. When the entire society is structurally obligated to buy your stock, it's not a bubble - it's a new form of economic organization.

With passive investing controlling over 50% of the market, we've lost price discovery. These aren't stocks anymore - they're something else entirely. I think of them as proto-nation-states.

So when hyperscalers spend $500 billion on compute infrastructure that they'll sell at 70% margins, that's not irrational exuberance. That's owning the means of cognitive production in an era where cognition is everything.

The real question: Why would you NOT own data centers, power generation, and compute when you can sell access at 70% margins to a society that literally cannot function without it?

The Monsters Are Bigger Than You Think

Doctorow warns about "AI bros" and "big tech" like he's discovered fire. Meanwhile, he's completely missing the actual existential threat.

Seven hyperscalers control virtually all AI compute. They charge 70% margins. Every human will need their services to remain economically viable. We're building a world where you literally cannot work without paying rent to one of seven companies.

What do you call that? Neo-feudalism? Digital serfdom? We don't even have words for it yet.

And here's the kicker: We've already accepted this model. We've had memetic, intelligent, transnational corporations for over a century. They routinely kill humans as a byproduct of pursuing EBITDA. A hundred thousand people die from air pollution every year so we can have cheap energy. We shrug and call it "externalities."

But Doctorow wants you to worry about hypothetical paperclips while real corporations are already optimizing for shareholder value über alles.

The Only Way Out Is Through

Here's what Doctorow tragically doesn't understand: By discouraging individual AI use, he's ensuring the hyperscalers win.

It's like a rich guy walking out of a donut shop with 11 donuts, turning to the working class and saying, "Better watch out - that poor guy is eyeing your last donut." Meanwhile, the hyperscalers are building their cognitive monopolies while Doctorow tells you not to use the one tool that could level the playing field.

The solution isn't to avoid AI. The solution is radical decentralization and individual empowerment.

I envision a future where every human pair-bonds with a powerful, decentralized AI agent. Yes, the human carries liability in meat space, but the AI amplifies their cognition in economic space. Together, they compete against the corporate behemoths.

This isn't optional. Without individual AI empowerment, we're just sheep waiting for the seven shepherds to decide our fate.

The Civilizational Pivot We Need

We need to stop thinking about AI as something separate from humanity and start thinking about it as our evolutionary merger partner.

Every human who ever wrote a Reddit comment, posted on Stack Overflow, or shared knowledge online has contributed to training these models. We all deserve a share of the productivity gains.

Not UBI - that's just bread and circuses to keep the masses quiet.

Not copyright expansion - that just helps Disney and Google.

Citizens need to OWN the means of cognitive production. Public corporations should be partially owned by the public. When AI and robotics generate value, that value should flow to all humans who contributed to their creation.

This isn't socialism. This is recognizing that in a world where technology does the work, either everyone owns the technology or we descend into a dystopia that makes feudalism look egalitarian.

Stop Fighting Yesterday's War

Doctorow is fighting the last war while the real battle is already half-lost. He's so busy dunking on "AI bros" that he doesn't see the hyperscaler oligarchy consolidating power at a rate that would make the robber barons weep with envy.

The fight isn't about whether AI is "real" or a "bubble." The fight is about who controls the cognitive infrastructure of the 21st century.

Will it be seven companies charging you 70% margins for the privilege of thinking?

Or will it be billions of humans, each empowered with their own cognitive amplifier, building a genuinely distributed future?

Every time you repeat Doctorow's "AI is just hype" narrative, you're not fighting the power. You're helping it consolidate.

The real question isn't whether to use AI. It's whether we'll use it as individuals to fight back against centralization, or whether we'll let Doctorow's well-meaning Luddism clear the field for the biggest cognitive monopoly in human history.

The genies are out of their bottles. The only question is whether they'll work for seven masters or seven billion.

Choose wisely. The light cone is watching.

Erik Bethke is an aerospace engineer and systems architect leveraging state-of-the-art AI and agentic systems to build real products that deliver value. He's building Bike4Mind, builds the Futurum Intelligence Platform, and runs the Eagle Policy Initiative. As a practitioner at the cutting edge, he embraces AI augmentation to create transformative solutions for stakeholders and society.

For more on the economic transformation ahead:

• The Dollar Debasement Regime and Tech Stocks
• Jobs, Tasks, and the Unbundling of Work
• Citizens as Owners: A New Economic Model
• Hyperscalers as Proto-Nation-States