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Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Hell Is Other People
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, Hell Is Other People, about the solipsistic fantasy underpinning the AI bubble. Sartre was (arguably) an optimist. It’s not that other people are unpleasant: quite the contrary! There’s nothing that makes the day (or, pointedly, the night) sweeter than agreeable human companionship. And... more
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Well, hello and welcome back to the Cory Docter Podcast. Coming to you from my echoey hard surface filled office in London where I'm still waiting for some sound baffles. I will be in Edinburgh August 16th and 17th at the International Book Festival doing a solo presentation on the 16th and a gig with Jimmy Wales on the 17th. Then I'm flying to Sydney, Australia. I'll be at the Festival of Dangerous ideas on the 23rd and 24th and then off to Melbourne on the 25th at the Wheeler Centre come September. I will be in Brighton on September 8th with Carol Cadwallader and I'll be in London on September 9th with Riley Quinn. And there will also be an event in Manchester, but the details are still being worked out. I believe it's going to be September 11th and there may be one more event in London with Novara Media. We're still working out all those details. October 6th though, I will be in South Bend at Notre Dame. And there are some other events too that I will announce as they come up. So this is going to be a quick podcast. I was on with you last week and so not a lot of news to report in the intervening week. In my life. I am writing, I am working, I am touring. I just gave a talk yesterday at the Idler Festival here in London. More of that to come. Although next weekend I will be away for my birthday. We're going to an off grid cabin in the Hundred Acre Wood, so I won't be speaking to you then. And yes, literally that Hundred Acre Wood. Anyway, I have a new Locus column out this week. It's called Hella's Other People and it's about the solipsistic vibe that underpins AI And I really think that I'm onto something with this. And so without any further ado, this is from the July 2026 issue of Locust Magaz. Hell is other people. So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture chambers, the fire and brimstone, the burning Marlborough? Old wives tales. There's no need for red hot pokers. Hell is other people. Jean Paul Sartre. No exit. Sartre was arguably an optimist. It's not that other people are unpleasant, quite the contrary. There's nothing that makes the day, or pointedly the night more sweet than agreeable human companionship. And of course, for those tasks that exceed what you or anyone could do alone, other people are a necessity. Without other people, your aspirations could never exceed the things you would personally make happen. And if you're honest, you have to admit that this is a short list of things other people then are a thing that you can't live without. And yet other people stubbornly insist on organizing their lives around their needs, their preferences, their desires, without any consideration for how nice it would be for you if everyone would just do whatever you told them to. Thus it is that our species has invented all kinds of technologies like language and persuasion and bureaucracy and ethics and religion and government and coercion and slavery and wage labor and guilt and duty and conscription and commerce and meetings and chore wheels and corporations and teams that can be used to get some other people to sometimes act in ways that make your life better. After all, we have neocortices, the most recently evolved structures in our brains that seem to specialize in understanding other people's motives to aid in this endeavor. Most of us have made our peace with this we understand other people to be co equal with us and their needs and wants, and acknowledge that a world in which everyone lives their lives in a way that maximizes our happiness unhappiness would be fundamentally unfair. And even if we're willing to tolerate some unfairness, most of us are also aware that an unfair system is more likely to be unfair to us rather than unfair for us. Not everyone feels this way. A subset of humanity is committed to a world where everyone takes orders from them. We have different names for these people. We call the majority of them toddlers, but we call the others bosses or tyrants. These latter two groups, who, unlike toddlers, are unlikely to outgrow their belief that everyone else should shut up and do as they're told, are also among the people most excited about AI. What's more, the more powerful these people are, the more credulous and enthusiastic they are about AI. Among bosses, the most enthusiastic boosters are tech overlords. These billionaires will not shut up about AI. And tellingly, the thing they're most excited about is the fact that AI might let them fire programmers and replace them with chatbots. It may seem odd that the tech bosses who spent the past 20 plus years singing the praises of the talent are now so palpably horny to replace coders with chatbots, but only if you don't understand the special hell that programmers represent to tech bosses. Tech workers have historically been in extraordinarily short supply, and tech workers are extraordinarily productive. A single engineer adds about a million dollars to the bottom line of a big Silicon Valley firm. Given those two facts, tech workers were always Able to credibly threaten that they would walk out the door because there were 10 other bosses waiting at the factory gate eager to offer them a new job. For tech bosses, the fact that they needed tech workers much more than tech workers needed them was indeed hell. Tech bosses needed to pretend to be their workers peers, wearing hoodies and attending engineering meetings where workers were encouraged to ask impertinent questions about the business's technological direction and commercial strategy. What a humiliation. We know how tech bosses would like to treat their workers. Tim Cook became Apple's CEO after he figured out how to shift Apple production to Chinese contract manufacturers without the company's product plans leaking or its manufacturing quality declining. All it took to achieve those goals was a working environment so toxic that the factories needed to install suicide nets to catch the workers who'd rather die than spend another day assembling iPhones under the conditions Cook enforced. Then there's Jeff Bezos. This year's Met gala was sponsored by Bezos, and protesters ring the building with bottles of fake urine to highlight the fact that the conditions that Bezos created for his warehouse workers and drivers are so onerous that they don't allow for bathroom breaks. For a man with a penis shaped rocket, Bezos is weirdly hostile to the human kidney, or at least other people's kidneys. Every big tech company has a sweatshop tucked away somewhere. A small city of traumatized Kenyan content moderators say, or a high rise building full of QA people working through the night to find bugs in a blockbuster video game in the hours before it ships. Any boss who can subject other people to this kind of treatment does not, at some foundational level, truly believe that other people are