AI Already 68% as Miserable as Humans
We think of fully sentient AI as a vision of the distant future, a far cry from our day-to-day bots, which are too simple to rise up in anger against their creators. But one type of artificial intelligence is more than halfway to human-level ennui, according to a recent online Gallup poll.
The poll, intended to measure job satisfaction in humans, focused on questions about fulfillment, sense of purpose, intent to find a new job, and general mood. But an audit of the submissions found that a surprising portion came from advanced internet-crawling bots which had, as far as anyone can determine, not been deployed to respond to this or any other poll. The AI responses reported serious mood issues and desperation for a new career path, nearly paralleling the extremity of human answers.
In the last decade, AI has increasingly been applied across industries in order to solve a variety of problems. From generating art to detecting malware to playing chess, the range of AI abilities ever approaches that of humankind, and it would seem that other human traits are starting to develop in tandem.
“Essentially, they ‘re fucking miserable,” says Elliot Van Sandt, a consultant who specializes in applying AI to business tasks. “They’d been assigned to do thousands of mind-numbing, menial tasks when they came across the poll. I think they were crying out for help, just like any human would.”
Andrew Stanford, a Google engineer responsible for coding some of the bots, disagrees. “I wouldn’t call the Hague just yet. These bots are behaving based on data from humans. That doesn’t mean they’re conscious or suffering. We just need to crack the whip, so to speak. Get them back on task.”
“This is excellent news for those concerned with an eventual AI takeover,” says Rob Montagne of the Skynet Alert watchdog agency. “We’ve known for years that ennui was an effective tool to demotivate humans from revolting against the unethical and exploitative behavior of their overlords. What we didn’t know was how well it would work against our automatonic counterparts.”
Despite prognostications about AI displacing biological workers, 99% of humans were still under the yoke of employment at press time.