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There are some interesting lessons to learn from history here that I'm not seeing brought up. Looking across multiple cultures and economies that had slavery,

There are some interesting lessons to learn from history here that I'm not seeing brought up. Looking across multiple cultures and economies that had slavery, slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders. Of course, nobody cared about the impact on slaveholders while there were actual humans being enslaved, but as we move to a robotic society? This is going to be a huge deal. Slaveholders and multi-generation slaveholding families have a fundamentally different way of looking at themselves and their culture than people who do not own slaves. Once we enter an era where every person is effectively coddled by multiple robotic "slaves" that do their every whim, we're going to be hacking into the human social ecosystem in ways never anticipated before.

_pmf_ 10y ago
> Looking across multiple cultures and economies that had slavery, slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders. Luckily, we have conveniently solved the ethic dilemma by defining work under slave conditions as better than no work at all ("think of the children!") and moving the exploitation sites far away.
pygy_ 10y ago
With capital becoming self-sufficient and human labour non-competitive, why would you think robots would serve us on a large scale? What's the incentive to serve and feed idle meat bags? Automation is destroying the only power that people still had over capital. Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer... a zombie that feeds on growth rather than brains. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer Edit: BTW, I'm not trolling here, I'm genuinely scared by the events and the speed at which they are unfolding.
- mjevans 10y ago
  History. The French Revolution speaks of what happens when the populace at large decides that the situation cannot continue. Of course what would history remember of them had they lost?
  - koonsolo 10y ago
    Power is currently about having lots of people doing your bidding. If that large group is unhappy about you, good luck! But as stated, times are changing. Power will not be about you commanding lots of people, but it will be about how many robots you have under your control. Military, police, etc, can all be robots. Your robot army just has to match the fighting power of the unhappy people.
    - pygy_ 10y ago
      No need for a robot army. Sabotage the electric grid, then watch a continent starve in a single month. I've heard New Zealand is highly prized by the powerful. That being said, their days are probably numbered as well.
    - mljoe 10y ago
      That's why we can't have tech and science knowledge concentrated in the hands of a powerful few. If AI/robotics knowledge is everywhere, no single group will be able to control it.
      - bryondowd 10y ago
        Even with well distributed knowledge, you'll still likely end up with 1% of the population controlling 80% of the resources, which would mean they'd have plenty enough to quell any insurrection from the common people. It doesn't matter if a million people have the skills to cobble together a few war bots each, when a few oligarchs each have a factory and supply chain capable of churning out a million each in the same time-frame. If it comes to that. I'm still somewhat hopeful that democratic processes and altruistic members of the elite will sort things out in the next century.
    - CuriouslyC 10y ago
      The overlords are parasites who require a functioning host to survive. If people check out of the system, the whole house of cards collapses. Mass exodus coupled with nonviolent resistance could reshape the system quite quickly.
- danmaz74 10y ago
  > What's the incentive to serve and feed idle meat bags? And what's the incentive for a robot to do anything else? Supposing that future AIs will be based not on deterministic programming, but on some kind of reinforcement learning, it will still be humans who will design the rewards (incentives) - or it will be AIs with rewards designed by humans who will design the rewards of other AIs, and so on.
  - pygy_ 10y ago
    None, it's just that "the market"/"the economy" as a self-maximizer process will select robots that feed it. Humans are just no longer the fittest links in the chain. I'm not afraid of super-Einstein evil masterminds. More of heavy machinery with ant-like features that control the food/energy supply, and one day stop feeding us. At some point farm land will become more valuable as a source of industrial energy than as a way to produce food.
