# AI solipsists and AI cynics > [!quote] > "You don't have to believe that AI 'works' to believe that it's a good investment." Cory Doctorow separates the technology question from the capital question and argues only the second one explains what's happening. ## Author's thesis As a *technology* AI is unexceptional — strip away the stock swindle and we'd call these applications "plug-ins." As an *economic pathology* it is extraordinary, because >$1.4T has been spent on the promise of unemploying workers with tools that can't do the work. The bubble, not the capability, is the single most salient fact. ## Key arguments 1. **Two distinct investor psychologies.** *Solipsists* — billionaires for whom other people aren't fully real, so replacing them with chatbots costs nothing morally. *Cynics* — investors who don't believe in AI but believe **other people** will, a Keynesian beauty contest. You don't need to be a solipsist to bet on AI; it's sufficient to believe that **bosses** are solipsists. 2. **The bet is on managers, not models.** The operative question isn't "can AI do your job?" but "can an AI salesman convince your boss that it can?" Bosses are structurally receptive because AI promises to remove the workers who tell them their plans are illegal, stupid, or dangerous. 3. **Premature automation destroys process knowledge.** When the bubble pops, the defective chatbots go with it, leaving the work undone and the people who understood it retrained, retired, or gone. "AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our civilization." 4. **Downstream harms trace to bubble scale, not to the tech.** Scraping epidemics, AI crammed into every product, eminent-domain data centers, and — when 7 AI firms are 35% of the S&P 500 — an austerity response that Doctorow calls fascism's best recruiting tool. ## Caveats The incentive model is strong; the empirical scaffolding is reported journalism, not a study. Sweeping claims about billionaires and bosses attribute motive at a scale the evidence can't cover for any individual case, and the analogies (supplements, yoni eggs) sharpen rhetoric rather than establish anything. Tone is combative and self-consciously so. ## Links - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/A Cynical AI Bet Only Needs Bosses to Believe]] — the claim this note promotes - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Bubbles End From Cost Not From Lost Belief]] — the mechanism this note is missing: Doctorow explains why the money went in, that note explains what will make it stop - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Value-Per-Human Is the Real Mechanism Behind Replacing Employees With AI]] — the manager-side arithmetic that makes the cynic's bet pay off - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/The Reverse Centaur Pattern - Humans Forced to Work Like Machines]] — Doctorow's own prior frame; the reverse centaur is what survives the layoffs in this essay - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/AI-Driven Reset Is the Acceptable Public Frame for Margin-Driven Layoffs]] — evidence-for: if the bet is that bosses will fire regardless of capability, "AI did it" is the cover story that makes it sayable - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Vernacular Software Survives the Bubble Because It Is Unmonetizable by Design]] — what's left standing afterward; the asbestos metaphor is the cleanup bill this note doesn't price - [[3. Resources/Literature Notes/Lit · Why hasn't AI increased unemployment]] — direct counterweight from the same day: McCrory finds no displacement in the data Doctorow assumes is already arriving - [[3. Resources/MOCs/AI & the Future of Knowledge Work MOC]] — applies-in: the MOC lists this note under Labor market & economics. ## Source - [Reader: Pluralistic — AI solipsists and AI cynics (24 Jul 2026)](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kya5apvj3qv3vf9tyyj4ejq9) — originally [pluralistic.net](https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/24/supplemental-income/)