Hell Is Other People  🔗 **Source:** [Hell Is Other People](https://share.snipd.com/episode/76bbacf1-6438-40a7-8f15-577ae69e812d) ## Highlights - **Other People Are Necessary And Problematic** - Other people are both indispensable collaborators and sources of friction that humans invented institutions to manage. - Cory Doctorow ties social technologies (language, bureaucracy, ethics) to our evolved neocortex skill of modeling others' motives. Transcript: Cory Doctorow 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 marl? 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, 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 would Be fundamentally unfair. ([Time 0:02:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/82eec883-04fd-4d36-a877-26466d1fb8ba)) - **Bosses See AI As Freedom From Skilled Workers** - Powerful bosses embrace AI because it promises escape from dependence on scarce skilled workers. - Doctorow explains engineers add about a million dollars of value, creating boss fear and a desire to replace them with automation. Transcript: Cory Doctorow 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. ([Time 0:05:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d6ef6cf4-d5a1-4888-aae1-0cd4e7d847d7)) - **Tech Bosses Pretended To Be Engineers** - Tech bosses mimicked engineers to keep talent but secretly resented their leverage. - Doctorow cites hoodies, engineering meetings, and the humiliation of feigning peer status to retain scarce engineers. Transcript: Cory Doctorow 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 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 backseat, playing with a Fisher-Price steering wheel. ([Time 0:06:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a9fa073a-0ee1-4def-b92c-645eae81fbd2)) - **Social Media Wants Friends Replaced By Bots** - Social platforms aim to replace messy human friendships with controllable bots to maximize engagement. - Doctorow highlights Zuckerberg's pivot from friends' posts to creator content and plans to replace creators with AI-generated material. Transcript: Cory Doctorow 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 joined 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, quote, content creators posted. Turning Facebook 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. ([Time 0:09:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/db479f8d-ad45-4cfa-ae97-3215d6dbdf2a)) - **Fascists Favor AI To Sidestep Skilled Bureaucracy** - Authoritarian figures and fascists favor AI because it lets leaders bypass ethical civil servants and enforce whims without skilled intermediaries. - Doctorow connects Trump's and allied efforts to fire civil service under the pretext that AI will replace them. Transcript: Cory Doctorow 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 in 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-haired brown shirts from Doge 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. ([Time 0:11:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a36771f6-0461-4e7f-a723-48e1b0aeab2d)) - **Choose Collaboration Not Replacement** - Commit to improving cooperation because most people's response to social friction is constructive collaboration. - Doctorow contrasts this path with tyrants who seek to eliminate other people's agency via automation and coercion. Transcript: Cory Doctorow 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. ([Time 0:12:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c6af2c7b-472b-4162-82ca-4ebb58c3994e)) - **Longtermist EA Embodies The Fantasy Of A World Without People** - Effective Altruism's longtermist obsession exemplifies a solipsistic fantasy of prioritizing hypothetical future artificial lives over present people. - Doctorow criticizes EA's focus on improving the lives of 10^53 future artificial people over today's 8×10^9 humans. Transcript: Cory Doctorow 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, quote, 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 8 Times 10 to the 9 real people. When I first heard on this, I assumed that it was just bullshit, a variation on Galbraith's maxim that, quote, 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. ([Time 0:13:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f856c430-fb35-47fa-ac4a-9cc14072171b))