Cory Doctorow
speaker
2,525 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 20 Sep
Cory Doctorow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
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.
I think that this preoccupation with 10 to the 53 hypothetical far-future artificial people is just an expression of the fantasy of a world without people.
A fantasy that bewitches people who think that the answer to other people being hell is to get rid of the other people.
All right.
Well, thank you very much.
And it was nice to talk to you again.
I just realized that I don't remember if I told you this last week, but inshinification has been inducted into the Oxford English Dictionary, which is awfully cool.
So, yeah, awesome.
Anyway, I'm away next week for my birthday, but I'll probably be back the week after.
Hope you have a great fortnight and I'll talk to you later.
Welcome back to the Cory Doctorow podcast, London edition.
You can hear from the room tone that I am in the big hard surface room that is my home office in London.
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