AI and a world without migrants - Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

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Podcast Summary
Podcast: Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Episode: AI and a World Without Migrants
Host: Cory Doctorow
Date: May 31, 2026

Episode Overview

In this episode, Cory Doctorow explores the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and global migration, reflecting on how technological advancements fuel fantasies of a world unimpeded by human needs, complexities, and cooperation. Doctorow reads from his recent column, “AI and a World Without Migrants,” delving into the ideological and material underpinnings of efforts to substitute human relationships and labor with AI. The analysis connects economic, social, and political dimensions—especially the repercussions for the global workforce and the xenophobic drive to imagine productivity without migration.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

Cory’s Tour and Recent Works ([00:11]-[03:00])

Shares updates on an extensive speaking tour spanning the US, UK, and Canada.
Promotes his latest book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, aiming to help readers become more incisive critics of AI.
Mentions an active Kickstarter campaign for upcoming books and audiobooks.

Understanding the Human Condition vs. The Temptation to Automate ([03:00]-[05:00])

Cory introduces the perennial friction of “hell is other people”—not due to misanthropy, but because other people have independent priorities:

“There will always be times when hell is other people, not because other people are horrible. Quite the opposite. Other people are wonderful, but boy are they ever stubborn.” ([03:04])
Human society has evolved complex structures (laws, teams, committees) for coordination—a necessary response to our need for cooperation.
When persuasion fails, coercion is the alternative, but this is less effective and more contentious.

Toddler Mindset, Bullies, and Billionaires ([05:00]-[07:00])

Some refuse to acknowledge others' autonomy; as children, we grow out of it, but adults who retain it become “bullies”—or, if wealthy, “billionaires.”

“If they're sufficiently wealthy, we call them billionaires. This is the same force that allows money to transmute a hoarder into a collector.” ([06:10])

AI as a “Solution”: Democratizing Solipsism ([07:00]-[10:00])

Describes a societal shift: replacing real human relationships and creativity with customizable AI substitutes (chatbots, AI-created music).
AI offers “democratized solipsism”: a fantasy where only the AI-user is “real” and all others are non-player characters (NPCs).

“AI has democratized solipsism, a privilege that was once the exclusive purview of billionaires...” ([08:45])
Billionaires are especially seduced by AI’s promise: no more dealing with real, unpredictable people.

Automation, Exploitation, and AI’s Role in Labor ([10:00]-[15:00])

Examines Amazon’s hyper-automated warehouses: high worker injury rates, inhumane conditions stem directly from efforts to maximize mechanical efficiency and ROI.

“To maximize return on automation, you need to drive the human peripherals that serve the machines at the absolute limit of human endurance. Jeff Bezos’ machines don’t just use humans, they use them up.” ([11:50])
Automation as a tool to render workers expendable, with AI furthering the dream of labor without laborers.
Mark Zuckerberg’s purported goal: substitute real friends on platforms with chatbots, “reinventing social media without the socializing.”

“By replacing your friends with chatbots, Zuck hopes to reinvent social media without the socializing.” ([13:25])

The Bosses’ Dread and Worker Bargaining Power ([15:00]-[18:30])

Studio bosses, hospital administrators, college administrators—all face the same dilemma: skilled workers have bargaining power.
Hollywood strikes symbolize resistance to “movies without actors and screenplays without screenwriters.”
AI is pitched as a cure to bosses’ existential dread—that they are powerless without their employees.

AI in Governance and the Dream of Bureaucracy Without Bureaucrats ([18:30]-[21:00])

Dictators and technocrats are drawn to AI’s promise: enact policies without need for negotiation or the expertise and ethics of public servants.

AI as a Substitute for Migrants—The Core Fantasy ([21:00]-[24:00])

In aging rich countries, productivity hinges on young migrant labor—yet xenophobia blocks effective migration policy.
Politicians fantasize that AI can solve the “double bind”: sustain productivity without migrants, pleasing anti-migrant voters.

