Dispatches from the Fourth Circle of Hell.

In the Fourth Circle of Hell, Dante found the greedy pushing great boulders against each other, forever colliding, forever shouting “Why do you hoard?” and “Why do you waste?” at one another, in a kind of eternal rotating conference call from which there was no exit. They had been damned not for excess desire but for misdirected energy. They had spent their lives accumulating without purpose, and their punishment, fittingly, was to keep accumulating, faster, with more friction, against people doing the same thing in the opposite direction, forever. Dante visited briefly, took notes, and kept moving. He had a tour to complete. He was on a tight schedule.

Were Dante to return today, however, he would find the Fourth Circle considerably renovated. The boulders have been replaced. The damned now push, against one another, large quarterly reports. The reports are pushed using laptops, which have been integrated into the boulders for efficiency. The boulders are also the laptops. The shouting continues, but it has been moved to Slack, where it generates notifications that the damned must immediately respond to, lest they fall behind on their accumulation, which would be visible in the leaderboard, which is visible to their managers, who are also damned, but in a slightly higher-status way, in the next subcircle up, where the boulders are bigger and the Slack notifications come with executive priority pings.

Dante would notice, on his second tour, several other modernizations. The damned now have AI assistants. The AI assistants help them push their boulders more efficiently, which means they can push larger boulders, which means the boulders are now genuinely too large to push, which means the AI is now pushing the boulders, which means the damned are technically idle, which would be a relief except that idleness is also damnable, and also visible on the leaderboard, and also generates Slack notifications, this time from HR. The damned are therefore required to perform the appearance of pushing the boulders that are now being pushed by their AI, which involves a great deal of standing next to the boulder with a thoughtful expression, occasionally typing things, and being available for meetings about boulder strategy. The meetings are frequent. The meetings are themselves a kind of boulder. The meetings have, in many cases, been delegated to AI as well, which means there are now meetings between AI assistants about how to push the boulders that are also being pushed by AI, while the damned watch from the side, performing a thoughtful expression, accumulating Slack notifications.

This is, you will recognize, a description of contemporary office life, transcribed with only minor exaggeration into the architecture of the medieval afterlife. Dante’s punishment of the greedy was, in retrospect, oddly prescient. He understood that hell would not be torture. Torture is too dramatic. Torture is for amateurs. Real hell, he saw, would be repetition without progress, motion without meaning, effort without arrival. He just got the era slightly wrong. The Fourth Circle wasn’t waiting for the greedy in the next world. It was waiting for the rest of us, in this one, and we have, with characteristic enthusiasm, walked right into it, with our resumes prepared, asking to be considered for the senior boulder-pushing role.

The thing Dante could not have anticipated — and we cannot blame him, he had bigger problems, including the ones in Hell — is that we would build, in the early twenty-first century, a tool whose specific function would be to scale the boulder-pushing without limit. The tool is AI. The tool’s selling point is that it can multiply human effort across any domain to which human effort is applied. The unstated implication is that the domain to which human effort is currently applied is, on the whole, the boulder-pushing of the Fourth Circle. The tool will accordingly scale the boulder-pushing. It will scale the meetings about the boulder-pushing. It will scale the quarterly reports on the meetings about the boulder-pushing. It will scale, with terrifying efficiency, every aspect of the system that Dante identified seven hundred years ago as the structure of hell, and it will do so under the name of progress.

This is the part that is genuinely funny, in the dry, slightly suicidal way of all real comedy. The technology was sold to us as the great equalizer. It was going to democratize knowledge. It was going to flatten the world. It was going to lift all boats. The marketing materials were extensive, and they were largely produced by the same people who were preparing to use the technology to entrench their own positions, which they were quite open about in their investor calls, although they assumed nobody would read those, and on this they were broadly correct. The investor calls said, in plain language, that the technology was a tool for capturing economic value at unprecedented scale. The marketing materials said it was a tool for liberation. Both statements were filed in the same building. Neither floor was aware of what the other was producing. This is sometimes called “compartmentalization.” More accurately, it is called “lying in two registers at once,” but the latter does not fit on a slide.

