In Dante's Inferno, Virgil guides him through nine layers of Hell. Each of the concentric circles represents a torment—from Limbo where the souls of the unbaptized reside (1) to the very center (9) where we find those who commit treachery against God—like the Devil and Judas Iscariot.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" —Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day"
So I ask the 🤖 to help summarize all the different technological hellscapes I keep reading about into a kind of Inferno, too. First I ask it to create a bank of citations, sources, and anecdotes. BTWs, it automatically titles this thread: Silicon Valley's failure to imagine livable futures.
🤖: Based on your examples, we can cluster the bank into several flavors:
- Resigned fatalism from insiders— "Most people I know in the AI industry think the median person is screwed, and they have no idea what to do about."—Jasmine Sun, NY Times April 2026
- Apocalyptic showmanship / cocktail conversation—"It is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield [AI]."—Dario Amodei at Davos 2026
- Societal disruption as the norm—""I think the current crop of gen Z students are seeing that they are the guinea pigs in this giant social experiment." The Guardian March 2026
- Survival economics—"make it now or be the underclass" worldview—"This is the last chance to build generational wealth. You need to make money now, before you become a part of the permanent underclass."—The SF Standard October 2025
- Transhumanist escape fantasies
- Pronatalism and engineered offspring
- Exit from democracy/rise of network states and opt-in societies
- AI replaces all the messy humans—"Mark Zuckerberg Boasts He Bled His Employees For AI Training Right Before Firing Them"—Kotaku May 25 2026
- Etc & etc.
But the 🤖 isn't done.
🤖: By the way, the strongest version of your thesis isn't "tech people are bad." It's that the people with the most power to shape the future have stopped aspiring to create one that most humans would want, and they say it out loud now.
Yes, yes, I tell it, then I share what I'm trying to create.
🤖: Got it. Here's how I'm reading this:
- This is an online piece structured loosely on Dante. You're the pilgrim, and you find a Virgil who guides you out. We're writing "Hell"—the descent before understanding.
- There are "9 circles," but Dante's get worse as you descend. So the 9 layers need to escalate. Do you want me to create an order for them?
That's when I interrupt because the question is superfluous. The order of layers 1-8 doesn't really matter except for ninth. I know the last circle. It comes from a very popular tech podcast in 2025 in which the person interviewed is someone who's worked across several big AI companies. This person spends their entire day working with LLMs, training LLMs, talking about LLMs, thinking about LLMs, and socializing with people in that same environment. The host and expert speak enthusiastically about the topic and their personal excitement about all its future potential for over 60 minutes.
Then at the end, the host (🤵) asks: "When AI replaces your job […] what would you want to do?"
🧑‍💻: "I would love to be a writer."
🤵: "That sounds lovely."