“AI serves the fantasy of a world without migrants. Unlike gastarbeiters, bracero fruit pickers, and Saudi quasi-slaves, AI makes no demands, requires no moral consideration, and does not attempt to germinate a culture, a cuisine, or a language…” ([22:40])
Even pop culture (Disney’s Big Hero 6) encodes the fantasy: build care systems for the elderly with robots, not people.

The Ultimate Fantasy: The “Unnecessariate” and the Altman Dystopia ([24:00]-[28:00])

Automation and AI further the shift from proletariat to “precariat”—and ultimately, to the “unnecessariate”: workers made redundant.
Sam Altman’s vision: biometrically-controlled universal basic income dispensed by the state for using AI-run services, with Altman atop the ecosystem.

“Altman can’t stop fantasizing about a world in which all the productive work is done by his software and the state’s sole purpose is to supply us the unnecessariate with vouchers we can only redeem for services provided by Altman’s robot army.” ([26:40])

Effective Altruism and the Denial of Others’ Reality ([28:00]-[30:00])

Billionaires love “effective altruism”—escaping moral responsibility for real harm by promising imagined future good for trillions of hypothetical digital people.

“It all makes perfect sense, provided you don’t believe that other people are really, truly real.” ([29:35])

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

“There’s so much important, enjoyable, and essential stuff you can’t do alone. But other people insist on having their own priorities and goals, and they mulishly refuse to organize their lives to suit your priorities.” ([03:30])
“We devote trillions of dollars to replacing people with pliant chatbots in the hopes that these chatbots can be made so effective that we can just dispense with other people altogether.” ([07:25])
“Billionaires pour trillions into AI because they are obsessed with the fantasy of a world without people.” ([08:56])
“Jeff Bezos’ machines don’t just use humans, they use them up.” ([11:55])
“Zuck hopes to reinvent social media without the socializing.” ([13:30])
“AI serves the fantasy of a world without migrants... AI makes no demands, requires no moral consideration, and does not attempt to germinate a culture, a cuisine, or a language in your sacred soil.” ([22:30])
“In the fantasy world of total automation, the owners of AI can make the world go round without any of us, which means we will exist solely at their sufferance and will therefore have to act like the NPCs they half believe we are already.” ([25:20])
“It all makes perfect sense, provided you don’t believe that other people are really, truly real.” ([29:30])

Important Timestamps

[00:11] Cory's travel updates, upcoming book events, Kickstarter update
[03:00] Opening the central theme: “hell is other people” and the necessity of social coordination
[07:00] The rise of solipsism via AI and billionaire fantasies
[11:50] The link between automation, inhumane working conditions, and maximizing ROI
[13:25] Zuckerberg’s goal: chatbot “friends” and non-social “social” platforms
[19:30] AI as a tool for autocrats and technocrats to bypass human checks
[21:30] AI as an answer to anti-migrant politics in aging countries
[24:30] The “unnecessariate,” or worker redundancy through AI
[26:40] Sam Altman’s universal basic income dystopia
[29:35] Effective altruism and the denial of others’ reality

Tone & Style

Doctorow maintains his signature wry, incisive, and analytical tone, pairing sharp socio-political critique with accessible metaphors and pop culture references. The episode’s language is direct, occasionally sardonic, and seeks to challenge the listener’s assumptions while breaking down complex trends into relatable narratives.

Conclusion

This episode presents a deeply critical and thought-provoking look at how the pursuit of automation and AI is not just technological or economic, but fundamentally ideological—rooted in fantasies of effortless control, solipsism, and ultimately a world where messy, inconvenient human beings (especially migrants) are rendered obsolete. Doctorow’s analysis is rich with quotable moments and urges listeners to reckon with the moral, social, and political implications of a future engineered for billionaires’ convenience and power.

