It’s incredibly obvious from the first part of the article that Doctorow is using the strongest rhetorical techniques they can, regardless of the technical merit of the resulting arguments. This makes it dogmatic, yes. That’s just kind of how Doctorow is, and always has been. I don’t much care for that method of communication because it is so often used to mislead people with oversimplified emotional language and convince them without being logically sound.
It wouldn’t be as bad if Doctorow’s understanding of the subject matter was at least accurate, but their conclusion is irrelevant if their understanding is unsound. Their main mistake is saying it is essentially doing database lookups while ommitting the entire effect that enables it to appear intelligent, that being compression of the input data into a semantic representation. Anyone familiar with the Compression is Intelligence paper and related work would know that ommitting that step is presenting a narrative so inaccurate that it is not only misleading but actually false. This leads me to conclude that Doctorow either does not understand how AI works, or does understand it but is willing to lie to their audience. Either is unacceptable and renders the conclusion of their argument worthless. Again, if they do more than “demystify” AI by incorrectly explaining how it works then let me know and I will read the rest of the article.
Edit: To be clear, an article actually demystifying AI would be a good thing. My point is that it is a bad idea to overcorrect for the ai bro hype bubble by explaining it just as badly in the other direction.