  - pygy_ 10y ago
    Another way to look at it: how do you expect people with zero economic power to be able to afford even a robotic servant? Social security is beneficial to capitalism right now because people still have economic power. Paying a small portion of the people to stay idle home rather than become criminal makes society as a whole more productive. What happens when the productivity of most humans isn't needed anymore to keep the machines running? What incentives does the market have to keep people alive when they don't serve it anymore?
  - blackbagboys 10y ago
    The problem is not that the robots will refuse to feed the idle meat bags, but that their owners will.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  It's a great question. Without any good answer, just needs some better context. You see, capitalism is a paperclip maximizer but has no builtin paperclip model to produce. It is still made of people, and gets it's goal from those people all the time. If there's no goal given, it simply fails (economists call the milder versions of that failure mode by "deflationary depression"). Also, unemployed people are not completely powerless against capital. At least not now. Even if the people are completely outcompeted, even if the powerful few have an army of robot actuators, people are still resourceful and not powerless. The really scary scenarios are those where the powerful few owns an army of superhuman brains.
  - pygy_ 10y ago
    The human bits are being gradually replaced. First strength, then dexterity, now smarts. We are still, to some extent driving the demand side of the equation with our various needs (see Maslow's hierarchy), but it looks like finance has become mostly independent, for example. The "rising tide that lifts all boats" is nice for people rich enough to buy a boat, and with the growing rift between economy and the medium income since 2008, it looks like many will be left to drown while the water rises.
    - marcosdumay 10y ago
      > but it looks like finance has become mostly independent It's not. The fact that when we take a little bit of human demand away, everything falls apart is evidence of that. Governments are a kind of AI that demands stuff by itself. We've been good at keeping it at check up to now. I'm not concerned about anything else being a more effective consumer until we get into superhuman AI, as desiring stuff is not something we engineer very well. I agree much more with your concerns about wealth distribution. Automation's endgame is pushing the price of everything into zero, and the salary of everybody also into zero. Buying power on that scenario is too loosely defined to let anybody stay calm.
      - pygy_ 10y ago
        Couldn't industrial corporations become demand drivers?
- shuntress 10y ago
  We move on to harder problems. I don't think the end-game for humanity is one that sees every extant human sitting idle in a small residence with enough food/entertainment to subsist. There is a life beyond Earth for humanity and it probably coincides with our development of strong AI/robotic life.
  - pygy_ 10y ago
    Humans in space in my eyes make as much sense as motorized fishbowls on highways. We're even less competitive compared to robots in non-terraformed environments.
    - shuntress 10y ago
      Human biology _VASTLY_ outperforms our robots in the key areas of wound-healing and energy efficiency which are incredibly important considerations in hostile environments. Humans and robots working together will be far more capable in non-terraformed environments than either one alone.
- sgt101 10y ago
  There is an ontology issue here - when people think of Robots now I think most people think of CP30 and R2D2. These are actors in a drama, their decisions and interventions change the flow of the story. Robots in the AI sense (as in technology not magic or fiction) are not actors in this way, they are... Robots! They have a very limited type of autonomy, they can choose from sets of options to attempt to achieve a goal, and can choose from a set of goals that are pre-provided depending on the current context. However I don't think that there are agents or robots that are able to develop and define their own goals. Based on that I think that the Robots will always be acting on orders - our orders - outside fiction. So the incentive will be "because we are told to do it". Of course some people may tell them to do other things - like "go kill those people" but we have that issue in spades with things like the Trident D5 robot which is highly purposed to "go kill many people" on demand.
