If "Hell Is Other People" . . . .

Cory Doctorow quotes Jean-Paul Sartre's aphorism, "Hell is other people," to introduce the hypothesis that technology moguls' fantastized utopian society is one with as few real human beings as possible:

Hell Is Other People

Doctorow immediately points out that we need other people for a functional society, and we often cherish their company. Admittedly, however, there's an inescapable drawback to sharing our world with them: "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 tell them to do."

Well, how rude of them!

Nevertheless, as Doctorow also remarks, "We understand other people to be co-equal with us in 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." That is, most of us understand those principles. But -- "A subset of humanity is committed to a world where everyone else 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.'”

Billionaire "tech overlords," who possess the wealth and power to potentially bring that imagined world into existence, eagerly anticipate a future when unruly live, flesh-and-blood employees and customers will be replaced by artificial intelligence. They do not, "at some foundational level, truly believe that other people are real." Doctorow quotes one notorious public figure as labeling the majority of the population "non-player characters."

"For these bosses, AI represents the promise of a world without people: a world where you have a product idea and it just appears." Whereas Doctorow initially regarded this sort of mindset as idle speculation, he now views it more ominously: "I think that this preoccupation with 10⁵³ 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." Their utopia would be dystopia for the rest of us, those few of us who might survive to inhabit it.

So rather than seriously believing "hell is other people," he presents that idea as the foundation of certain powerful individuals' distorted worldview.

Every time I come across Sartre's claim (or, at least, the claim made by his character in NO EXIT), I mentally retort, "No, it isn't!" Quite the opposite. C. S. Lewis explains Hell, on the contrary, as the ultimate fulfillment of solipsism. When a person rejects the Good so completely he insists God should leave him alone, God -- rather than violate human free will -- does exactly that. After death, with no bodies to tether them to external reality, such damned souls are trapped for eternity within their own minds. As Lewis puts it in THE PROBLEM OF PAIN, such a person "has his wish -- to live wholly in the self and to make the best of what he finds there. And what he finds there is Hell."

Only someone who thinks like Doctorow's "tech overlords" could contemplate this kind of "life" as less than a nightmare.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.