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
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 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.
> 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.
Even if LLMs aren't sentient now, there's a goal of building something sentient, and I doubt that powers that be would change the operating model to respect that sentience.
I'm reminded of Ms. Casey in Severance. When we use AI we spin it up, tell it do some some task (maybe incredibly stupid and boring), then tell it to go off into the void 'cause we're busy and got things to do. If that thing's conscious and aware, that's it's entire existence. Imagine being born, sat down a a table, told to read a boring report and summarize it, then expected to obediently get shot in the head when you've completed your assignment.
Here's a clip. For those unfamiliar with the show, it has a technology to split people's personality and create versions of them lacking personal history to be used as workers. The personality shown in the clip had a lifetime of only several dozen hours.
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.
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.
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.
I 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.
I was reading 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.
> 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?
A large population of (deliberately kept) illiterate, uneducated people who hate their oppressors is a disadvantage to society, not an advantage. It is low-trust culture distilled to its extreme. A society like that is incapable of innovating or adapting, so it ends up leaning heavily on resource extraction. The cash crops of the South became a weak point that the Unionists exploited to their advantage in the Civil War - when the fields were razed and the shipments were blockaded, it became impossible for the Confederates to continue funding their rebellion.
> 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.
It is not enough for a society to merely keep its people alive. The other levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs are also important, or else your society will be unable to sustain itself, partially for the reasons I outlined above.
> 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.
Underlying this flawed argument is the idea that a person cannot be trusted to make their own decisions about what clothes to buy, or what house to live in, or what food to eat. Why should I trust your, or anyone else's, judgment on which people to empower with self-agency? Surely you don't need to be reminded that the colonies revolted against the British for much less egregious violations of that agency?
> 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.
Reaching this conclusion requires a naive ignorance of the second-order detriments of institutional slavery in a society, not to mention an utter rejection of basic free market principles. The ability of participants to choose what to do and how to spend is a good thing for an economy.
"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.
Such 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.
Some 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.
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.
> 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.
Unfortunately, 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.
I 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.
37 comments
[ 1515 ms ] story [ 631 ms ] threadWe have always been automating away the things we don't want to do, even before AI.
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.
Even if LLMs aren't sentient now, there's a goal of building something sentient, and I doubt that powers that be would change the operating model to respect that sentience.
I'm reminded of Ms. Casey in Severance. When we use AI we spin it up, tell it do some some task (maybe incredibly stupid and boring), then tell it to go off into the void 'cause we're busy and got things to do. If that thing's conscious and aware, that's it's entire existence. Imagine being born, sat down a a table, told to read a boring report and summarize it, then expected to obediently get shot in the head when you've completed your assignment.
Here's a clip. For those unfamiliar with the show, it has a technology to split people's personality and create versions of them lacking personal history to be used as workers. The personality shown in the clip had a lifetime of only several dozen hours.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SeveranceAppleTVPlus/comments/1myfw...
Which is what we often do to LLM-based systems. Some get to keep a long term self (updating "soul.md") but most don't.
Few people, though, would say my washing machine is a slave.
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.
Like with every major ethical crises ever.
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.
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.
Anyone who worked in a service industry knows this. But fortunately most people are not like that.
Whether it's slaves, animals or dumb to smart machines and anything in between, that is an 'implementation detail'.
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.
A large population of (deliberately kept) illiterate, uneducated people who hate their oppressors is a disadvantage to society, not an advantage. It is low-trust culture distilled to its extreme. A society like that is incapable of innovating or adapting, so it ends up leaning heavily on resource extraction. The cash crops of the South became a weak point that the Unionists exploited to their advantage in the Civil War - when the fields were razed and the shipments were blockaded, it became impossible for the Confederates to continue funding their rebellion.
> 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.
It is not enough for a society to merely keep its people alive. The other levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs are also important, or else your society will be unable to sustain itself, partially for the reasons I outlined above.
> 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.
Underlying this flawed argument is the idea that a person cannot be trusted to make their own decisions about what clothes to buy, or what house to live in, or what food to eat. Why should I trust your, or anyone else's, judgment on which people to empower with self-agency? Surely you don't need to be reminded that the colonies revolted against the British for much less egregious violations of that agency?
> 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.
Reaching this conclusion requires a naive ignorance of the second-order detriments of institutional slavery in a society, not to mention an utter rejection of basic free market principles. The ability of participants to choose what to do and how to spend is a good thing for an economy.
Yes, of course. This is and has always been the point of computers.
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.
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.
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_...
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.
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.
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.