Cory Doctorow
speaker
2,525 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 6d ago
Cory Doctorow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
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 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.
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