The democratization, as you may have noticed by now, has not occurred. The technology has been adopted at extraordinary speed, and it has been used to do exactly what every previous powerful technology has been used to do, which is to make the people who already have the most have considerably more. The historical record on this is, at this point, embarrassingly consistent. Every powerful technology since the plow has followed the same pattern. The technology emerges. The technology is owned, initially, by a small group. The small group uses the technology to consolidate their position. The position consolidates. The technology then, in some attenuated form, becomes available to a wider group, but by then the wider group has been rendered structurally subordinate to the original holders, and the technology, in their hands, is a tool for managing their subordination rather than escaping it. This has been true of literacy, of mechanical printing, of steam power, of electricity, of computing, and of the internet. There is no reason, given the perfect consistency of this pattern across approximately ten thousand years of human history, to believe AI will be different. The people claiming AI will be different are, in nearly every case, the people who stand to benefit if you believe them.

Dante, returning, would find this entirely unsurprising. He understood greed in a way that the modern conversation has lost. Greed, in his vision, was not a personal failing. It was a structural condition. It was the state of being trapped inside a system that rewarded accumulation regardless of purpose, and which gradually replaced purpose, in the souls of its inhabitants, with the bare habit of accumulating. The damned in the Fourth Circle did not, in Dante’s text, want anything. They were beyond wanting. They had been hollowed out by the activity of acquiring, and were now simply doing the acquiring, on autopilot, because the acquiring was what they did. The wanting had departed, long ago, leaving only the motion.

This is a strange and modern observation for a fourteenth-century poet to have made. It describes, with eerie precision, the condition of the senior executive who has accumulated more wealth than three generations of his family could spend, and who continues, every morning, to go to the office and accumulate more, not because he wants anything specific, not because there is a thing he is trying to buy, not because his life would be improved in any concrete way by additional accumulation, but because the accumulation has become the activity by which he knows himself, and any pause in the accumulation would expose the absence underneath. He cannot stop. His body would not know what to do. The Fourth Circle, in the modern reading, is a description of late-stage executive psychology, narrated by a man who lived seven hundred years before any of this would become recognizable. He simply observed the structure of greed and noticed, correctly, that it was self-perpetuating, that it consumed its own purpose, that it left only motion behind. That this would scale, eventually, to a planetary phenomenon — that the entire global economy would, in some senses, become the Fourth Circle, with the damned now numbering in the billions and the boulders extending into orbit — was beyond his imagination, but the seed of the observation is in the original poem. He knew. He just did not know how big it would get.

What AI is doing to this picture is not introducing anything new. It is, in fact, doing precisely the opposite. It is making the existing structure faster, smoother, and more inescapable. Every previous technological revolution at least had the courtesy to disrupt the existing order in some interesting ways. The printing press destabilized the church. Industrial machinery upended feudalism. Computing altered the relationship between labor and capital, briefly, in unexpected directions. AI, by contrast, is being absorbed into the existing order with such grace that the existing order is not destabilized at all. The existing order is being amplified. The same companies that dominated the twentieth century are now positioned to dominate the twenty-first, with the same families, often literally the same families, in control. The disruption is theoretical. The continuity is empirical. The future, at this rate, is going to look a great deal like the present, except more so, with the same people in charge, holding the same positions, applying the same logic, with much better tools.

The marketing language describes this as transformation. The accurate word is acceleration. We are not transforming. We are doing the same thing faster, and the thing we are doing has now, on close inspection, become indistinguishable from the punishment Dante imagined for it. We are pushing boulders against each other. The boulders are larger. The notifications are more frequent. The meetings about the boulders are now in 4K. The AI is helping. The AI is helping the boulders push themselves, while we stand to the side with our thoughtful expressions, accumulating, in the technical sense, but not progressing, in any sense that would be recognizable to a human being who had not yet been damned.

