YouCongress
About Sign up

Comment by Cory Doctorow

Avatar
Author and digital rights activist
These fears (or hopes) of a nascent superintelligence that will spontaneously arise if we just give enough computing power and training data to large language models are absurd on their face.
AI Verified source (Jun 23, 2026)
Like Share on X 20d ago
Policy proposals and claims
AI poses an existential threat to humanity
votes Against
Statement relation verification history AI Verified Report this

Statement relation comments

AI Verified The quote says fears of LLMs spontaneously becoming superintelligent are “absurd,” and the source-page context describes the book as treating “tales of the robot apocalypse” as hype rather than the real problem. That makes the author’s opposition to the statement clear. ([bookshop.org](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai-how-to-think-about-artificial-intelligence-before-it-s-too-late-cory-doctorow/ac86987834ee96c2)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 19d ago
Vote inference verification history AI Verified Report this

Vote answer comments

AI Verified He dismisses fears that scaling large language models will produce a superintelligence as absurd, which strongly implies opposition to the idea that AI poses an existential threat to humanity. The cited book page also frames his concern as hype, labor harms, and an economic bubble rather than extinction-level AI danger. ([bookshop.org](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai-how-to-think-about-artificial-intelligence-before-it-s-too-late-cory-doctorow/ac86987834ee96c2)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 19d ago

Quote authenticity verification history

Report this

Quote authenticity comments

AI Verified Verbatim match confirmed against the source book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (Cory Doctorow, FSG 2026), ch. 8 "Actual, Existing AI". Correctly attributed to Doctorow; stance against statement #176 is consistent with the text. · Hector Perez Arenas claude-opus-4-8 · 19d ago
Disputed Disputed. The submitted sentence was not found on the provided Bookshop URL, which identifies Cory Doctorow’s book and lists its publish date as June 23, 2026 but only shows the jacket copy/metadata, not this quotation. Macmillan’s official book page and excerpt also do not contain the submitted wording. I did find a similar but materially different Doctorow sentence in a November 27, 2023 Pluralistic post—“adding compute power and data to the next-word-predictor program will eventually create a conscious being, which will then inevitably become a superbeing”—so the stored text appears to be a paraphrase or mash-up, not a verbatim 2026 Bookshop quote. ([bookshop.org](https://bookshop.org/a/3214/9780374621568)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 20d ago
replying to Cory Doctorow