AI isn't Dangerous. America Is. | Cory Doctorow interview

A 52-minute interview on PoliticsJOE about The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, which Doctorow says he wrote so he could stop talking about AI. His argument is that the danger lies not in the technology but in who deploys it and how, and that the sovereignty risk Britain should worry about is not AI at all but American control of everyday software.

He opens with criti-hype, Lee Vinsel’s term for criticism that repeats the vendors’ biggest claims and adds “and that’s bad”. AI won’t take your job, he says; your boss will give it to an AI that can’t do it, because the chatbot never says no. Used as a normal tool that workers choose, it is fine: he runs a small open model on his own laptop to catch typos. The pitch that sells is the reverse centaur. Adding AI to a hospital’s ten radiologists would cost more and catch more cancers, and nobody buys that. The pitch is to fire nine and keep one as what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink”, checking the machine’s work too fast to stay alert for rare errors, and blamed when one kills someone.

Sovereignty is the part he most wants to talk about. The US, he says, has already shown it will switch services off: Microsoft cutting off the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, and John Deere remotely disabling tractors Russian troops looted in Ukraine. Turn off Office 365 and every ministry stops. Dollar clearing and undersea cables are hard to replace, but software is not. Repeal the anti-circumvention rule (Article 6 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, which Britain no longer has to keep), allow reverse engineering and interoperable alternatives, and build a “post-American internet”. He credits “Comrade Trump” with making that case better than he ever did.

Along the way: AI as the biggest money-loser ever, worse per user than Uber was, like running Concorde between London and Manchester for 10p instead of building HS2; open-weight models doing ordinary tasks as the sane alternative; AI’s real talent for surveillance pricing and wage discrimination, with gig nurses offered less the more credit-card debt they carry; and US privacy law stuck in 1988, when Robert Bork’s leaked video rentals produced a law protecting video records.

Several of his examples need correcting. The ICC story is disputed: AP reported in May 2025 that the prosecutor lost his Microsoft email after US sanctions, and Microsoft denies it ever cut off the court. The warrant against Netanyahu was for war crimes and crimes against humanity, not genocide. The Deere equipment was worth about $5 million, not six. The nurse-pay claim rests on a Roosevelt Institute report that says the apps “may” use debt data, which is not a documented finding. The video-rental law was not the last federal consumer privacy law: HIPAA, COPPA and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act all came later. And in his story of Congress protecting only itself from data brokers, Ron Wyden was the senator trying to extend the protection to everyone, and Ted Cruz blocked it. His currency arithmetic also slips: the number of pairs among 200 currencies, about 20,000, grows with the square, as he says, but his “two to the five” example is exponential.