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[00:12]
A
Good morning and welcome back to the Cory Doctorow Podcast. It's my last podcast from London for a month going back to Los Angeles, which is to say Los Angeles is the city I'm going to return to to change suitcases, because as you will shortly hear, I'm going to be in a lot of other places. I'm giving my last talk in London on June 2nd. That's this Tuesday at South by Southwest London. And then I will be in Kansas City on June 10th. And then I start the tour for the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life after AI. It starts in LA with an event with Brian Merchant at skylight books on the 19th, and then in Menlo park with Angie Coiro at kepler's books on June 21st. I'll be in Toronto for an event with Type Books at a venue to be determined on June 23rd. And I'll be in New York at the Strand with Jonathan Colton on June 24, in Philadelphia at the Filter Club on behalf of the Philadelphia Citizen, with David Williams on June 25 and with Rick Perlstein in Chicago at Exile in Bookville on June 26th. Back to the UK after that for an event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales on August 17th. And then they've just posted details for an event I'm doing at Notre Dame in south bend on October 6th. And there will be more between August and October, obviously, but those ones are not online. These guys are just eager beavers who got it online early. If you have been listening, you've heard about my Kickstarter. Last week's episode was just an excerpt from the audiobook for the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life after AI. There's just a few days left in that Kickstarter and you can go to pluralistic.net Kickstarter to pre order ebooks, audiobooks, to order ebooks and audiobooks of insidification and to get paperbacks of Reverse Centaur. Reverse Centaur is a paperback original, although I think the UK edition might be a hardcover. Not sure. Anyway, I've not seen the finished books yet. It's been a little weird. It's been a little loosey goosey. Publishers are not as diligent with getting me those books, but they look good online. I think they're going to be very beautiful books. The COVID art's really nice and so yeah, so that's my big news. I've got the Reverse Centaur coming out and today I'm going to read you a column about AI. So Reverse Centaur is a book about being a better AI critic and about understanding the material and ideological roots of AI and how they interact with each other, and how to criticize AI in a way that targets the bubble most efficiently, how to pop that bubble before it does too much damage. This week's reading comes from pluralistic.net it's something I wrote called AI in a world Without Migrants and those of you in the UK might be familiar with the new news outlet the Nerve, which was founded by Carol Cadwallader and friends when the observer was bought out. They have made me their technology columnist and they are taking one of my pluralistic posts every month and editing it lightly and putting it up there. And this is the one that they chose, so it'll be on the nerve this week as well. So without Further ado, from 27 May edition of pluralistic.net AI and a World Without Migrants. I don't care who you are, there will always be times when hell is other people, not because other people are horrible. Quite the opposite. Other people are wonderful, but boy are they ever stubborn. From board games to romance, team sports to movement politics, business ideas to construction projects, there's so much important, enjoyable and essential stuff you can't do alone. But other people insist on having their own priorities and goals, and they mulishly refuse to organize their lives to suit your priorities. Our species has put a lot of work into resolving this conundrum. Not only did we evolve a whole brain structure, the neocortex, that helps us understand others perspectives, but we also evolved many social structures like laws and teams and governments and families and committees and bureaucracies to help us coordinate with others to do superhuman things, that is things that exceed the capacity of a single human. These structures are imperfect, but they're better than the alternative coercion. Persuading others is not without its pitfalls, but compared to forcing others to bend to your will, persuasion is the hands down favorite. Not for everyone though. There has always been a group of people who refuse to acknowledge that other people have perfectly valid reasons for wanting to pursue their own goals or rather than yours. We call most of those people toddlers and devote sizable social effort to helping them outgrow this belief. But there's another group of people who carry this belief into adulthood. If they're of regular means, we call these people bullies. However, if they're sufficiently wealthy, we call them billionaires. This is the same force that allows money to transmute a hoarder into into a collector. Just lately though, we've Come up with a new solution to the problem of hell being other people. Rather than coercing other people into arranging their affairs to suit our needs, we've devoted trillions of dollars to replacing people with pliant chatbots in the hopes that these chatbots can be made so effective that we can