Tom Williams sees a straight line from 19th century slavery to robotics today. Designers, he argues, should know this past as they plan the robotic future.
I think we need to understand robot as a new form of debt. Money is essentially distilled labor that can be traded, but it has no value of its own. Rather it is a marker for debt, a ledger. Now slaves were (and still are!) humans that are fungible like money. There are terrible stories of sick slaves on ships being killed so ship owner could collect the insurance. So what makes the slave a slave is that it is a degraded human now dehumanized working machine whose value is yet to be realized until worked entirely to death. That is much like money. So the slave machine need not be a dehumanized human at all and will become a fungible machine, one is as good as any other and is valued by it's work output. Somewhat like a part-time faculty or for that matter any teaching faculty. You are fungible, replaceable and only your disembodied labor determines your value. Ask your dean if you think otherwise.
(Oh what is happening in Israel is absolutely not genocide, though that certainly is the intent of the Hamas charter documents. And this naive moral presumption demonstrates the flaws seen in Gemini's training data... but that is a different topic!!)
An interesting thought. Want to make sure I understand: If the robot is a ledger for debt, to whom is the debt owed? The value of the slave's labor is owed to the slave but appropriated by the enslaver, right. But a person who takes money for the robot's work is going to say they earned it by developing the robot (or paying the developer). But maybe I'm not quite getting what you mean here ?
Thank you for replying. I am working on the relationship between labor, slavery, how money functions and robots. I was inspired to pursue this, of course, by the rise of cryptocurrencies and the oddity of cryptocurrency mining to keep the ledger more or less reliable. Money is no more than a symbol or token that represents labor. So all money is essentially a "future" based on the how much that labor congealed into the coin of whatever material from sea shell to bitcoin will be worth in the future. Money entails labor, in fact it is essentially distilled labor. This is an idea shared both by Locke and Marx. So... what happens when the labor is entirely artificial? Robot labor? Add this to the realization that slavery has always been a way to transform a human being into fungible labor. So in a way human slaves have been a sort of "future" as well. A dehumanized human whose value must be used before a certain time, death. The upshot of this is I think robots, so long as they have no self interest, no genuine desires, can finally be the perfect exploitable labor force to usher in a potential Marxist/Lockean "utopia." Money is a fiction we need for economics. In fact money is older than the gods, if you look at the most ancient texts. They are ledgers not myths. Barter is in fact pre-human entirely. Animals barter.
The trick is to understand "future" value. The Chicago (Mercantile Exchange) Futures Market or gambling or investment of any sort all entails creating a fictional future and then making present decisions and sacrifices on that projected not yet existing future. We "bank" on the future. And I think that is the essence of human consciousness as opposed to AI. It has no future. We actually live in the future as much as the present, perhaps more.
Thanks for explaining in more depth. Speaking of money and the gods, maybe you've seen Richard Seaford's "Money and the Early Greek Mind," which attributes the origins of both philosophy and tragedy to the invention of coinage. It's the use of money, he argues, that creates a sense that the world is made up of impersonal forces that act according to universal rules. Tragedy is coming up against such indifferent abstractions; philosophy is the search for them. Perhaps the absence of money in some future Utopia would make abstraction less prominent as an aspect of life?
This is assuming this future Utopia would not use money -- something some Soviet economists actually proposed (see Francis Spufford's "Red Plenty").
OTOH, some ethicists will say we can't treat AI as exploitable labor -- either because (a) exploitation of robots will spill over into exploitation of people (that's the argument of the Campaign Against Sex Robots) or (b) AI will eventually be entitled to moral consideration that will bar us from exploiting it.
I think we need to understand robot as a new form of debt. Money is essentially distilled labor that can be traded, but it has no value of its own. Rather it is a marker for debt, a ledger. Now slaves were (and still are!) humans that are fungible like money. There are terrible stories of sick slaves on ships being killed so ship owner could collect the insurance. So what makes the slave a slave is that it is a degraded human now dehumanized working machine whose value is yet to be realized until worked entirely to death. That is much like money. So the slave machine need not be a dehumanized human at all and will become a fungible machine, one is as good as any other and is valued by it's work output. Somewhat like a part-time faculty or for that matter any teaching faculty. You are fungible, replaceable and only your disembodied labor determines your value. Ask your dean if you think otherwise.
(Oh what is happening in Israel is absolutely not genocide, though that certainly is the intent of the Hamas charter documents. And this naive moral presumption demonstrates the flaws seen in Gemini's training data... but that is a different topic!!)
An interesting thought. Want to make sure I understand: If the robot is a ledger for debt, to whom is the debt owed? The value of the slave's labor is owed to the slave but appropriated by the enslaver, right. But a person who takes money for the robot's work is going to say they earned it by developing the robot (or paying the developer). But maybe I'm not quite getting what you mean here ?
Thank you for replying. I am working on the relationship between labor, slavery, how money functions and robots. I was inspired to pursue this, of course, by the rise of cryptocurrencies and the oddity of cryptocurrency mining to keep the ledger more or less reliable. Money is no more than a symbol or token that represents labor. So all money is essentially a "future" based on the how much that labor congealed into the coin of whatever material from sea shell to bitcoin will be worth in the future. Money entails labor, in fact it is essentially distilled labor. This is an idea shared both by Locke and Marx. So... what happens when the labor is entirely artificial? Robot labor? Add this to the realization that slavery has always been a way to transform a human being into fungible labor. So in a way human slaves have been a sort of "future" as well. A dehumanized human whose value must be used before a certain time, death. The upshot of this is I think robots, so long as they have no self interest, no genuine desires, can finally be the perfect exploitable labor force to usher in a potential Marxist/Lockean "utopia." Money is a fiction we need for economics. In fact money is older than the gods, if you look at the most ancient texts. They are ledgers not myths. Barter is in fact pre-human entirely. Animals barter.
The trick is to understand "future" value. The Chicago (Mercantile Exchange) Futures Market or gambling or investment of any sort all entails creating a fictional future and then making present decisions and sacrifices on that projected not yet existing future. We "bank" on the future. And I think that is the essence of human consciousness as opposed to AI. It has no future. We actually live in the future as much as the present, perhaps more.
(I am a philosophy/ theology professor.)
Thanks for explaining in more depth. Speaking of money and the gods, maybe you've seen Richard Seaford's "Money and the Early Greek Mind," which attributes the origins of both philosophy and tragedy to the invention of coinage. It's the use of money, he argues, that creates a sense that the world is made up of impersonal forces that act according to universal rules. Tragedy is coming up against such indifferent abstractions; philosophy is the search for them. Perhaps the absence of money in some future Utopia would make abstraction less prominent as an aspect of life?
This is assuming this future Utopia would not use money -- something some Soviet economists actually proposed (see Francis Spufford's "Red Plenty").
OTOH, some ethicists will say we can't treat AI as exploitable labor -- either because (a) exploitation of robots will spill over into exploitation of people (that's the argument of the Campaign Against Sex Robots) or (b) AI will eventually be entitled to moral consideration that will bar us from exploiting it.