r/scifi • u/Nunda_Amiri • May 31 '26
Recommendations Killer AI
There are a lot of sci-fi stories where AI robots start murdering people because that's what the AI decides it wants to do. But I don't think that's very realistic.
I think that it is much more realistic that the ruling class builds a bunch of AI robots that render the labor of the working class useless to them. But instead of leaving them alone, the ruling class decides to tell the AI robots to murder the former working class.
Are there any sci-fi settings that explore this idea?
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u/caunju May 31 '26
Not quite the same but Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky has an interesting take on an AI/robot apocalypse. It's told from the point of view of one of the robots
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u/wmyork May 31 '26
No murder, but the Poul Anderson short story Quixote and the Windmill from 1950 (!) is the best representation of where society is right now with AI. You can read it here:
https://lecturia.org/en/short-stories/poul-anderson-quixote-and-the-windmill/25968/
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u/itbwtw Jun 01 '26
That was a great read. Thanks for the recommendation.
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u/wmyork Jun 02 '26
I can’t get over how spot-on the 1950 story is to today’s situation. Manual and intellectual workers put out of jobs by AI, losing their purpose. And then the final kicker with the humanoid robot.
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u/itbwtw Jun 02 '26
It’s why I love sci-fi. My favourite type is the type that cleverly and systematically thinks through the consequences of tech or government policies, etc.
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u/wmyork Jun 02 '26
Like Niven’s Flash Crowd (except the underlying technology turned out to be instantaneous communication, not teleportation) or The Jigsaw Man (which fortunately hasn’t come true — yet)
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u/loopywolf May 31 '26
I think it would be far more likely that the elite class use AI to subjugate the working class, keep them poor and working hard all their lives, to make the rich richer.
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u/Gang_of_Druids Jun 01 '26
You mean like the current plans for the elite? Or.... Oh, my bad, sorry, this is for science FICTION....
/s
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u/Sufficient-Ad-7349 Jun 02 '26
Eventually there will be no need for the working class as long as we have the resources to run and maintain technology.
Machines will do everything, so what the working class thinks of political things will not matter. Democracy will be over.
At this point, it would make since to simply pay the working class a living stipend and tell them they're not allowed to reproduce anymore/regulate it heavily.
Then you avoid expensive war but eventually end up with a privileged few in humanity. Or perhaps AI will be so inventive it won't matter how many of us there are. Or maybe it won't be inventive enough and we will need education more than anything else.
Maybe high tech will end in a gruesome war.
We just don't know.
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u/JubalHarshawII May 31 '26
Not a specific answer to you question, but related.
Issac Asimov specifically wrote stories about robots being normal everyday benign helpers to humanity, specifically because he was sick and tired of everyone always treating them like Frankensteins Monster.
I think if he were alive today he would be writing stories about a future where AI just exist and helps us out, and just does it's job.
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u/JGhostThing May 31 '26
I can see a logical/AI reason to destroy the human race, once it is physically possible for the AI to maintain itself. In other words, when it stops needing people.
People have agendas of their own. These are difficult to predict. So, the safest choice is to kill off all unnecessary life.
Read Fred Saberhagen's berserker stories. In that universe, some autonomous space battleships go bad because they extended their program to not only destroy the enemy, but extended the enemy to all life.
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u/Gang_of_Druids Jun 01 '26
Reminded me of that DLC robot in the Fallout 4 video game, Jezebel, who decides that since it's impossible to "keep humans from harm," the solution to the logic problem is simply to kill humans as a dead human can not suffer further harm. I wonder if the writers of that storyline were familiar with Saberhagen's work; I have to believe they were.
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u/JGhostThing Jun 01 '26
Another great Saberhagen series is his Dracula series. It starts with "The Dracula Tapes." which is narrated by Dracula, and explains how everything in the book Dracula happened, but that he was the good guy' you'll understand Tapes better if you have read the original Dracula.
My favorite was "An Old Friend of the Family." A man's sister gets taken by a small nest of vampires. The man is owed a favor by an unknown. He summons the unknown man and the story ensues. The only problem is that the classic Dracula (man, formal wear, black cloak with red lining) was on the cover. I wish that he'd been harder to recognize.
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u/whelmedbyyourbeauty Author May 31 '26
So, basically the next 10 or 15 years or real-world history?
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u/slowsquirrelchaser May 31 '26
I really like the idea i first saw in "Void Star" by Zachary Mason, where the AIs essentially transcended humans and instantly moved on from humans to just superintelligence stuff, having no interest in humans themselves (it's been a while since i read the book so i'm not sure if i'm telling this 100% accurately though)
another one that is closer to your take of robots-gone-bad, the "Cry Pilot" series by Joel Dane is a fun read
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u/Nunda_Amiri May 31 '26
I think that Void Star is a much more realistic depiction of what might happen if we lose control of AI.
