Anthropic Researchers Warn That Humans Could End Up Being "Meat Robots" Controlled by AI

Researchers at one of the world's leading AI labs are warning that humans may soon be little more than "meat robots" for near-future artificial intelligence systems.

During a recent interview with AI podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, Anthropic researchers Sholto Douglas and Trenton Bricken were surprisingly casual when fretting that the technology they're working to build may soon render us into AI-controlled androids — or, at the very least, further grim job loss to the technology.

"There is this whole spectrum of crazy futures," Douglas, who worked at Google DeepMind until earlier this year, told the 24-year-old podcaster. One such future involves a "drop in white collar workers" over the next two to five years, the researcher said — one that he thinks will come to pass "even if algorithmic progress stalls out."

Bricken, meanwhile, had more grandiose prognostications about the future he and his colleagues in the AI space are building.

"The really scary future is one in which AIs can do everything except for the physical robotic tasks," he declared. "In which case, you’ll have humans with AirPods, and glasses and there’ll be some robot overlord controlling the human through cameras by just telling it what to do."

(Yes, you read that right — this AI researcher did, in fact, refer to fellow humans as "it." )

"Basically," Bricken continued, "you're having human meat robots."

 

Douglas quickly jumped in at that point to, it seems, defend the technology.

"Not necessarily saying," he interjected, "that that's what the AIs would want to do or anything like that."

Regardless of AI intent — if such a thing could exist — Douglas reasoned that we humans are in for a "pretty terrible decade" as the technology takes over.

Human labor will, Douglas predicted, primarily be valued upon how well we can do physical work that AI cannot, like so many Taskrabbits for the algorithmic powers that be — but luckily, we make "fantastic robots" to that end.

"That's a shocking, shocking world," he concluded. We've got to say we agree.

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