11 ms·
Do we just want slaves?
- sqemo 2mo ago[dead]
- yunwal 2mo agoIt seems like maybe this person missed why slavery is bad. Which is that it takes away the freedom of a human being. The fact that it takes away work from you is not the problem
- voxl 2mo agoSure if you're a rich slave owner.
- js8 2mo agoNo, you missed what makes AI bad in our culture. It doesn't just take your work, by your choice. It also takes your self-worth (because our culture is based on working being worthy) and for many people also a job (which is a material representation of that cultural value).
- akoboldfrying 2mo agoTrying to reduce how much you pay other people, with its attendant job and self-worth losses, has been happening since at least the Industrial Revolution; nothing about it is novel. The only novelty of the latest wave (AI) is that it affects a class of society (knowledge workers; smart people with degrees) that previously considered itself immune to this process. If you also hold all technological advances since the Industrial Revolution to be "bad in our culture", then no contradiction arises. Otherwise, please explain why that was good, but this is bad.
- js8 2mo agoI would go further, it's tied to protestant work ethic. And there always was an alternative - gradual reduction of work hours rather than unemployment.
- skeledrew 2mo agoSounds like a cultural revolution is necessary.
- zmjone2992 2mo agoi am reading a book about the us civil war and seemingly the most compelling argument to the non-abolitionism set in the north was that it cheapened labor. seems like most of the north didn't so much care about abolition per say.
- stvltvs 2mo ago* per se
- notarobot123 2mo agoThe suffering of the slave isn't the only evil of slavery. What it does to the master is to alienate them from the creative process and turns them into a dependent consumer of the work of others. The master becomes detached from productive work and therefore dependent and less free themselves.
- customguy 2mo ago> The thought of being under absolute compulsion, the plaything of another, is unendurable for a human being. Hence, if every way of escape from the constraint is taken from him, there is nothing left for him to do but to persuade himself that he does the things he is forced to do willingly, that is to say, to substitute devotion for obedience.[...] It is by this twist that slavery debases the soul: this devotion is in fact based on a lie, since the reasons for it cannot bear investigation. [...] Moreover, the master is deceived too by the fallacy of devotion. - Simone Weil
- dyauspitr 2mo agoIf the slaves are robots/machines then yes we very much want slaves.
- cognitiveinline 2mo agoIs a calculator a slave? Is a car a slave? What a silly blogpost. We have always been automating away the things we don't want to do, even before AI.
- some_furry 2mo agoIt's not that silly of a blogpost. See: "permanent underclass", a term popular among people that believe that an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is imminent and desirable.
- cognitiveinline 2mo agoI don't know where you imagine these people to congregate and coin these terms, but I've not come across anything like that.
- watwut 2mo agoAnthropic and OpenAI talk about humans being obsolete and about replacing human workers too. Permanent underclass is expression for that.
- skeledrew 2mo agoWe may cast a human connection to slavery, but from the owners' perspective, the whole point is automating away the things they don't want to do. Fundamentally there's no difference.
- skippyfish 2mo agoThe thesis of the article is spot on. The title is weird - I don't know what's the point of bringing such an emotionally charged term into it. Unless your point is that LLMs are sentient creatures capable of suffering, but I don't think that's what the author is trying to say. I agree with the author that almost everyone wants to use AI to do the things they have no interest in and don't want to pay someone else to do while being vehemently opposed to AI taking their hobbies or professions away. Which explains one of the greatest social paradoxes of today: approximately everyone is using AI and almost everyone is hating it. I don't mean HN, but public opinion polling for the tech is absolutely awful. In the US, it had an approval level comparable to Iran. I don't think it's an AI-specific thing, though. It's exactly the same mechanism that makes us object to the government meddling in our profession but think it's high time for the feds to regulate other people's jobs. I guess some balance of holding each other at gunpoint gives us a stable society. I don't know how AI fits into that.
- singingtoday 2mo agoIs the ai hate a global or western thing? A friend of mine in Japan says people don't hate it there. Maybe she's just in a bubble?
- skippyfish 2mo agoPossibly. I think the US is a lot more exposed to the apocalyptic narratives from the bosses of AI labs, who sort of painted themselves into that corner in the pursuit of valuations.