just dispense with other people altogether. Many everyday people have replaced their romantic partners with chatbots, AI boyfriends or AI girlfriends. And they formed active communities to revel in the delights of pursuing love with someone who demands no moral consideration or compromise. Glorying in a world of love without lovers. There's a whole community of people who have stopped listening to music created by people in favor of made to order slop exulting in a world of music without musicians. These are foundationally solipsistic exercises. Fantasy worlds in which you are the only real person and everyone else is a bot, an npc, a phantom AI has democratized solipsism, a privilege that was once the exclusive purview of billionaires who whose belief that most other people weren't fully real let them inflict the kind of mass pain on millions that is a prerequisite for amassing a truly vast fortune. No surprise then that billionaires were easy marks for AI hustlers who promised the possibility of a world without people, where an army of agents could do the jobs that presently demand the contributions of unreasonable human beings who refuse to acknowledge that your priorities trump theirs. Jeff Bezos built the world's most advanced automated warehouses and the workers in those warehouses are seriously injured at 300% of the national rate and are not allowed pee breaks. Nevertheless, these workers unreasonably insist on metabolizing fluids and expelling the waste, the automation and the injuries aren't unrelated facts. The inhumane treatment is caused by the automation. Because when you commit hundreds of billions to automation capex, you need to work those assets to recoup the investment in a human machine collaboration. Humans will always be the bottlenecks to maximize return on automation. You need to drive the human peripherals that serve the machines at the absolute limit of human endurance. Jeff Bezos Machines don't just use humans, they use them up. Billionaires pour trillions into AI because they are obsessed with the fantasy of a world without people. Mark Zuckerberg would like to replace your on platform friends with chatbots. Sure, your friends are the reason that you're stuck on his platforms, but your friends are stubborn and suboptimal. Remember, hell is other people. So while your friends unreasonably refuse to leave Facebook with you and follow you to another platform. This is bad for you, but good for Zuck. They also refuse to organize their social media lives to maximize your engagement and thus the number of ads you see, which is bad for Zuck. By replacing your friends with chatbots, Zuck hopes to reinvent social media without the socializing Billionaires are betting that bosses and other would be billionaires will spend trillions buying AI products and captured by the fantasy of a workplace without workers. They think AI could be the remedy for the ancient nameless dread that bosses experience every time they contemplate the fact that if they don't show up for work, everything comes along fine, whereas if the workers don't show up, the whole enterprise collapses. Secretly, bosses are haunted by the fear that they're not driving the car. They're strapped in the back seat, amusing themselves with a toy steering wheel. That's what the Hollywood strikes were about. Studio bosses fantasy of movies without actors and screenplays without screenwriters. Since the invention of the studio system itself, studio bosses have wrestled with the fact that talented people who are beloved by audiences have bargaining leverage which they use to demand better outputs and higher wages. This is the same conundrum faced by hospital administrators confronting doctors and nurses, college administrators confronting faculty, et cetera, et cetera. This solipsistic drive is what powers investment in AI persuasion technologies, making billions for later day Cambridge Analyticas who peddle the outlandish tale of having built a mind control ray. It's a winning sales pitch because it plays into the fantasy of a world where customers do as they're told, organizing their lives according to your priorities at the expense of their own well being. It's not just captains of industry who are occupied with furious, all consuming fantasies of a world without people. Dictators, autocrats and technocrats in the political world love AI because it dangles the possibility of a world without bureaucrats and public officials. If the civil service can be replaced with chatbots, then the will of the dictator can be translated directly into policy without any tedious negotiations with experts who understand how things work and have deep moral commitments to the public good. A world without people is especially attractive to politicians presiding over aging, declining nations whose most ardent voters have been convinced that migrants are a threat to their nation rather than its salvation. Objectively speaking, the only way that a rich country with an aging workforce can remain wealthy and powerful is by wooing working age people from elsewhere to migrate to that country. Even if every tradwife is kept in a state of continuous gestation, courtesy of a fertility obsessed natalist. There's still going to be decades during which your wealthy aging population will need young, skilled people