Pluralistic: Born on technology's third base (21 Aug 2026)

Blog · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-08-29)

• Cory Doctorow argues that individual and technological successes, particularly the current AI boom, are often misattributed to inherent genius or merit, but are profoundly shaped by “world-historic forces” and “accidents of history”—likening it to being “born on third base.”
• He illustrates this with his own career, benefiting from being born in 1971 into a tech-literate family during a time of cheap education and easy entry into the tech industry. He also highlights how the shift from Moore’s Law-driven serial computing to parallel computing created new “adjacent possibles” (Kevin Kelly’s concept) that fueled fields like graphics, VR/AR, and AI.
• The current AI boom relies heavily on “theory-free inference,” which uses massive datasets and parallel computing to find correlations without building causal models. While effective for some tasks, this approach “fails badly” when encountering unexpected or unprecedented situations due to its lack of true understanding (e.g., an LLM can recite chess rules but cannot play chess effectively).
• Doctorow warns that the AI sector’s continued investment in theory-free inference at scale, despite its limitations, is creating a bubble. He suggests that doubling down on this approach for problems it’s ill-suited for is wasteful and unreliable, akin to trying to solve today’s housing crisis by replicating post-war suburban development.