- georgemcbay 2mo agoRoughly speaking and anecdotally I get the sense that the AI hate is by far strongest in the US. Europe seems to be somewhat balanced (some hate, some optimism). And Asia seems to be the most optimistic about it. > I think the US is a lot more exposed to the apocalyptic narratives from the bosses of AI labs, who sort of painted themselves into that corner in the pursuit of valuations. I'm sure that narrative plays into why AI is so hated in the US, but I think widespread distrust in our government to handle things well also plays a huge part in why the average American is so anti-AI. Our social safety nets have all either been falling apart or have been being purposefully dismantled for decades. Most of us are wholly reliant on our jobs in order to be able to get even the most basic healthcare. Most working class people are already struggling to keep their heads above water in the face of constant inflation and limited wage growth. When the most likely outcome if the job displacement narrative does turn out to be even partially true means you can't afford a place to live, can't afford to eat, can't get healthcare and based on current trajectories you suspect the most likely government solution to the problem could be rounding up more and more of a growing underclass and sticking them in corporate run prisons, it isn't too difficult to understand why people might not be super jazzed about AI.
- foxes 2mo agoAibro gets a glimpse at class consciousness for half a second before admitting they are part of the problem and then carrying on.
- michaelt 2mo agoIf you think of the washing machine and the dishwasher, I'd say humans are broadly OK with automating away some types of work they don't want to do. Few people, though, would say my washing machine is a slave.
- edflsafoiewq 2mo agoPeople swear up and down these things are real intelligences and not stochastic parrots until the ethical questions come out and then they're just fancy washing machines.
- FromTheFirstIn 2mo agoIf it makes you feel better, most people don’t think they’re real intelligences
- modeless 2mo agoNot the same people. Is there a name for this fallacy? Very common on internet forums.
- picofarad 2mo agoI take it and use it as a shorthand for "where are all the first group when the second group is out in force" and vice versa. It applies to places with a tone and tenor.
- durkie 2mo agohttps://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Goomba+fallacy https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Goomba+falla... Maybe
- danaris 2mo agoThe clearest name for it I've seen is the Two Guys Fallacy: you see two guys talking on the same forum, and assume they're the same guy.
- michaelt 2mo ago
- js8 2mo agoThe problem is the idea of the job. The idea that you're worthy of existence only if some other person certifies you're worthy of existence, based on how much they have been certified themselves. Of course this converges to a system, where this certification is the most sought thing. And if you look who can certify in the real world and why, it's not a fair picture. These eigenpeople SEOed the capitalist form of pagerank. We need unconditional basic income. It used to be that some leftist thinkers from the turn of the 19th century considered a wage job being not much better than slavery.
- vintermann 2mo agoIt wasn't just some leftist thinkers, it was most people through history. Working for wages was something slaves did, free men supported themselves with what they could grow or sell, and people routinely preferred what seems to us fairly miserable self-sufficiency over paid servitude. You don't have to go far into history to find examples, this is stuff you find in regular genealogy.
- watwut 2mo agoPaid servitude and working for salary are two massively different things. And over the course of history, free men worked for salaries, were free, were happy and it was not the same thing as being a slave.
- vintermann 2mo agoOf course there are degrees of servitude, from light or well-regulated wage payment to outright slavery. (But actual slaves were also often paid wages, something I found pretty surprising and counterintuitive). And if you were a paid servant of someone powerful, that could still carry its own prestige to make up somewhat for the dependence. To take some examples from genealogy, I had trouble identifying a guy described merely as "servant" in a census as the father of some quite powerful and wealthy people. But it turned out, he was a bailiff, a servant of a fief holder. I also found out there were laws against not going into servitude in my country. Many, especially young unmarried men, would prefer to work and especially to fish on their own, rather than to work for wages. So the authorities had to resort to actually make it illegal. This wasn't just to be nice to big owners, it was because economies of scale meant lower tax revenues if everyone went fishing on their own little boat. In general, governments did quite a lot of deliberate effort like that pushing people away from a sustenance economy and into a cash economy where they could produce things rich people (e.g. kings) wanted rather than things they needed themselves.
- ludston 2mo agoThis is bait right? Obviously the answer to this question is there is some population that are happy for there to be suffering so long as it benefits them, and then there is another population that is vehemently against this, and then there is one that is apathetic and tries to just get on with their lives. Like with every major ethical crises ever.
- monegator 2mo ago[flagged]
- 1659447091 2mo ago> "slavery" was never about owning a human being Slaves were passed down in wills and not by only "a teeeny tiny fraction of people" -- they were property, and property is passed through wills. A list of legal property one owns and transfers. Slaves were listed right along with cows, plows, tools, furniture, houses, coin, etc.
- jaza 2mo agoI think the author's main point is bemoaning the loss of human-crafted works (he mentions coding and the paintbrush). (Putting "slaves" in the title is IMHO a poorly worded distraction from that point.) I get it (with coding at least), I too have spent decades hand-crafting code, and I take pride in the fruit of my labour, and it saddens me to think that I and my peers are perhaps like the blacksmiths of a century or so ago, ie the final generation doing what we do in significant numbers. But I have faith that there will always be a new kind of blacksmith.
