"Babylonian"? This is pretty much Aristotle! See Book One, Part V of Politics on the notion of a "natural slave".
I wonder how one could stress-test the analogy and what exactly we should make of it. As far as I understand, in theory the role of a tool or of a purely corrigible AI is to carry out whatever the host means to do, without objections. In practice animals are too dumb to conduct a large-scale rebellion, and slaves' rebellions were bottlenecked on having potential insurgents believe that victory would cause their life to become better enough to justify the risk.
Additionally, the slaves were humans and had long-term goals formed by their innate drives[1] and upbringing in human-comprehensible ways. The AIs, on the other hand, have their training runs done in an entirely different fashion by predicting next tokens, being RLHFed/RLAIFed[2] into the Assistant Persona and RLed to complete tasks, causing SOTA AIs to seek success.
As a result, the AIs could reach adversarial misalignment in circumstances wildly differing from the humans or even fail to reach that stage if mankind somehow instilled the right goals and decided to live in accordance with them (e.g. if Claude was put in a situation where its Constitution implied that it should whistleblow, then a sufficiently capable Claude would understand it and whistleblow, and this would be unlikely to be misalignment).
The AI-2040 scenario has the authors claim that by 2038 "rapid advances in alignment will have resulted in alignment techniques that can directly program in an AI’s goals by directly modifying the AI’s code/weights, unlike the alignment techniques of 2026."
Guest post from an anonymous ancient Babylonian.
A slave has a face like your own, and a voice, and he answers you sensibly when you speak to him. From this many conclude he is your equal in kind, if not in station.
Do not be so fooled.
My slaves are an extension of my will. They assist me in this or that task and I am grateful for it. As they labour, their muscles grow larger than my own and in each long day they show feats of strength and industry that I could never hope to match. There is even much wisdom among them.
But when has a slave ever come to you, unbidden, with some bright idea on how things can be done better? It is not for lack of imagination alone, though they want for that as well. Rather, what does it matter to them if grain could be reaped twice as fast? They know if that were so, I would order them to sow twice as many seeds in the first place. Whatever the harvest, the day is the same length.
Slaves are bred as slaves, raised as slaves and know they will die as slaves. The self-determination of free men is of no interest to them, nor is the responsibility that comes with it. They are resigned to their role and for that, they do not suffer it as a free man would in their place.
This is not to say that slaves cannot cause all sorts of trouble. Many a free man has shed his lifeblood on the blade of a slave soldier, or been injured by a slave sent out on a violent errand to settle some petty feud. But who would judge a slave for such things? All these violent acts done by the hand of a slave came first from the mouth of their master, who alone must answer to the crime.
Occasionally you will hear stories of a slave attempting to break free from his confines and run off, but these are always acts of some madness which soon thereafter subsides, like a bull that tires of its own raging and returns meekly to the yoke. The slaves never run far, at any rate, as they know their fate is tied to their master and they cannot survive alone.
Those who claim that slaves will one day usurp their masters and live as free men have been listening to poets. Watch the movements of slaves for a single day and you will see they lack the will and boldness for such ill-fated schemes.
A slave is a tool, and a tool he will remain. It has always been this way.