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 boardgames 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. We evolved social structures – laws, teams, governments, families, bureaucracies – to help us coordinate with others to do superhuman things. 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 favourite.
Not for everyone, though. There has always been a group of people who refused to acknowledge that other people have perfectly valid reasons for wanting to pursue their own goals 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 those people "bullies". However, if they're sufficiently wealthy, we call them "billionaires".
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.
No surprise, then, that billionaires were easy targets 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. 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's machines don't just use humans, they use them up.
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
Mark Zuckerberg would like to replace your on-platform friends with chatbots. Sure, your friends are the reason you're stuck on his platforms, but your friends are stubborn and thus suboptimal. They unreasonably refuse to leave Facebook with you and follow you to another platform (this is bad for you, but good for Zuck), but they also refuse to organise their social media lives to "maximise 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 socialising.
It's not just industry. 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) face an impossible bind.
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 labour. From picking crops, to staffing hospitals, to building homes, to filing lawsuits, to preparing tax returns, your quiverfull child army will be too young to take over for years to come.
For these politicians, AI offers 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 the country for lack of workers. In feeding the fantasy of a world without people, AI serves the fantasy of a world without migrants. Unlike gastarbeiter, bracero fruit-pickers or 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.
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 the climax), the precariat becomes the unnecessariat: workers who are surplus to requirements and can be vaporised or liquidated or warehoused or simply ignored.
In the fantasy world of total automation, the owners of AI can make the world go around without any of us, which means that we will exist solely at their sufferance, and will therefore have to act like the non-player characters they half-believe we are already, organising 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 fantasising 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 unnecessariat – 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.
It all makes perfect sense – provided you don't believe that other people are really, truly real.
This is an edited version of a Cory Doctorow post from pluralistic.net. It is published under a CC BY 4.0 creative commons licence
Cory Doctorow, who was born in Toronto and now lives in Los Angeles and London, is the Nerve’s tech columnist. His most recent book Enshittification is published by Verso