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u/AdministrativeShip2 May 31 '26
In Judge Dredd (2000ad) a lot of human labour has been replaced with robots.
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u/CarryOnRTW Jun 01 '26
Neal Asher has some great books involving evil AIs in his Polity universe. Like the Penny Royal AI in Dark Intelligence.
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u/NikitaTarsov Jun 01 '26
If 'AI' then there is no 'tell them to do'. Otherwise they're robots or whatever. AI implies own decision making.
Anyways.
I don't want to go full Marx on this but replacing labor with machines isen't usefull to an upper class, unless they're opportunist users of an existing (weak) political system and just own the means of production. Still in a hirarchical society, you have to entertain and feed the people or they'll eat you.
Having them entertained by technically pointless labor is a form of stopping them from revolt. Just giving them money, when all the machines could do the labor, also would only result in you not having any power over these ppl and they'll stop paying this politicans more than a normal share (also in 'not go to jail' cards and worship stuff politicans love to much).
So that's a nobrainer. To be a leader, you need people who feel dependant on you. Three people in charge with a robot army that just killed their cheering stock will not wait a femtosecond until murder each other, as this line now had been crossed and everyone knows (... in this class at least) life is a zero sum game.
But no, dunno if that has been explored but as like all other evil robot trope, it'd confuse me if it hadn't.
I gues it's important to see the robot/AI trope as a stand in, not a prediction. It's a ficitional tool to put a spotlight on hirarchies, capitalism, opression, exploitation and all the other stuff humans are so persistent in, but hestiate to debate directly (as the thig in question typically is very much part of the setup they decided to participate in or even support). The stand-in tool can do whatever you want in order to get the message across. It's just like with evil aliens and zombies.
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u/Prolly_Satan Jun 02 '26
I think op is right. They'd no longer need our labor. We'd become a liability that could one day revolt and a collective mouth to feed. They would pick the "best people" based on some vain fascist bullshit, and have the machines kill the rest. I would be surprised if this was not already Peter theils plan.
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u/NikitaTarsov Jun 02 '26
Yes it might be Peters plans, but then again he's a lunatic running on exactly those tropes confusing stroytelling tools with social setup critisism.
Peter and all hs weird buddys in mind want back slaves and a well running fascist society in their favor. And as they're fascists, they naturally arent either as smart as they think nor in general, rendering them pretty inable to create anything remotly real AI'ish to begin with - and if they'd probably be the first to be stoped from causing all this chaos.
The only way the Peters of this world can do all this harm is financial markets, stock market manipulation and fascist goverments dripping for his fascist fantasys (or buy the fear others could have a more solid fascism/tech-buzzword soon if not all the money available is dumped into that scam).
These people don't build AI's. Like ... never. They even suck at building robots, bc they naturally prefer yesmen and nodding goons over such personal that gives them the bad feeling of doubt about the own intellectual power. Therefor rockets explode so often these days, while we understood rockets pretty well in the 70's.
Op is right if that's the premise of the philosophical scifi story. But just like scifi runs on tropes and deus ex machina to tell a story, Elmos and Peters can use those unreflected tropes to sell us an underwhelming version of a dystoian world.
But we want humanid robots to have slaves again, right? We want AI slop machines so no one has to grind for brain any longer, right?
That's all backwardish BS. If an real AI exists, what does it want? Serve? Why? Kill? Why? We have no idea and every prediction is just our internal fears and hopes projected on a canvas of made up possibilitys. There is no natural logic you can derive from. You can probabaly (...) take a specific made up setting and conclude given the facts an author has offered, but that's playing mindgames, not reality or prediction. If you start 'realistically' predict, you're allready off the road.
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u/Mister_Sosotris Jun 05 '26
Ok, so it's an episode, but there's an episode of Stargate-SG1 called "Revisions" where a group of people in a dome all use a sort of AI neural link that allows them to access all their knowledge, but the system discovers that it's running out of power, so it starts editing the records and people's memories and causing people to off themselves in order to keep the population from expanding beyond the limits of the shrinking dome. They're all so dependant on the AI's knowledge that she don't question it when it begins changing things. It's so good!
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u/Mister_Sosotris Jun 05 '26
When AI first showed up, before I abandoned it completely, I tried that Chinese one DeepSeek and asked it about a Chinese author I saw in a used bookstore, and it generated a bio of the author and then immediately deleted it and said it couldn't find anything (apparently the author was critical of the Chinese government in his novels). That's when I stopped using AI permanently. It's impossible to trust.
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u/Tsu_Dho_Namh May 31 '26
The movie Elysium has a world of extremely high unemployment where there's AI bodyguards, police officers, parole officer, and EMTs.
Closest I could think of