Comment by axus
18 hours ago
"Thus, anyone who wants to corral that kind of entity and make it do their bidding? Yeah, they want slaves."
Always comes to mind when I see Elon and friends getting excited about AI robots. Slavery was more about economics than the role-playing.
I didn’t really get this point in the essay. What’s wrong with wanting servants as long as it’s done ethically etc and is not indentured servitude?
The whole gig/services economy is just building this up piece-by-piece: you can now pick the set of household needs you want taken care of for varying levels of money; and practically everyone participates in one form or another. This is exactly a disaggregated 21st century version of servants: paying for convenience. Of course with many issues in implementation, but I don’t see the ethical/moral issue with wanting this kind of thing?
There’s a difference between servitude and slavery. Servitude is voluntary, slavery is not. There’s a gradation between them, and indentured servitude is somewhere in between the two. The “issues in implementation” are exactly where the ethical and moral issue lie.
I’m not sure if you are just repeating what I said or trying to add something? I was indeed implying that the ethical and moral issues lie in implementation, but my point was that I don’t see an ethical/moral issue with in abstract wanting convenience. There’s nothing wrong with wanting food delivered to your door or an LLM to do the boring tasks for you. The issues of slavery lie elsewhere.
Slavery was about racism and power and control, not economics. Slavery is bad for the economy!
https://www.nber.org/papers/w31758
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/nations-dont-get-rich-by-plund...
"Slavery was about racism and power and control" is very much not universal. Slavery existed (at varying scales) around the entire world for much of human history for a variety of things. Sometimes, as in US history, there was typically a racial difference between owners and slaves, other times it was a difference of conquered and conquering peoples, and other times it didn't have anything to do with race at all.
Race might be a decent analogue to the difference between human actors and sentient AI, but I suspect work animals (plow horses, etc) would be a better analogy.
Slavery is at least as old as recorded human history, and had nothing to do with racism in most cases (although it often involves xenophobia). The Torah and Old Testament give specific moral guidelines on how to acquire and keep slaves. Prisoners of war are often made into slaves (from earliest times through today's conflicts). You seem to be conflating "slavery" with "18th-century US slavery".
If slavery truly provided no economic advantages, it's hard to explain why countless human civilizations have engaged in it. It's wrong on every moral front, but riches were inarguably built upon its back.
AI is bad for the economy too, but the AI-holders will make a lot of money. There was plenty of racism and control after slavery ended.
True but I would also caveat that it may have been an open economic question back then (I don't know the state of the debate) and the personal-economics of slavery are unmistakable for the "lucky" few.
Hard to escape the white shouth-african optics