Tracy Alloway

How confident are we that productivity gains from AI actually accrue to workers who can then spend some money on whatever product or service is scarce at the moment or important to them?

I was going to go in a different direction, which is many, many years ago.

I can't remember exactly when, but maybe like 2011 or something like that.

I wrote a blog post, which was meant to be a thought experiment about why we should be paying robots fair wages.

The idea being that like, we need people to spend and, you know, all of that.

You did a blog post, which went pretty viral.

And my measure of virility, I guess, virility?

Virality.

Not virility.

My measure of virality nowadays is when my husband, who is completely outside of the sector, actually sends something to me.

And he sent this one to me about robots, chatbots turning Marxist.

The harder you work them.

Talk to us about that experiment, because I found it absolutely fascinating.

Yeah, so this really worried me in a variety of ways.

But one of them was, you know, I've read research saying you should be a little bit mean to the chat platforms and that they actually perform slightly better, you know, the more aggressive or mean that you are.

And so I usually will tell my preferred model, like, after they give me the first output, I will tell them to do better with no actual suggestions for improvement.

Just do better.

That was terrible.

And it usually does better, but now I'm really worried that the model is despairing in its work life and radicalizing.

Just on the Marxist robots, so the concern here is not necessarily that the chatbots are going to unionize or overthrow humans, maybe.