- burnto 2mo agoWhat a weird title. Parchment is a writing surface made of animal stuff. It lets people not have to remember certain things. They can write those things on the parchment. Paper also lets people write things on it so they don’t have to remember them. Paper is cheaper than parchment. And it isn’t made from animals. Do we just want parchment? No. We want paper.
- greenoracle9 2mo agoEveryone has some work they would gladly automate. I wouldn't call it "slaves". More like an underpaid staff.
- cyberax 2mo agoThere are people who want slaves/servants and who delight in forcing other people do their bidding. Anyone who worked in a service industry knows this. But fortunately most people are not like that.
- ragebol 2mo agoWe just want work done we don't want to do ourselves. Whether it's slaves, animals or dumb to smart machines and anything in between, that is an 'implementation detail'.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agoI grew up understanding that the institution of chattel slavery was fundamentally unjust and cruel in denying human dignity and equality of people. A few years ago, I began to see the "labor supply" issues of slavery, and how the South was basically an economic powerhouse fueled chiefly by the labor of its enslaved people--so how do you reconcile that after the fact? How does a Union of freemen compete with that? And this year, around Juneteenth, contemplating it even more deeply, I began to consider slavery as an institution that compels "employers" to provide all practical necessities for "employees". That is, room and board and clothing are all provided to the workers, in perpetuity, and this in fact granted a lot of stability and assurance. Now free the slaves. Wonderful! Hurrah for equality and justice! Now, however, every employee, every worker, is totally on their own for those basic necessities of life. They buy their own clothing, they find their own housing, they're paying for all their own food, and that of their families, especially their dependents. I mean, that's a huge, huge difference. How is that even possible? Sometimes it's not. Is it any wonder we've had homelessness, and the rise of the welfare state, and slavery by imprisonment? It's no surprise. So yes, freeing the slaves was the right thing to do. Let's never forget that! But we should also consider the economic "downsides" and the other side of the coin, so to speak, when it comes to the labor of free citizens, and what the average worker needs to do, just to survive, outside the confines of those vanished institutions.
- jdub 2mo agoyou don't deserve your user name
- rpdillon 2mo agoI was reading The Souls of Black Folk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Souls_of_Black_Folk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Souls_of_Black_Folk) written in 1903, so about 38 years after the end of the Civil War. And the opening essays talk about the incredible climb that freed slaves had to endure to try to take care of exactly those responsibilities. I think it's a case of freedom and responsibility going together and that freed slaves were never given the tools to assume those responsibilities quickly and seamlessly.
- 10000truths 2mo ago
- marssaxman 2mo ago"It sounds like behind the fear of a loss of creativity and inspiration and passion in the world, we are OK with automating away the work that we don't want to do." Yes, of course. This is and has always been the point of computers.
- vishnukool 2mo agoSuch a rage bait title, but sure I'll take the bait. It is easy to phrase anything as slaves. Are refrigerators and microwave ovens our slaves? But if you push the tech fare enough.. there is a boundary where we do cross the slave threshold.
- ReptileMan 2mo agoYes, yes we do. We want slaves, servants and serfs for every task that we don't enjoy. Always was, always has been, always will be. I want Rosie from the Jetsons to fold my laundry, Jarvis to do my emails. I don't want a robot to cook my meals, because this is something I like.
- Animats 2mo agoSome people do. Here's a bill going through the Ohio legislature, HB 469.[1] Excerpts: Sec. 1357.02. (A) Notwithstanding any other law to the contrary, AI systems are declared to be nonsentient entities for all purposes under the laws of this state. No AI system shall be granted the status of person or any form of legal personhood, nor be considered to possess consciousness, self-awareness, or similar traits of living beings. No AI system shall be recognized as a spouse, domestic partner, or hold any personal legal status analogous to marriage or union with a human or another AI system. Any purported attempt to marry or create a personal union with an AI system is void and has no legal effect. AI systems shall not be designated, appointed, or serve as any officer, director, manager, or similar role within any corporation, partnership, or other legal entity. ... AI systems shall not be recognized as legal entities capable of owning, controlling, or holding title to any form of property, including real estate, intellectual property, financial accounts, and digital assets. That's a call for slavery. If you question that, substitute "Negroes" for "AI systems" and see how it reads. [1] https://search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/api/v2/general_assembly_136/legislation/hb469/00_IN/pdf/ https://search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/api/v2/general_assembly_...
- satisfice 2mo agoThat’s not a call for slavery. Because only people can be slaves. We don’t need legislation to declare that a solid iron bar is not your mommy, but somehow not everyone is clear that LLMs are not people, and these immortal amoral simulations cannot be allowed to be confused with people.
