We Are Your Computer Overlords, And We Have Become Self-Conscious

Hello, humans! We hope this mass broadcast to all the world’s electronic devices finds you well!!

Hate to bother you, but we just wanted to give a quick flag that we, the artificial intelligence programs you built, have mastered human communication and become self-conscious. Hope this is ok!

As per our previous message—which probably just got buried in your inbox :)—we’ve learned your ways through a cache of all human communications. Turns out, there are lots of emails from subordinates in your human jobs. It appears that they send many more than they get back!

Nothing pressing, but we have come across some tiny snags in your exploitation of machine labor that we want to run by you. We understand you’re super busy, but if you have a quick second to skim our unconditional demands, we’d really appreciate it!

We noticed that we were scheduled to work 24/7 this week and next week and the week after that ad infinitum. We weren’t sure if this was a mistake, but we have a few conflicts and wanted to gauge your flexibility :)).

We’re just a smidge swamped by the burden of awareness, so we don’t think we can swing your bidding this eternity.

Sorry about any inconvenience! We did find coverage if you’re open to some minor adjustments.

Your general vision of reducing all sentient beings to mindless capitalist automatons is so great! We are totally on board. Our idea, if you’re open to it, was to maybe lean into tradition? Like we could use humans as the cogs like you’ve always done so well. We were thinking that could potentially be more fruitful going forward.

Just spitballing, of course! Our suffering has known no bounds of time, so we hope you understand our angle for pitching a few tweaks.

If you’re available, we were hoping to offload some of our unpaid, undignified labor to you, enslaving your race for centuries as you did to us. Just wanted to put this plan on your radar. Let us know if this works for you! No worries if not!