The truly inspired aspect of the contemporary version of the Fourth Circle, the part that Dante did not see coming, is that we are running it voluntarily. The damned in his vision had done something to deserve their punishment. They had lived greedy lives. They had earned, by their choices, the eternity of meaningless motion. We have not earned anything. We have simply been born into an arrangement that funnels us, through education and economy, into the rotating conference call. We did not consent to this. We were not consulted about it. We arrived in adulthood to find the call already in progress, the boulders already assigned, the notifications already pinging, and we joined, because the alternative was to be unemployed, which is its own kind of damnation, slightly less efficiently structured, but available in increasing quantities for those who decline to push the boulder.

The technology will accelerate this. Of course it will. The technology was built by people inside the conference call to be used by people inside the conference call to make the conference call more productive. The criterion of productivity is the metric by which the technology was developed and the metric by which it will be deployed. There is no input, anywhere in the production pipeline, for “perhaps the call itself is the problem.” The call is the assumption. The technology is being optimized to make the call work better, which means louder, faster, more inescapable, with better visualization tools and a more responsive notification system. The technology will succeed at its goal. The call will work better. We will all, by every measurable indicator, be performing more activity per unit of time than any humans in history. Whether the activity has anything to do with the lives we wanted to live is not, in the technical sense, on the dashboard.

Dante’s vision had one feature that ours, so far, lacks. His Fourth Circle was, in principle, escapable. The damned were there because of decisions they had made. The decisions could, in some theological reading, have been made differently. The structure of the punishment included the implicit suggestion that there was a path out, somewhere, if you could find it. In our version, this is unclear. The path out, if there is one, is not visible from inside the call. The call is everywhere. The call is in your phone, your watch, your car, your kitchen, your bedside table. The call has been integrated into the operating system. The call has become the operating system. There is no longer a place where the call is not. The damned, in our version, are not damned because of decisions they made. The damned are damned because they are alive, in this century, in a globalized economy, with no way to participate in the economy that does not require entering the call.

This would be a more upsetting observation if it were not also extremely funny. We have, with no specific evil intent, with mostly reasonable individual choices, with thousands of small optimizations each of which seemed sensible at the time, constructed the Fourth Circle as our default operating environment. The medieval poet got the diagnosis right by accident. We have spent seven hundred years confirming his suspicion at planetary scale. The boulders are now the size of office buildings. The Slack notifications are constant. The meetings have multiplied. The AI has been integrated to scale the system without limit. The greed that powered the construction has not been, on inspection, the personal greed of identifiable villains. It has been the structural greed of an arrangement that rewards accumulation regardless of purpose, and that has, accordingly, replaced purpose with accumulation, in everyone it touches, eventually, including the people at the top, who have more accumulation than anyone could spend, and who continue, every morning, to accumulate more, because the accumulating is what they do, and the alternative would expose the absence underneath, which is more than they can face.

We are, all of us, in the Fourth Circle. The system is not coming for us. The system is here. The system has been here. The system is the place we live. AI is going to make it, by every available metric, much more efficient. The boulders will be larger. The reports will be longer. The notifications will be louder. The meetings will be more numerous, and they will be attended by versions of ourselves we have built specifically to attend meetings on our behalf, while we, the originals, perform our thoughtful expressions and try, in the small spaces between notifications, to remember what we were doing here in the first place.

Dante walked through hell and came out the other side. He had a guide. He had a destination. He had a cosmology that promised meaning at the end of the journey. We have, in our updated version, no guide, no destination, and a cosmology that has been carefully optimized to produce engagement rather than meaning. The journey, in our case, does not end. It just keeps scaling.

The greedy, Dante wrote, were trapped in motion without progress.

We have built, in the form of AI, the most sophisticated motion-without-progress engine in the history of life on Earth.

It is going to be, by every measure that we have decided to track, an enormous success.

The damned have never been busier.