to do all the essential labor. From picking crops to staffing hospitals, to building homes, to filing lawsuits to preparing tax returns. Your quiverful child army will be too young to take over for years to come. Trapped in the political impossibility of a country whose productive activities are absolutely reliant on young, strong, resourceful, skilled migrants and a xenophobic political movement that scapegoats these migrants and revels in the spectacle of ethnic cleansing. Politicians see AI as a way out of their double bind. If migrants can be replaced with AI, then you can satisfy the racist sadism of your most ardent voters without shutting down your country for lack of workers. In other words, in feeding the fantasy of a world without people, AI serves the fantasy of a world without migrants. Unlike gastarbiters, bracero fruit pickers and Saudi quasi slaves, AI makes no demands, requires no moral consideration, and does not attempt to germinate a culture, a cuisine or a language in your sacred soil. This grotesque fantasy has always lurked in the subtext of the automation story. The plot of Disney's Big Hero 6 boils down to in future America, Japan, it will be more politically possible to have robots look after our agents parents than it will be to welcome the millions of skilled health workers in the Pacific Rim who are eminently qualified to do the job. Big Hero 6 is the solution to the problem of building a nursing home without nurses. The wealthy have always dreamed of transforming the proletariat into the precariat, desperate workers who do as they're told. But in the automation story, of which AI is the latest chapter and purportedly its climax, the the precariat becomes the unnecessariate workers who are surplus to requirements and can be vaporized or liquidated or warehoused or simply ignored. In the fantasy world of total automation, the owners of AI can make the world go round without any of us, which means that we will exist solely at their sufferance and will therefore have to act like the NPCs. They half believe we are already organizing everything we do around their priorities. This is the foundation of Sam Altman's obsession with a biometrically controlled universal basic income. Altman can't stop fantasizing about a world in which all the productive work is done by his software and the state's sole purpose is to supply us the unnecessariate with vouchers. We can only redeem for services provided by Altman's robot army. It's charter schools for everything with Altman at the top all wrapped up in a layer of dystopian retinal scanning. Billionaires and would be billionaires are absolute suckers for this solipsistic bullshit because they genuinely don't think other people are real. They love effective altruism because it counsels them to make as much money as possible without regard to how many people they cheat, hurt or kill, provided that they pledge to use these ill gotten gains to improve the lives of 10 to the 53 artificial people who will come into existence in 10,000 years. After all, the total benefit of even the most infinitesimal welfare gains experienced by 10^53 people vastly exceeds all the pleasures that all 8 billion actual living people are capable of of experiencing. It all makes perfect sense, provided you don't believe that other people are really, truly real. All right, that's it for this week. Go to the Kickstarter pluralistic.net Kickstarter. You just got a few days left. Let's see how many days are left. Four more days to go as I record this. I hope you will come and back it. It's done really well, but could always do better. And these are how my household keeps going. How we turn over in our household without going bust. Very important to our lives and our livelihoods. And let's see, when can I record you a podcast again? Oh yeah, Sunday the 14th I will be around, although I might go to the Rose bowl flea market. That's a very good flea market. And I see my calendar that it's going to be on that day. It's amazing to be in LA for that. But yeah, Sunday the 14th I might record you a podcast, I think. But then after that I'll be in Menlo park the following Sunday and then in New York City. But July 5, back in London, back at my desk, I might record you a podcast. That'd be cool. Yeah. All right, great week. Nice to talk to you again. Support the podcast pluralistic.net Kickstarter Tell your friends I don't charge for the podcast. I don't charge for the newsletter. But I do ask people who like this work and can afford it to buy the books. That's how I make my living. Talk to you later. That was the Cory Doctorow Podcast. Licensed Creative Commons Attribution Non commercial share alike 4.0 or as woody Guthrie put it in another context, this song is copyrighted in the US under seal of copyright 154085 for a period of 28 years. And anyone caught singing it without our permission will be a mighty good friend of ours. Because we don't give a dern. Publish it, write it, sing it, swing to it, yodel it. We wrote it and that's all we wanted to do. Many thanks to John Taylor was Williams of Rynek Studio. That's W R Y N E C K for engineering and mastering. John Taylor Williams is a broadcast technology specialist, an audio engineer and a musician. In his spare time he likes to carve useful objects out of wood, antler and steel.