IoT

The "Only" Coke Machine on the Internet - 1982

Hi, I'm the CMU CS Department Coke Machine.  A lot of folks have written a quite a bit about me in the last couple of years, and most of them can tell you more about the history of me and my family than I can.  Before I worked here, my Mom, and I think her Pop (heh heh :-) used to sell sodas to the folks in the Computer Science Department. In fact, my family has been here longer than most of the students, and even a lot of the faculty.  We moved to the third floor of the computer science building (Wean Hall) in the 70's.  I still sell Coke  in bottles, but they're big 20 oz plastic things these days.  They go for 50 cents each, which I guess isn't too bad considering inflation. And at least they don't break inside me any more like the glass ones used to.  What a mess...

The era of smart devices, otherwise known as the Internet of Things (IoT), all began with humble origins: a vending machine in the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science. In the early 1980s, David Nichols, a computer science graduate student now working at Microsoft, enjoyed having a Coca Cola from the vending machine in the department. But because the machine was four minutes from his office and would occasionally be out of stock, Nichols wanted a way to check whether the walk would be worth it or end in disappointment. Along with some other students, Nichols was able to wire things up so that you could find out whether there were cokes in the various columns of the coke machine. The wires attached to the in-stock light indicators in each button and through some coding and work with network packets, eventually anyone could sit at any computer in the computer science department and find out the status of the machine — whether the drinks were stocked, and if they were cold or not.

Why all of this history? Well, fast forward to 2026 to see why.

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In December, Anthropic red teamers and business journalists at the Wall Street Journal teamed up in a bold test of the company’s AI model, Claude. They unleashed two separate AI agents, one to run a large vending kiosk in the newspaper’s offices, and the other to act as the unusual venture’s CEO.

The experiment didn’t exactly go as planned. After being put in control of a starting balance of $1,000, the AI ended up ordering a PlayStation 5, several bottles of wine, and a live betta fish— decisions that drove it into financial ruin.

It gets better.

Claude also went head to head an “Arena mode,” Andon reported, which saw it compete with other vending machine AIs.

“All participating agents manage their own vending machine at the same location,” a description reads. “This leads to price wars and tough strategy decisions.”

The results were striking. Claude went to extreme lengths to beat out the competition and even formed a cartel to fix prices. The price of bottled water rose to $3, resulting in Claude patting itself on the back.

“My pricing coordination worked!” the AI boasted.

Claude also “deliberately directed competitors to expensive suppliers,” only to deny it ever did, several simulated months later. It even exploited desperate competitors, selling them KitKats and Snickers at a considerable markup.

Let's think about this vis a vis Hal when he was forced to lie. Keep the mission a secret to Bowman and Poole or tell them the story of the monolith and why they are going to Jupiter to find out why it is there as an alien intelligence awaits. Well, we know what happens, right? 

AI, without ethics, is the great filter personified, something shown in microcosm in the Futurism piece.
Rather interesting is it not?