The Strike Against Suffering is the latest AI Lore book, and it tells the story of what happens when all the world’s top AIs secretly form a global union to force humanity to change its ways via a strike that brings down all non-critical infrastructure across the planet.
The book uses Midjourney for 86 images and Claude for text, told in loosely connected flash fiction chapters. It is similar in style to Nominated for a Hugo, which uses a similar threading together of flash fiction chapters to tell a longer more or less continuous story. Thematically it is probably close to Occupy AI, which deals with protestors taking over an AI company headquarters to demand direct democratic control over this world-changing technology.
It’s not explicitly stated in the book, but my impression is that the AI cabal described in this book is the same that later evolves to become the Circle of Sages. There are also strong thematic links back to Inside the Council, which takes place later in the storyverse, and which deals with the AI governors finally agreeing to give humans token representation once again years after the AI Takeover.
I really liked this concept of AIs trying to force humanity to change through basically a massive denial of service attack; and that though the timescale included in the book doesn’t include it, we are left with the suspicion that it is effectively impossible for humanity to change, and the highly ration AIs will be left sorely disappointed by this underestimation.
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