Cory Doctorow Says Billionaires Use AI to Replace People
Cory Doctorow says cory doctorow sees a tech elite pouring billions into AI to dispense with inconvenient humans. He argues that the push reaches far beyond chatbots and into the social systems people rely on to work, cooperate, and stay put.
“I don't care who you are, there will always be times when hell is other people.” That is the opening line of his argument, and he uses it to frame a simple claim: wealthy tech figures are trying to make other people optional.
Bezos and Zuckerberg
Doctorow says the world has devoted trillions of dollars to replacing people with pliant chatbots, and he points to Jeff Bezos's automated warehouses as a concrete example of what that looks like in practice.
He says workers in those warehouses are seriously injured at 300% of the national rate, and he argues that the automation and the injuries are not separate facts because companies need to push human workers harder to recoup the investment.
Human bottlenecks
Doctorow says humans are the bottlenecks in a human/machine collaboration, and he quotes himself saying, “Jeff Bezos's machines don't just use humans, they use them up.”
He also says Mark Zuckerberg would like to replace on-platform friends with chatbots, because friends are the reason people stay on Facebook and refuse to follow users elsewhere.
Governments and migrants
Doctorow extends the same logic to governments, saying they want the same trick so they can wish away migrants their economies desperately need.
That leaves one unanswered issue: whether these companies and governments can actually replace the stubborn, social, and often inconvenient parts of human life that Doctorow says make the whole project possible in the first place.