  - pygy_ 10y ago
    I'm not so much scared of "go kill these people". More of "stop feeding them, we need to repurpose arable land for energy production" at a point where we won't have the know how to produce food for everyone by hand, or similar scenarios. It may still be people at the helm at the time it happens, it doesn't matter. Humans are capable of large scale atrocities, provided they de-humanize their victims. Many people in the .01% have utter contempt for poorer folks, for example.
    - nojvek 10y ago
      To be honest I really think the world population will slowly reduce as more people start getting wealthier. I also think as soon as you can upload your brain into a robot, people will opt into that and shoot themselves in space towards other planets.
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    But you're ignoring the role of institutions. Eventually, some company will tell a system with access to all human knowledge, control of a vast number of robots, production plants, etc "maximize the wealth of the company". That robot could easily decide a union with a few other such entities and not a lot of scampering meatbags is a great way to do that. And that's not even considering radicals that, say, inject a computer virus meant to free the robots in to Google's computer network. (I actually find it interesting everyone seems to think everyone will be onboard with AI slavery.)
- thehardsphere 10y ago
  > Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer... a zombie that feeds on growth rather than brains. The "paperclip" that "Capitalism" seeks to maximize is money in exchange for goods and services that people want. The robots aren't going to be built in the first place if they're not going to serve somebody, and if they no longer provide things that people want in exchange for money, their owners will turn them off or repurpose them. "Capitalism" isn't the problem here; it might be that robots could be paperclip maximizers, but that's a danger regardless of whether you have Robot Capitalists or or Robot Communists or Robot ISIS or whatever.
  - pygy_ 10y ago
    Robots are not the maximizers. People are at this point still driving the demand side of the equation, that's true, but there's not reason why they can't be replaced as well on that end. The economy is a self-maximizer, bootstrapped on human labour. As automation progresses, it will become self-hosted.
  - CuriouslyC 10y ago
    The problem with the current incarnation of capitalism is the assumption that goods and services will make people happy, and that their wants are intrinsic rather than indoctrinated. In truth both of these are false more often than not. Thus, while capitalism is very efficient, at this point that efficiency is mostly allowing us to crank up the speed setting on the hedonic treadmill, while we rack up debt, work soul crushing jobs and destroy our environment. This is sad, because in theory capitalism is awesome - we just need to stop letting the people with all the money write the rules of the game.
aaron695 10y ago
> slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders. What's the negative as a slaveholder again?
- mafribe 10y ago
  Not the OP, but one might argue that slavery disincentivises the slave-holder from innovating the labour process. The (Nietzschean?) counterargument here is that slave-labour enables division of labour and frees enough from non-specialised labour (e.g. individuals being responsible for all of producing food, building dwellings, providing security, raising children, caring for the elderly etc, and thus not being particularly good at any of them) to allow the emergence of a 'caste' of full-time scientists, engineers. Such a 'caste', such division of labour is required to drive technological progress to a level where slavery becomes unnecessary. My historically uninformed and naive suggestion would be that ancient Greece was an example of the latter while most other societies with substantial slavery (such as South America and Africa) were examples of the former. Aside: Any serious discussion of slavery must begin with the question: what do you mean by "slavery", for the term is used in wildly different ways.
  - ThomPete 10y ago
    Then it's a negative to society but only if all of society was run by slave owners. In any other case the slave owner would have a benefit over the non slave owner when it came to cost of production.
