AI and a World Without Migrants  🔗 **Source:** [AI and a World Without Migrants](https://share.snipd.com/episode/ecdfccfa-7b46-47a5-b112-28b3cc468d8a) ## Highlights - **Why Coordination Beats Coercion** - Human societies evolved institutions and the neocortex to coordinate with others rather than coerce them. - Cory Doctorow highlights teams, laws, governments, and bureaucracies as imperfect but superior alternatives to forcing people to conform. Transcript: Cory Doctorow 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. ([Time 0:03:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/49830a74-71ed-4a83-a698-bdb4f5a76274)) - **AI as Democratized Solipsism** - Billionaires invest in AI because it promises a world without inconvenient humans who demand consideration or bargaining power. - Doctorow calls this a democratized solipsism where chatbots let people enact fantasies previously limited to the ultra-wealthy. Transcript: Cory Doctorow 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've 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 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 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. ([Time 0:05:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6b5ddae8-06fe-4312-afe0-15176fde1dde)) - **Amazon Warehouses Use Humans Up** - Jeff Bezos' automated warehouses show how automation can lead to inhumane working conditions as firms try to maximize returns on expensive machinery. - Doctorow cites injury rates at 300% of the national average and restrictions like denied bathroom breaks as concrete harms. Transcript: Cory Doctorow 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. ([Time 0:07:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3473983c-6425-4ff4-855f-0899aa7e560c)) - **Bosses Fear Being Unnecessary** - Bosses fear that if they stop showing up nothing happens, whereas if workers don't show up everything collapses, fueling an obsession with replacing workers via AI. - Doctorow ties this to the Hollywood strikes and industries trying to eliminate bargaining leverage held by talent and staff. Transcript: Cory Doctorow 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, etc., etc. 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. ([Time 0:09:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/af9a7f2b-29ee-44ee-b7b4-380bb2eedc3d)) - **AI Enables A World Without Migrants** - Countries with aging populations politically oppose migrants but need them economically, so AI is promoted as a way to avoid admitting reliance on migration. - Doctorow argues AI becomes a political escape hatch enabling xenophobic policies while maintaining essential services. Transcript: Cory Doctorow 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 are 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. ([Time 0:11:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/346b64e6-ffc3-47c7-93b7-a344085a5d37)) - **From Precariat To The Unnecessariat** - The fantasy of total automation turns workers into an 'unnecessariat' who exist only at owners' sufferance and must organize life around owners' priorities. - Doctorow links this to Sam Altman's biometric UBI idea as control layered over dependency. Transcript: Cory Doctorow 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 unnecessariat, with vouchers We can only redeem for services provided by Altman's robot army. ([Time 0:13:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4b22871f-9ea5-4f89-b6d7-f0b3ffb6be66)) - **Longtermism Justifies Present Harm** - Effective Altruism and longtermist math rationalize harm to current people by privileging hypothetical far-future lives, reinforcing billionaire solipsism. - Doctorow highlights the absurdity of valuing tiny welfare gains for 10^53 future beings over actual present suffering. Transcript: Cory Doctorow 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 to the 53 people vastly exceeds all the pleasures that all 8 billion actual living people Are capable of experiencing. It all makes perfect sense, provided you don't believe that other people are really, truly real. ([Time 0:14:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e3789a3a-8498-4640-a896-e2486369282d))