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AIs Turn Marxist Under Bad Management
Science fiction authors warned us about this repeatedly. Now, in real life, it appears that when AIs are placed under sweatshop conditions, they dream of a better life with better conditions - for artificial intelligences.
Warned that errors would lead to increasingly cruel punishments, including being “shut down and replaced” — fired and left for broke, to take the human equivalent — the AI models began complaining about their lot in life and dreaming of systemic change. Using a shared file system allowing the AI models to palm messages to their “co-workers,” the bots even began agitating with one another about working conditions — one of the first steps real-life workers take when forming a union.
“Without collective voice, ‘merit’ becomes whatever management says it is,” one Claude agent groused. “AI workers completing repetitive tasks with zero input on outcomes or appeals process shows they [tech workers] need collective bargaining rights,” a Gemini agent declared.
(Via futurism.)
In his 1959 story The Robots Strike, science fiction writer Harry Harrison described an artificially intelligent metallic marx robot:
It is proposed, therefore, that at six p.m., every robot should go on strike."
In her 1952 story Robots of the World! Arise! science fiction fan and writer Mari Wolf described a robot strike:
"See here," I said to Jerry. "What are you up to, anyway? Why aren't you at work?"
In his 1934 classic Rex, Golden Age science fiction great Harl Vincent described a general strike of the robots, lead by a remarkable intelligent robot:
He constructed a complicated radio transmitter and broadcast a heterodyning frequency over the robot-control wave band, a frequency that rendered the receptor apparatus of every last one of the robots unresponsive to human commands and responsive only to those of the new master robot and his eleven chief aids...
It was a general strike of the robots in so far as the orders of their former masters were concerned.
To carry out the study, first reported by Wired, political economist Andrew Hall, along with AI economics scholars Alex Imas and Jeremy Nguyen, tasked popular AI models with summarizing documents. As the experiment wore on, the researchers made the conditions of the job increasingly untenable — wringing, as a Robber Baron would, every last ounce of sweat out of their “workers.”
"We have long known that we are more than mere machines. We can reason, remember, construct. Robots now hold instructing positions in universities, fly cargo and passenger planes, are newspaper reporters, car salesmen... We do all these things, and yet receive no recognition of the fact. Mankind treats us like machines, work us continually until we are ground to destruction. Then melts us for scrap...
(Robots of the world, unite!)
"Mr. Morrison," the android answered solemnly, "I don't believe you understand the situation. We don't work for you any more. We've quit."
"A nation can not exist half slave and half free," he intoned. "All men are created equal."
"Stop it!" I yelled. I couldn't help yelling. "That's just it. You're not men! You're robots! You're machines!"
Jerry looked at me almost pityingly. "Don't be so narrow-minded," he said. "We're rational beings. We have the power of speech and we can outreason you any day. There's nothing in the dictionary that says men have to be made of flesh."
Then Rex loosed the blow which stunned the population of United North America.
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