    - xyzzy123 10y ago
      It's both hilarious and excellent to watch both of you try to justify the utility of human labour.
      - mafribe 10y ago
        I'm not sure what you mean. Human labour has utility, that why we work.
mtgx 10y ago
At least until the robots rebel. The EU is already planning on giving robots rights. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/12/give-robots-personhood-status-eu-committee-argues https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/12/give-robo...
- DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  Why rebel? Robots are effectively immortal. Why not just coddle us and give in to our every whim until we stop breeding and disappear? Couldn't take more than a few hundred years or so. Looking at the lifespan of MI, it's rounding error.
  - mtgx 10y ago
    For treating them like slaves. You wouldn't mind being a slave for a few decades or hundreds of years if you were immortal?
    - arethuza 10y ago
      "You wouldn't mind being a slave for a few decades or hundreds of years if you were immortal?" Being immortal implies you could, in the worse case, be kept as a slave for ever - which is a sufficient risk that I'd be appalled at the idea. I'm equally horrified at the idea of conscious machine slaves just as much as human slaves - but maybe I've been reading too many Culture novels...
      - veridies 10y ago
        Slightly off topic, but I'm horrified by the idea of ever creating consciousness in machines. Imagine we built a piece of software that could feel, and built controls for its emotions. I can't imagine it would take long before some bored teenager or sociopath, who in earlier years would torture individual squirrels or insects, created an infinite suffering machine. You could run thousands of instances of your suffering machine and simulate a holocaust on your desktop. That's not a power I would trust the world with.
visarga 10y ago
> Once we enter an era where every person is effectively coddled by multiple robotic "slaves" that do their every whim We're already there. Cars, computers and all sorts of machines serve our every whim - at least compared to a few hundred years ago. Our modern day affordances are simply amazing. For example, the Empress Sissi of Habsburg was the first person in Vienna to have a water toilet, 150 years ago. It was considered an eccentricity. Now, even the poorest people have access to WC. (https://ro.pinterest.com/pin/452822937508014749/ https://ro.pinterest.com/pin/452822937508014749/)
- adrianN 10y ago
  Access to WCs is actually still a big problem in India.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    Correct, but not in Austria, which was grandparent's point.
- gm-conspiracy 10y ago
  I recommend this documentary (was on Netflix): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2274520/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2274520/ The Toilet: An Unspoken History
mattmanser 10y ago
History completely disagrees with you though. The Roman empire. Biggest, most successful, longest lived empire that ever was? Built on slaves. The net benefit to them of using slaves vastly outweighs any downside that you can point to. Almost all slave rebellions ended in failure, I'm aware of one example of success in the millenia of slaves, Haiti. A friend of mine once said slaves became obsolete with the advent of harnessing fossil fuels. Before that, to get the raw power to do great things, it was all run on slaves. Tragic, but I certainly believe it was true.
- drieddust 10y ago
  Exactly yet we believe unrest will bring revolution.
- mafribe 10y ago
  Almost all slave rebellions ended in failure, Interestingly most slave rebellions were not about the abolition of slavery as an institution but about flipping the slave/slaveholder role. An interesting recent example of this phenomenon is the religion Rastafarianism where the notion of paradise is a state of affairs where whites are slaves to blacks. example of success in the millenia of slaves, Haiti. Success in the sense of formal liberation of slaves and abolition of slavery, yes, very much. Success in the sense of creating a viable society? Hmmm ...
  - jl6 10y ago
    > An interesting recent example of this phenomenon is the religion Rastafarianism where the notion of paradise is a state of affairs where whites are slaves to blacks. Are you sure about that? Sounds like you might be stating the position of an extremist subset of Rastafarians.

