In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, a new and unsettling narrative is emerging—one where the drive for automation is not just about efficiency, but about making people optional. Tech billionaires are pouring trillions into AI, not merely to streamline operations, but to sidestep the messy realities of managing human workers, colleagues, and even friends. This sweeping transformation is not limited to factories or tech startups; it’s rippling through social platforms and influencing government policy at the highest levels.
Writer and technology critic Cory Doctorow has become one of the most vocal commentators on this phenomenon. On June 2 and 3, 2026, Doctorow published a series of critiques across multiple outlets, including thenerve.news, highlighting what he sees as a fundamental shift in the ambitions of the tech elite. According to Doctorow, “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.”
Doctorow’s argument rests on a simple but provocative idea: for the ultra-wealthy, other people are often seen as obstacles to be managed or, increasingly, replaced. “There will always be times when hell is other people,” he writes, framing the billionaire mindset as one that seeks to make ‘other people’ optional. In his view, the push for AI is not just about making things run smoother—it’s about creating a world with fewer difficult people in it.
One of the most striking examples Doctorow points to is Amazon’s automated warehouses, built under the leadership of Jeff Bezos. These warehouses are hailed as marvels of modern logistics, but Doctorow argues that the human cost is staggering. Workers in these facilities are “seriously injured at 300 percent of the national rate,” a statistic he attributes directly to the relentless pressure to maximize returns on automation investments. “Jeff Bezos’s machines don't just use humans, they use them up,” Doctorow states, emphasizing that the injuries and the automation are not separate facts. The need to recoup massive capital expenditures on robotics and AI means that the remaining human workers are pushed to the absolute limits of physical endurance.
According to Doctorow, humans are always the bottleneck in any human-machine collaboration. Machines can run 24/7, but people need rest, safety, and dignity—needs that are often sidelined in the race for higher productivity. The result, he says, is a workplace where the human element is not just undervalued, but actively eroded. “In a human/machine collaboration, humans will always be the bottlenecks. To maximize return on automation, you need to drive the human peripherals that serve the machines at the absolute limit of human endurance.”
The trend doesn’t stop at warehouses. Social media platforms, most notably Meta under Mark Zuckerberg, are now exploring ways to automate user interactions themselves. Doctorow claims that Zuckerberg would like to “replace on-platform friends with chatbots.” The logic is simple but chilling: while friends are the reason people stay on Facebook, they are also unpredictable and unwilling to organize their social media lives to maximize engagement (and thus ad revenue). Chatbots, on the other hand, are pliant, always available, and never stubborn. “By replacing your friends with chatbots, Zuck hopes to reinvent social media without the socialising,” Doctorow writes.
This vision of automation extends even to the structure of society itself. Politicians in wealthy nations with aging populations are, according to Doctorow, eyeing AI as a way to avoid the economic and cultural complexities of migrant labor. The challenge is stark: rich countries need young, skilled workers to maintain their economies, but anti-migrant sentiment among core voters makes large-scale immigration politically toxic. AI, Doctorow argues, offers a tempting workaround. “If migrants can be replaced with AI, then you can satisfy the racist sadism of your most ardent voters without shutting down the country for lack of workers.” In this scenario, AI doesn’t just automate jobs—it automates away the need for new people, cultures, and communities.
Doctorow is quick to point out that this isn’t just a technical or economic project, but a fundamentally political one. The wealthy, he says, have always dreamed of transforming the proletariat into the precariat—workers so desperate that they do as they’re told. But with the rise of AI, even that is not enough. “In the automation story of which AI is the latest chapter (and purportedly the climax), the precariat becomes the unnecessariat: workers who are surplus to requirements and can be vaporised or liquidated or warehoused or simply ignored.”
Perhaps the most dystopian vision comes from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, who Doctorow says is “obsessed with a biometrically controlled universal basic income.” In Altman’s imagined future, all productive work is done by AI software, and humans receive vouchers redeemable only for services provided by AI. “It’s charter schools for everything, with Altman at the top, all wrapped up in a layer of dystopian retinal scanning,” Doctorow quips. The implication is clear: the owners of AI could one day control not only the means of production, but the very terms of human existence.
Doctorow’s larger point is that the AI boom is about more than just technology or efficiency—it’s about power. Power to replace workers, to flatten relationships, and to make inconvenient people disappear when they get in the way. “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,” Doctorow notes.
What remains uncertain is how much of this trillion-dollar promise is already reality, and how much is still a pitch that wealthy buyers are eager to believe. The questions Doctorow raises—about the future of work, the value of human relationships, and the role of technology in society—are not easily answered. But his warnings are clear: the rush to automate is not just about machines. It’s about who gets to matter in the world that comes next.
As AI continues to reshape the landscape of work, social life, and governance, the stakes are higher than ever. Doctorow’s critique serves as a timely reminder that technology is never neutral, and that the choices made by those at the top will shape not just the future of labor, but the fabric of society itself.