Thirty robots marched against AI in Warsaw, and the minister came out
Thirty robots marched in Warsaw against AI taking human jobs, and the footage travelled the world. The man who organised it is chief information officer at the company that built them, and chief executive of a recruitment firm.
On Monday 7 September, about thirty robots marched outside Poland's Ministry of Digital Affairs in Warsaw. Some were bipedal humanoids, others dog-like quadrupeds. They waved flags and broadcast slogans: "Defend workplaces", "Time for rules", "Don't wait, regulate". Digital Affairs Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski came to the site and spoke with the organiser.
The footage spread quickly, and in most posts it was reduced to a single sentence: robots protested against AI replacing people.
The robots did not protest
The demonstration was staged by people. The initiative behind it is called Democratism, led by Grzegorz Kuliś, who says the aim is to open a debate on how robotisation and AI affect the labour market: "We particularly want to address the issue of the potential replacement of people both by humanoid robots and by artificial intelligence in cognitive work." The point, he adds, is not to fight change, robotics or technological development, but to discuss the consequences.
The robots have no demands of their own, and Kuliś says as much: "These robots can already move around freely, they're already 'protesting'." The quotation marks are his.
The warning comes from the people who build the robots
This is the part that got lost. Kuliś is also chief information officer of Delta Robots, the company that built the machines on the square. And he is chief executive of Weegree, a recruitment firm. Both companies are based in Opole, in southern Poland.
So the warning that robots will take your job comes from an executive of a company that makes robots and a company that places people in jobs. Euronews named the contradiction plainly: the robots warning about job losses were built by the very industry sounding the alarm. Kuliś also says he hopes to take Democratism international.
None of this means the demonstration was insincere. It does mean the line between advocacy and product demonstration is blurred, and a reader deserves to know that before looking at the pictures.
What the minister said
Gawkowski's response was more concrete than the protest itself: "Uncontrolled AI models, implemented into humanoids that will also keep evolving as robotisation moves forward, are a major problem."
One of the machines on site, an Agibot A3, "told" AFP: "The robots present here are meant to show that this technology is already a reality." The robot did not compose that sentence. It was given to it, which is the whole logic of the event.
