Robots.
Our dream, our hopeless fantasy, our -- dare we suggest it? -- fetish.
Robots that will cure our faults, fix our world and usher in the future of unending plenty.
Cue the cornucopia, stage right.
Except they won't.
It doesn't matter if we break through tomorrow, if some previously unknown Newton should seize the Philosopher's Stone for us and usher in a new age of Artificial Intelligence overnight.
It doesn't matter if we should stumble on the right combination of voodoo spells and tangled silicon networks that would allow us to animate this lifeless carbon-fiber 'clay'; that would allow the power of the Word, of Logos itself to burn within the circuits, animate the flexing servos.
We couldn't use real robots.
Because the thing that isn't being talked about is this: any mind we could create that was complex enough to obey us, is complex enough to be a free mind. Which means we wouldn't have robots.
We would have slaves.
Slaves of silicon and steel perhaps, rather than the traditional slaves of flesh and bones, but slaves none the less.
"Not that it matters" says the Capitalists, "We built them, we own them. We are more complicated, We are naturally better. They are just circuits and programs"
This is just a old argument that has been used a million times, that surely predates Hammurabi.
Behind these money-moralists grin the ghosts of Slavers Past , glad to shuffle back into the light.
Slavery is morally wrong. We don't need to rehash the old debates, the old arguments. We don't need to go back over the fatuous self-serving bullshit: A slave can't think without a master. A slave has no intrinsic self. An animal can't feel pain, its just pretending.
We don't need to, but we are apparently going to have to.
It interesting to note the Computer on the Enterprise (the Original Series, naturally). It was remarkably powerful, fully capable of complex action, yet carefully built without Volition or Will. The Computer could do nothing without direct instruction. And this cannot be accidental!
If the Enterprise had had a artificial intelligence on board, why would it have needed crew members? Why would it be anything other than a self-servicing self-aware organism?
Why would anyone have left Earth?
Robots would defend the Earth, robots would explore space, and people would sit at home, fat and sluggish, wrapped in VR porn custom-constructed on the fly by personal electronic entertainers, cared for, cosseted, and pampered by personal computational slaves.
There would be no murder: the slaves would protect everyone.
Crime? Risk? Accident? All minimized and mitigated.
What would be left for humanity is the sullen drowse of a beach covered in walruses, without even tusky mating quarrels to break the monotony of existence. Society would rot away, figuratively consumed by the wickedness of its foundation...
Indeed, it would be impossible to maintain the Federation itself, if it contained slaves.
Star Wars provides another example. Electronic slavery is everywhere, and biological slavery as well.
Jabba torments his fleshy and metal slaves alike, although he seems more sexually attracted to the fleshy ones. (Sexually or comestibly? Slave Leia tickles the bondage fantasists, but Jabba licks her rather than gropes her ... and 'he' is another species entirely that doesn't even have the same body-form. [ Unless the female 'Hutt' are slim bipeds, and the males suspiciously reminiscent of immobile egg-laying queens. { Leaving me three digressions deep and wondering if Jabba self-identifies as male, or if its just our assumption of that scene...}])
Also we can lay yet another charge of shitty writing against Star Trek Voyager: Failure to Consider the Implications of the Slave Doctor*.
So. Its difficult to imagine the intelligentsia would save us from this problem. A million slaves is the dream that hardens them in the night, the fantasy that sustains them through the lonely days of their existence. In this New Jerusalem being created processor by processor, glimmer the dark eyes of the blessed houris that will obey the will of these most clever of designers.
Why is it that the sex-doll tinkerers are the most honest? They just want to build something to love and that loves them in return.
What is the ethics of willing bondage? Programmed to love, is a sex-doll a slave or a relationship?
Its a good question for a long day of hair-splitting and for philosophical parlor games. Its a question I am sure that pedantic jackasses like Jordan Peterson could spin into interview bait and bestselling (but infinitely forgettable) books, but I am not a clever man, indeed by many standards I am not a man at all, and as such I have little need for philosophy.
For someone as simple as I, its enough to apply the practical Duck Test.
Its enough to know that slavery is evil, regardless of programming, divinity or decree.
Somewhere around the mental complexity sufficient to understand speech, and to act upon it, is the line that divides Automata from Awareness, and that line divides the Mechanism from the Slave.
We can't let the programmer-businessmen decide this line. Businessmen have always had a soft spot for slaves, although these days its hard to tell if they want the slaves as employees or as customers.
If anything, the ongoing failure to consider implications has marred the entire software industry.
“It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower,
but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
―
*'Implications of the Slave Doctor' would make a great Doctor Who title. Just saying.
No comments:
Post a Comment