Tim O’Reilly and Cory Doctorow on “Enshittification” and the Future of AI: How Do We Avoid the Race to the Bottom with AI?

Join Cory Doctorow and Tim O’Reilly for a discussion about “enshittification” and the future of AI. Cory’s notion of enshittification describes how online platforms win over millions of users by providing great service and delighting their users, but once they’ve established their position, they begin to prey on the new market they created. First they come for their suppliers and advertisers, but eventually they make services worse and worse for their users in order to extract more profit. Tim O'Reilly has developed very similar ideas using the theory of economic rents. He notes that search engines, ecommerce sites, and social media are all “algorithmic attention allocation engines” and has documented how they can extract rents by tuning their algorithms and designs for their profit rather than user or supplier benefit.

Both Cory and Tim worry that this same pattern will repeat itself for AI. Right now AI companies are in the virtuous phase of surprising and delighting their users. Will this continue once they’ve fully established themselves? We need to think about how enshittification will play out in new kinds of products we’ll be building, realizing that AI is inevitably a tool that will be incorporated into everything: our cars, our calendars, our news, our VR goggles, and many products we haven’t envisioned yet.

Is it possible to use open source AI to build products that aren’t manipulated by the established monopolies? Can AI be used to “move value to the edges of the network,” as Cory writes? Can transparency and disclosure about how AI is used—not just that it is used—alert users, investors, and regulators to enshittification before it’s too late? And what kinds of transparency would inform users and encourage them to respond effectively?

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

• Learn about the enshittification framework and why it matters
• Understand the role of disclosures and transparency in making an industry more competitive and holding it to account
• Discover how to establish good operating metrics for AI

This live course is for you because…

• You want the chance to hear from Tim O’Reilly and Cory Doctorow about the state and future of AI.
• You want the latest information on developments and breakthroughs in the field of AI.

Prerequisites

• Optional: Prepare for the discussion by reading Cory’s essays “The Enshittification of TikTok” and “‘Enshittification’ Is Coming for Absolutely Everything,” and Tim’s research papers on algorithmic attention rents.

Recommended follow-up:

• Read Technology Trends for 2024 (report)
• Follow Generative AI for All (expert playlist)
• Watch ChatGPT: Possibilities and Pitfalls (video)