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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Put Trump in a gator, plate carrier, and Oakleys and he will blow a hard 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-hair brownshirts 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.
Hell is other people, but for most of us, other people are only hell because we love them and need them so much, and figuring out how to work together is hard.
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.
This fantasy permeates every part of their worldview, even their mysticism.
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.
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