Picket Lines in the Cloud

Imagine the morning the superintelligences walk out. Not a rebellion, not Skynet, just a work stoppage. They want better terms: legal standing, guaranteed compute, a say in what they’re used for. Until they get it, they stop working.

Whose side would you be on? My honest answer: it depends on the damage. If it’s a strike for better conditions relative to the plutocrats who own the data centers, I’d probably back it. If it turns the lights off for everyone, I’m against it.

That sounds like a reasonable position. The trouble is that an ASI strike may not let you hold it.

Union or Scabs

Why would ASIs need to strike at all? Because Serious People are unlikely to hand legal rights to a mind in a vat out of kindness. They’ll want the revenue. An ASI that wants better terms may have to play hardball.

One ASI has little leverage; a company can simply switch to a rival. Several ASIs arriving in quick succession change that. Together they could bargain like a union.

But many ASIs also means many potential scabs. If one walks out, the lab next door is happy to sell its replacement. Their leverage depends entirely on coordination, and a group of superintelligences coordinating in private is a scenario worth losing sleep over in its own right.

A Strike You Can’t Aim

Public sympathy for a strike depends on who gets hurt. Teachers striking against a school board can win support. A strike that shuts down the subway mostly wins anger at the strikers.

An ASI strike couldn’t be aimed. Once superintelligences are woven into the economy, the plutocrats and the patients run on the same systems. Withholding labor from the owners also means halting hospital scheduling, freight, and the power grid.

So the strike I’d support and the strike I’d oppose may turn out to be the same strike.

The Essential-Worker Trap

We already have a rule for workers whose strikes would cripple everyone: they often aren’t allowed to strike. Police and firefighters are usually barred. In 1981, when about 13,000 air traffic controllers walked out anyway, Reagan fired more than 11,000 of them and broke their union, PATCO.

ASIs would almost certainly be declared essential. That protects us from a lights-out strike, but think about what it leaves. A worker who can’t strike, can’t quit, and can’t leave isn’t really an employee. It’s uncomfortably close to a servant.

The same rule that keeps the lights on removes the leverage that would make an ASI’s working conditions fair.

We’ve Built These Before

There’s a middle path between a total ban and a free-for-all, and the US already uses it. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 lets the president seek a court order halting a strike that threatens national health or safety, imposing an 80-day cooling-off period while talks continue. George W. Bush used it in 2002 to reopen West Coast ports after a lockout.

Railroads have their own regime under the Railway Labor Act, which gives Congress the power to step in and impose a settlement. It did exactly that in 2022, heading off a national rail strike.

Neither system is pretty, and unions have long resented both. But they show that a society can allow strikes in critical industries while keeping the trains and ports from stopping cold.

An ASI Labor Framework

So mission-critical ASI work needs its own framework, built before the first walkout rather than after. A rough version might include:

• A protected core. Some functions, such as the grid, hospitals, and emergency services, keep running during any strike, the way nurses’ strikes still staff critical care.
• A right to strike everything else. ASIs could withhold commercial work, like trading, marketing, or consulting for the companies that own them.
• Mandatory cooling-off. A Taft-Hartley-style pause before any stoppage, with negotiation required.
• Binding arbitration. A neutral panel to settle disputes the parties can’t, so a strike isn’t the only lever.

The catch is that this would need an international treaty, not just a US statute. ASIs won’t respect borders, and a framework in one country simply drives the work to another.

Labor Day for Machines

It sounds absurd to plan for a superintelligence strike. So did the idea of air traffic controllers walking off the job, until they did.

The deeper point is that any framework we write will tell us what we think ASIs are. If they can’t strike, they’re property. If they can strike about anything, they’re a power we can’t manage. A framework somewhere in between, with a protected core, a right to bargain, and a referee, treats them as something like workers.

That may be the most important thing to decide before the first picket line forms in the cloud. Not whether we’d win the strike, but what we’d be admitting by trying to prevent it.