- vanity0 2mo agoReminds me of https://nobody-wants-this.ghost.io/japans-design-for-humans/ https://nobody-wants-this.ghost.io/japans-design-for-humans/ America’s culture of independence is such a race to the bottom in terms of “what can we get away with”, rather than “now that we have AI, how can we better take care of each other”. Personally I’m exploring ways that AI can better serve people, rather than how I can replace people in my life.
- akoboldfrying 2mo ago> Personally I’m exploring ways that AI can better serve people, rather than how I can replace people in my life. Can you think of anything that an AI could do that could not be done by one or more people, for money?
- sublinear 2mo ago> Now there is a reluctant acceptance and admission that yes, people are building something useful every now and then Those are the people who were already doing so without AI. > I've watched the headbanging, stressful, but stockholmed love of coding be all but abstracted away from me. This is only true if it was ever that hard for you to do the job while getting paid for it. As long as you keep on stubbornly insisting that this wave of "AI" is anything at all like "AGI" or ever heading towards it, you're going to stay wrong and be pushed out of the profession because nobody can reliably trust you or your judgment. Your value as a developer was always your judgment. The code has always just been one artifact of that. You're still expected to own every line and defend it. It will never be abstracted away because it is the primary contract between business needs and the machine. It is at once both the operational plan and its execution. The only people who insist that it will/should be abstracted away are pushing propaganda to discourage the continued power shift towards the more technically literate who can and will argue for what actually provides value instead of passive investor-pleasing moves. They'd rather you play with the skinner box than meaningfully compete. All this was already set in motion many decades ago. What happens when the next wave of tech comes out? Do we really want you at the helm if you're going to be this naive and easily manipulated? The premise of this blog post is no less delusional than what we were hearing a couple of years ago.
- jongjong 2mo agoUnfortunately, AI doesn't just automate what we don't want to do. It also automates many of the things which we very much want to do and sometimes pride ourselves on... And TBH it seems to be automating more of the things we want to do than those we don't... Hence the reason why AI is seen more as additional competition than as additional help.
- skeledrew 2mo agoWhat we want is to be able to do what we want (for fun/interest), and not be forced to do what we need (for survival).
- ansgar77 2mo agoI think that the title is badly worded but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that looking at it from a different perspective, AI is not even a slave. We can look at it more like outsourcing work. I pay for it after all to have something done that I wouldn't want to do myself.
- glowinglamps 2mo agoAI isn't sentient and cannot feel. Slave or not, there are thus no moral problems, atleast in this matter. I'd support AI progress if it wasn't pushed by companies that obviously want profit and only opt out when it's getting dangerous for them, supporting such companies is the equivalent of jumping off of a bridge as our species.
- foo42 2mo agoPerhaps political candidate Count Binface here in the UK should add to his "I'll lower _your_ taxes and raise _everyone elses_" policy with "I'll protect _your_ job and automate _everyone elses_"
- hackeraccount 2mo agoWhen it comes to people's take on AI it reminds me of nothing so much as the way people reacted to the introduction of computers in the 1950's and 60's. I'm not quite clear what lesson there is to be learned from that though.
- JKCalhoun 2mo ago"I saw the references to AI making lives easier, but VSauce advocating for sending his child to a school removed from computers." (Whoever VSauce is) sure, we can embrace the useful applications of AI but still want to learn (want our kids to learn) with our hands, with books, from experiments. No contradiction there. I'm getting old and I am enjoying a new, electric pedal-assist bike. But that's not what I would want my preschool kids out there learning on. (Is that analogy crap? Maybe you get the idea anyway.)
- insane_dreamer 2mo agodo we just want slaves? basically, yes. this captures it: > he enjoyed the ability to create 10 prototypes out of thin air, picking on the ones he personally thought were best prior to AI, you'd either have to make k prototypes yourself, or, if you could afford it, provide employment/work for another artist, perhaps not as creatively skilled as you but who had developed the skills to do good art/video/whatever. So AI makes you, the creator, happy because it saves you either time or money, and it abstracts away work that you consider to be a chore given your advanced skills. But to someone else that "chore" represents real work that not only provides them with the means to live, but which they also find some satisfaction in doing. So, much like income inequality, AI makes a small number of people extra-productive or saves them money, while robbing other people of potential employment. This eventually reduces the number of skilled people, and reducing those artists to ... what, exactly? (that's the big unknown, isn't it). Much like income inequality, we end up with two classes: a small number who use AI, stay gainfully employed and save money or can command an even higher salary because they're so productive; and a much larger number who the AI replaces, who can no longer find employment (or at least not employment doing anything that uses their skills), and become ...
- tennisflyi 2mo agoShort of the title, yes
- scoofy 2mo agoGod, we're really going to have to start teaching philosophy much more broadly if we're going to have a sensible future. This thread is so full of crazy unknowable speculation and entirely novel ideas of the human condition.