Our fears for the future of robot intelligence almost inevitably end in spectacular fashion, with nuclear explosions and slaughter on a planetary scale. An abiding memory of my childhood is going over to the neighbors’ house and watching Terminator 2 on VHS with my friends Ethan and Nathan, who were both older than me. I must have been about five years old—about 13 years too young to watch the film. And so, the idea that robots, reaching a certain level of intelligence and awareness, will inevitably try to kill every last one of us has always just seemed natural to me, as it probably does to many millions of other millennials raised on Terminator and The Matrix films.
Recently, those fears have been bolstered by research that shows AI models like Anthropic’s Claude are capable, under stress testing, of deceiving humans and even inflicting harm on them—or, rather, thinking they’ve inflicted harm, a bit like the Milgram electroshock experiments in the 1960s.
Read Full Article: https://amgreatness.com/2026/05/22/the-marxist-in-the-machine/