real. If you understand other people suffering to be as real as your own, you could never institute a work regime like this. No wonder Elon Musk calls everyone who disagrees with him a non player character. Tech bosses never liked tech workers. They simply feared them. Feared that these other people would walk out the door. Like every boss, they must somehow resolve the fact that while they are nominally in charge of the company, the company would run just fine if they didn't show up for work. Whereas if the workers all did, disappeared, the whole business would grind to a halt. They want to believe they're in the driver's seat, but they secretly fear that they're strapped into the back seat, playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel. For these bosses, AI represents the promise of a world without people. A world where you have a product idea and it just appears with no need to cajole, flatter, or bribe entitled tech workers into building it for you. It's a way to wire the toy steering wheel directly into the corporate drivetrain. It's not just workers that tech bosses hope to replace with AI. Social media bosses like Mark Zuckerberg have announced plans to replace your friends with AI too. For Zuckerberg, your friends are a particularly hellish kind of other people. After all, your friends are the reason you join social media, and more importantly, they're the reason you stayed on social media. That's because you love your friends, but they are a pain in the ass. Hell is other people. You may all hate Facebook, but you also can't agree on when you should leave it or where you should go next. So you all stay on Facebook. So long as you love your friends more than you hate Mark Zuckerberg, he can make your life hell. Mark Zuckerberg is other people too, and you'll stay on his service making money for Zuckerberg. The problem from Zuckerberg's perspective is that your friends don't want to organize their social relations with you to maximize your engagement with his platform. They merely want to socialize with you. And conviviality isn't optimized to increase the number of ads you view. This is why Zuckerberg pivoted away from showing you things your friends posted to showing you things that content creators posted. Turning Facebook into into a cable access TV channel devoted to short form amateur dramatics created by theater kids is a weird move. However, unlike your friends, those theater kids will organize their usage of the platform to maximize your engagement with it. In fact, they will spend every hour that God sends trying to figure out how to get you to spend more time on Facebook. But those performers are people, and hell is other people. And these people would like dignified treatment, fair compensation, and other inconveniences that are suboptimal for Zuckerberg's own happiness. That's why he's so committed to replacing creators with AI slop. Just as bots might be the key to a coding shop without coders, Zuckerberg hopes that bots will produce a social media service without socializing. If he can imprison you in a mirror palace of chatbots, he can order them to say the things that they calculate will make you keep scrolling, and he will owe them nothing. Small wonder then that Zuckerberg, Musk Cook, Nadella, Ellison Pichai and other Silicon Valley bosses have allied themselves so closely to Trump's fascist project, and that Trump is so excited about firing bureaucrats and other civil servants and replacing them with chatbots. For Trump, hell is other people too. He wants to be a dictator, but a dictator can only dictate the policies he can get other people to carry out. Put Trump in a gator plate carrier and Oakley's and he will blow a heart valve before he can capture a single working class person and put them on a plane to a Salvadoran slave labor camp. And as Trump learned in his first term, the permanent civil service is full of people who stubbornly refuse to set aside their sense of ethics and duty in order to shape the world to his preferences. The broccoli hair brown shirts from Doge the laid waste to the civil service, indiscriminately firing skilled workers who do things that America needs done. When asked to justify this vandalism, they said that those fired workers were superfluous to requirements because general AI was just around the corner. The idea of creating and enslaving an artificial God is so attractive to them because it allows them to realize the fascist dream in which every whim of their cult leader is instantaneously translated into action without having to pass through the filter of skilled people who understand how things work. Hell is other people, but for most of us, other people are only hell because we love them and need them so much, and figuring out how to work together is hard. Confronted with this fact, most of us commit to figuring out better ways to work with other people. But for fascists, bosses and other dictators, the fact that hell is other people makes them yearn for a world without people. This fantasy permeates every part of their worldview, even their mysticism. There's a sizable overlap between AI cultists and the effective altruist, or ea, movement. While EA started out to maximize charitable giving by evaluating the relative efficacy of different humanitarian efforts, say mosquito nets versus malaria research, it eventually metastasized into one of the weirdest, most solipsistic religious cults in operation today. Modern EA holds that its adherents should earn to give working the highest paying jobs they can find, irrespective of how much harm this inflicts on the world and the other people they share it with. Hurting other people is fine so long as you eventually direct your earnings to the charitable purposes that will do the most good. But these charitable purposes are neither mosquito nets nor are they malaria research. Rather, EA holds that you should devote all of your efforts to improving the lives of 10 to the 53 hypothetical artificial people who will come into existence over the next 10,000 years. After all, even an infinitesimal improvement to the lives of 10 to the 53 artificial people will bring about far more happiness than could be possibly experienced by today's mere 8x10 9 real people when I first heard on this, I assumed that it was just bullshit, a variation on Galbraith's maxim that the modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy, that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. But these days I'm not so sure. I think that this preoccupation with 10 to the 53 hypothetical far future artificial people is just an expression of the fantasy of a world without people, a fantasy that bewitches people who think that the answer to other people being hell is to get rid of the other people. All right, well, thank you very much and it was nice to talk to you again. I just realized that I don't remember if I told you this last week, but Inshinification has been inducted into the Oxford English Dictionary, which is awfully cool. So, yeah, awesome. Anyway, I'm away next week for my birthday, but I'll probably be back the week after. Hope you have a great fortnight and I'll 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 ourn 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 Williams of Wryneck 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.