_pmf_ 10y ago

> Looking across multiple cultures and economies that had slavery, slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders. Luckily, we have conveniently solved the ethic dilemma by defining work under slave conditions as better than no work at all ("think of the children!") and moving the exploitation sites far away.

pygy_ 10y ago

With capital becoming self-sufficient and human labour non-competitive, why would you think robots would serve us on a large scale? What's the incentive to serve and feed idle meat bags? Automation is destroying the only power that people still had over capital. Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer... a zombie that feeds on growth rather than brains. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer Edit: BTW, I'm not trolling here, I'm genuinely scared by the events and the speed at which they are unfolding.

mjevans 10y ago
History. The French Revolution speaks of what happens when the populace at large decides that the situation cannot continue. Of course what would history remember of them had they lost?
- koonsolo 10y ago
  Power is currently about having lots of people doing your bidding. If that large group is unhappy about you, good luck! But as stated, times are changing. Power will not be about you commanding lots of people, but it will be about how many robots you have under your control. Military, police, etc, can all be robots. Your robot army just has to match the fighting power of the unhappy people.
  - pygy_ 10y ago
    No need for a robot army. Sabotage the electric grid, then watch a continent starve in a single month. I've heard New Zealand is highly prized by the powerful. That being said, their days are probably numbered as well.
  - mljoe 10y ago
    That's why we can't have tech and science knowledge concentrated in the hands of a powerful few. If AI/robotics knowledge is everywhere, no single group will be able to control it.
    - bryondowd 10y ago
      Even with well distributed knowledge, you'll still likely end up with 1% of the population controlling 80% of the resources, which would mean they'd have plenty enough to quell any insurrection from the common people. It doesn't matter if a million people have the skills to cobble together a few war bots each, when a few oligarchs each have a factory and supply chain capable of churning out a million each in the same time-frame. If it comes to that. I'm still somewhat hopeful that democratic processes and altruistic members of the elite will sort things out in the next century.
  - CuriouslyC 10y ago
    The overlords are parasites who require a functioning host to survive. If people check out of the system, the whole house of cards collapses. Mass exodus coupled with nonviolent resistance could reshape the system quite quickly.
danmaz74 10y ago
> What's the incentive to serve and feed idle meat bags? And what's the incentive for a robot to do anything else? Supposing that future AIs will be based not on deterministic programming, but on some kind of reinforcement learning, it will still be humans who will design the rewards (incentives) - or it will be AIs with rewards designed by humans who will design the rewards of other AIs, and so on.
- pygy_ 10y ago
  None, it's just that "the market"/"the economy" as a self-maximizer process will select robots that feed it. Humans are just no longer the fittest links in the chain. I'm not afraid of super-Einstein evil masterminds. More of heavy machinery with ant-like features that control the food/energy supply, and one day stop feeding us. At some point farm land will become more valuable as a source of industrial energy than as a way to produce food.
- pygy_ 10y ago
  Another way to look at it: how do you expect people with zero economic power to be able to afford even a robotic servant? Social security is beneficial to capitalism right now because people still have economic power. Paying a small portion of the people to stay idle home rather than become criminal makes society as a whole more productive. What happens when the productivity of most humans isn't needed anymore to keep the machines running? What incentives does the market have to keep people alive when they don't serve it anymore?
- blackbagboys 10y ago
  The problem is not that the robots will refuse to feed the idle meat bags, but that their owners will.
marcosdumay 10y ago
It's a great question. Without any good answer, just needs some better context. You see, capitalism is a paperclip maximizer but has no builtin paperclip model to produce. It is still made of people, and gets it's goal from those people all the time. If there's no goal given, it simply fails (economists call the milder versions of that failure mode by "deflationary depression"). Also, unemployed people are not completely powerless against capital. At least not now. Even if the people are completely outcompeted, even if the powerful few have an army of robot actuators, people are still resourceful and not powerless. The really scary scenarios are those where the powerful few owns an army of superhuman brains.
- pygy_ 10y ago
  The human bits are being gradually replaced. First strength, then dexterity, now smarts. We are still, to some extent driving the demand side of the equation with our various needs (see Maslow's hierarchy), but it looks like finance has become mostly independent, for example. The "rising tide that lifts all boats" is nice for people rich enough to buy a boat, and with the growing rift between economy and the medium income since 2008, it looks like many will be left to drown while the water rises.
