Do we just want slaves?

yunwal

It 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

cognitiveinline

Is 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.

dyauspitr

If the slaves are robots/machines then yes we very much want slaves.

skippyfish

The 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 thinking 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.

foxes

Aibro gets a glimpse at class consciousness for half a second before admitting they are part of the problem and then carrying on.

michaelt

If 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.

js8

The 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.

ludston

This 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

sad to see that people are still brainwashed about the slavery thing. I want my master/slave SPI bus back. Beside a teeeny tiny fraction of people, "slavery" was never about owning a human being, it's about having workers that only do what you tell them to do, and you don't have to pay. Under this light, the title is completely appropriate.

jaza

I 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.