Cory Doctorow says the people with the money are spending billions to do away with the people they find inconvenient, and that the drive to replace humans is now running through warehouses, social platforms and government policy. In his telling, the pitch for AI is not efficiency alone. It is a cleaner world with fewer difficult people in it.
That is why Doctorow is being read now. He argues that trillions of dollars have already been devoted to replacing people with pliant chatbots, while AI hustlers have sold billionaires on a world where an army of agents does the work that currently depends on unreasonable human beings. He says the same instinct shows up in government, where leaders want to wish away migrants their economies still need.
Doctorow’s case turns on a simple idea: humans are always the part of the system that resists being turned into machinery. He writes that there are always moments when hell is other people, then adds that other people are wonderful but stubborn. Society built laws, teams, governments, families and bureaucracies because persuasion is hard and coercion is the alternative. The people who refuse to accept that others have their own reasons for acting, he says, are called bullies when they have ordinary means and billionaires when they have enough money.
He points to Jeff Bezos as proof of how that thinking works in practice. Bezos built what Doctorow calls the world’s most advanced automated warehouses, yet workers inside them are seriously injured at 300% of the national rate. That is not, in his view, an accident. The automation and the injuries are linked, because when a company wants the highest return from machines, it pushes the human pieces that keep them running to the absolute limit of endurance. Bezos’s machines, Doctorow says, do not just use people. They use them up.
The same logic, he argues, sits behind the promise of AI more broadly. A chatbot does not demand fair treatment, develop loyalties or ask to be heard. It does not try to grow a culture, a cuisine or a language in someone else’s territory. That makes it attractive to executives who see real people as friction. It also explains why the idea is spreading beyond factories and into social media, where Doctorow says Mark Zuckerberg would like to replace on-platform friends with chatbots.
Friends, he says, are the reason people stay on Facebook, and they are also the reason users cannot simply leave with them. They are stubborn and refuse to follow. Doctorow’s larger point is that the current AI boom is not only about automation. It is about power: the power to replace workers, to flatten relationships and to make other people disappear when they get in the way. What remains unclear is how much of the trillion-dollar promise is already being built and how much is still a pitch that wealthy buyers are eager to hear.