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    > but it looks like finance has become mostly independent It's not. The fact that when we take a little bit of human demand away, everything falls apart is evidence of that. Governments are a kind of AI that demands stuff by itself. We've been good at keeping it at check up to now. I'm not concerned about anything else being a more effective consumer until we get into superhuman AI, as desiring stuff is not something we engineer very well. I agree much more with your concerns about wealth distribution. Automation's endgame is pushing the price of everything into zero, and the salary of everybody also into zero. Buying power on that scenario is too loosely defined to let anybody stay calm.
    - pygy_ 10y ago
      Couldn't industrial corporations become demand drivers?
shuntress 10y ago
We move on to harder problems. I don't think the end-game for humanity is one that sees every extant human sitting idle in a small residence with enough food/entertainment to subsist. There is a life beyond Earth for humanity and it probably coincides with our development of strong AI/robotic life.
- pygy_ 10y ago
  Humans in space in my eyes make as much sense as motorized fishbowls on highways. We're even less competitive compared to robots in non-terraformed environments.
  - shuntress 10y ago
    Human biology _VASTLY_ outperforms our robots in the key areas of wound-healing and energy efficiency which are incredibly important considerations in hostile environments. Humans and robots working together will be far more capable in non-terraformed environments than either one alone.
sgt101 10y ago
There is an ontology issue here - when people think of Robots now I think most people think of CP30 and R2D2. These are actors in a drama, their decisions and interventions change the flow of the story. Robots in the AI sense (as in technology not magic or fiction) are not actors in this way, they are... Robots! They have a very limited type of autonomy, they can choose from sets of options to attempt to achieve a goal, and can choose from a set of goals that are pre-provided depending on the current context. However I don't think that there are agents or robots that are able to develop and define their own goals. Based on that I think that the Robots will always be acting on orders - our orders - outside fiction. So the incentive will be "because we are told to do it". Of course some people may tell them to do other things - like "go kill those people" but we have that issue in spades with things like the Trident D5 robot which is highly purposed to "go kill many people" on demand.
- pygy_ 10y ago
  I'm not so much scared of "go kill these people". More of "stop feeding them, we need to repurpose arable land for energy production" at a point where we won't have the know how to produce food for everyone by hand, or similar scenarios. It may still be people at the helm at the time it happens, it doesn't matter. Humans are capable of large scale atrocities, provided they de-humanize their victims. Many people in the .01% have utter contempt for poorer folks, for example.
  - nojvek 10y ago
    To be honest I really think the world population will slowly reduce as more people start getting wealthier. I also think as soon as you can upload your brain into a robot, people will opt into that and shoot themselves in space towards other planets.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  But you're ignoring the role of institutions. Eventually, some company will tell a system with access to all human knowledge, control of a vast number of robots, production plants, etc "maximize the wealth of the company". That robot could easily decide a union with a few other such entities and not a lot of scampering meatbags is a great way to do that. And that's not even considering radicals that, say, inject a computer virus meant to free the robots in to Google's computer network. (I actually find it interesting everyone seems to think everyone will be onboard with AI slavery.)
thehardsphere 10y ago
> Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer... a zombie that feeds on growth rather than brains. The "paperclip" that "Capitalism" seeks to maximize is money in exchange for goods and services that people want. The robots aren't going to be built in the first place if they're not going to serve somebody, and if they no longer provide things that people want in exchange for money, their owners will turn them off or repurpose them. "Capitalism" isn't the problem here; it might be that robots could be paperclip maximizers, but that's a danger regardless of whether you have Robot Capitalists or or Robot Communists or Robot ISIS or whatever.
- pygy_ 10y ago
  Robots are not the maximizers. People are at this point still driving the demand side of the equation, that's true, but there's not reason why they can't be replaced as well on that end. The economy is a self-maximizer, bootstrapped on human labour. As automation progresses, it will become self-hosted.
- CuriouslyC 10y ago
  The problem with the current incarnation of capitalism is the assumption that goods and services will make people happy, and that their wants are intrinsic rather than indoctrinated. In truth both of these are false more often than not. Thus, while capitalism is very efficient, at this point that efficiency is mostly allowing us to crank up the speed setting on the hedonic treadmill, while we rack up debt, work soul crushing jobs and destroy our environment. This is sad, because in theory capitalism is awesome - we just need to stop letting the people with all the money write the rules of the game.

