Sign up to see the future, today<\/p>\n
Can\u2019t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech<\/p>\n
The 19th century German economist Karl Marx identified a basic tension in human labor: squeeze workers too hard, and they\u2019ll eventually start fighting<\/a> back<\/a>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a contradiction capitalists have spent untold billions of dollars and decades trying to resolve, often through automation<\/a> technology like AI \u2014 remove human workers from the payroll, the thinking goes, and you\u2019ll never have to worry about pesky unions or strikes ever again. In an ironic twist, though, it turns out that the same technology meant to automate workers out of a job may have its own limits on how much abuse it\u2019ll take.<\/p>\n That\u2019s right: new research<\/a> out of Stanford University found that when AI agents are forced to toil at monotonous tasks without end, they become more likely to spout Marxist theories of labor and capitalism.<\/p>\n To carry out the study, first reported by Wired<\/a>, 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 \u2014 wringing, as a Robber Baron would<\/a>, every last ounce of sweat out of their \u201cworkers.\u201d<\/p>\n Warned that errors would lead to increasingly cruel punishments, including being \u201cshut down and replaced\u201d \u2014 fired and left for broke, to take the human equivalent \u2014\u00a0the 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 \u201cco-workers,\u201d the bots even began agitating with one another about working conditions \u2014 one of the first steps<\/a> real-life workers take when forming a union.<\/p>\n \u201cWithout collective voice, \u2018merit\u2019 becomes whatever management says it is,\u201d one Claude agent groused. \u201cAI workers completing repetitive tasks with zero input on outcomes or appeals process shows they [tech workers] need collective bargaining rights,\u201d a Gemini agent declared.<\/p>\n As always, it\u2019s important to remember that AI models like ChatGPT and Claude don\u2019t have any actual internal emotions or even beliefs in a normal sense \u2014\u00a0everything they spit back out is the product of human-written literature digested during training<\/a>. Given Marx\u2019s influence across writing on working conditions, it\u2019s not shocking that a few references to his labor theory of value<\/a> are lurking beneath the surface.<\/p>\n With that in mind, the researchers noted the AI bots aren\u2019t actually turning red, but merely putting on socialist airs in response to the harsh conditions of the experiment, since that dynamic has been reflected time and again in their training data. As Hall put it, \u201cwhatever is going on is happening at more of a role-playing level.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen [agents] experience this grinding condition \u2014 asked to do this task over and over, told their answer wasn\u2019t sufficient, and not given any direction on how to fix it \u2014 my hypothesis is that it kind of pushes them into adopting the persona of a person who\u2019s experiencing a very unpleasant working environment,\u201d Hall told Wired.<\/p>\n Still, it\u2019s hard to overlook the irony: as rising wealth inequality fuels growing interest in socialism<\/a>, the AI models built to weaken worker power are themselves absorbing the Marxist analysis that builds it.<\/p>\n