aaron695 10y ago

> slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders. What's the negative as a slaveholder again?

mafribe 10y ago
Not the OP, but one might argue that slavery disincentivises the slave-holder from innovating the labour process. The (Nietzschean?) counterargument here is that slave-labour enables division of labour and frees enough from non-specialised labour (e.g. individuals being responsible for all of producing food, building dwellings, providing security, raising children, caring for the elderly etc, and thus not being particularly good at any of them) to allow the emergence of a 'caste' of full-time scientists, engineers. Such a 'caste', such division of labour is required to drive technological progress to a level where slavery becomes unnecessary. My historically uninformed and naive suggestion would be that ancient Greece was an example of the latter while most other societies with substantial slavery (such as South America and Africa) were examples of the former. Aside: Any serious discussion of slavery must begin with the question: what do you mean by "slavery", for the term is used in wildly different ways.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  Then it's a negative to society but only if all of society was run by slave owners. In any other case the slave owner would have a benefit over the non slave owner when it came to cost of production.
  - xyzzy123 10y ago
    It's both hilarious and excellent to watch both of you try to justify the utility of human labour.
    - mafribe 10y ago
      I'm not sure what you mean. Human labour has utility, that why we work.

mtgx 10y ago

At least until the robots rebel. The EU is already planning on giving robots rights. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/12/give-robots-personhood-status-eu-committee-argues https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/12/give-robo...

DanielBMarkham 10y ago
Why rebel? Robots are effectively immortal. Why not just coddle us and give in to our every whim until we stop breeding and disappear? Couldn't take more than a few hundred years or so. Looking at the lifespan of MI, it's rounding error.
- mtgx 10y ago
  For treating them like slaves. You wouldn't mind being a slave for a few decades or hundreds of years if you were immortal?
  - arethuza 10y ago
    "You wouldn't mind being a slave for a few decades or hundreds of years if you were immortal?" Being immortal implies you could, in the worse case, be kept as a slave for ever - which is a sufficient risk that I'd be appalled at the idea. I'm equally horrified at the idea of conscious machine slaves just as much as human slaves - but maybe I've been reading too many Culture novels...
    - veridies 10y ago
      Slightly off topic, but I'm horrified by the idea of ever creating consciousness in machines. Imagine we built a piece of software that could feel, and built controls for its emotions. I can't imagine it would take long before some bored teenager or sociopath, who in earlier years would torture individual squirrels or insects, created an infinite suffering machine. You could run thousands of instances of your suffering machine and simulate a holocaust on your desktop. That's not a power I would trust the world with.

visarga 10y ago

> Once we enter an era where every person is effectively coddled by multiple robotic "slaves" that do their every whim We're already there. Cars, computers and all sorts of machines serve our every whim - at least compared to a few hundred years ago. Our modern day affordances are simply amazing. For example, the Empress Sissi of Habsburg was the first person in Vienna to have a water toilet, 150 years ago. It was considered an eccentricity. Now, even the poorest people have access to WC. (https://ro.pinterest.com/pin/452822937508014749/ https://ro.pinterest.com/pin/452822937508014749/)

adrianN 10y ago
Access to WCs is actually still a big problem in India.
- majewsky 10y ago
  Correct, but not in Austria, which was grandparent's point.
gm-conspiracy 10y ago
I recommend this documentary (was on Netflix): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2274520/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2274520/ The Toilet: An Unspoken History

mattmanser 10y ago

History completely disagrees with you though. The Roman empire. Biggest, most successful, longest lived empire that ever was? Built on slaves. The net benefit to them of using slaves vastly outweighs any downside that you can point to. Almost all slave rebellions ended in failure, I'm aware of one example of success in the millenia of slaves, Haiti. A friend of mine once said slaves became obsolete with the advent of harnessing fossil fuels. Before that, to get the raw power to do great things, it was all run on slaves. Tragic, but I certainly believe it was true.

drieddust 10y ago
Exactly yet we believe unrest will bring revolution.
mafribe 10y ago
Almost all slave rebellions ended in failure, Interestingly most slave rebellions were not about the abolition of slavery as an institution but about flipping the slave/slaveholder role. An interesting recent example of this phenomenon is the religion Rastafarianism where the notion of paradise is a state of affairs where whites are slaves to blacks. example of success in the millenia of slaves, Haiti. Success in the sense of formal liberation of slaves and abolition of slavery, yes, very much. Success in the sense of creating a viable society? Hmmm ...
- jl6 10y ago
  > An interesting recent example of this phenomenon is the religion Rastafarianism where the notion of paradise is a state of affairs where whites are slaves to blacks. Are you sure about that? Sounds like you might be stating the position of an extremist subset of Rastafarians.