Some things never change – AI as the new slavery
After the ILTA conference in National Harbor, my wife and I stuck around the DC area for the weekend. One of our priorities, aside from watching national guard troops stand around with nothing to do, was to spend the day at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Yes, that was a priority because it is clear that this museum is going to either cease to exist or undergo significant changes in the coming months.
I paused at this sign and wondered if anything had changed:
This is from 1734 and is a quote attributed to William Snelgrave.
“Tho’ traffic in human creatures … may at first appear barbarous … the advantage of it far outweigh(s) all …inconveniences.”
As I read it, my thoughts turned to everything that has happened since 1734. Slavery is illegal, but slavery turned into sharecropping, which became worker exploitation in factories, which turned into exploitation of immigrant workers, including tech workers on work visas, and is now turning into AI, which is slavery of virtual bots.
At the bottom of it all is a group of incredibly wealthy people willing to sacrifice everyone else in pursuit of their “advantages”. In contrast, everyone else gets to suffer the “inconveniences.”
In the 18th and 19th centuries, slavery in America was justified because of profit. In the 20th century, we moved on to worker exploitation, and now we are in a situation where the wealthy and powerful need AI to increase their profits, regardless of the economic and environmental impact on the rest of the world.
AI is not a human being. It is, however, the thing that most closely resembles the desire of slave owners – the ability to not only own the means of production, but also the labor required, to do with as you wish, all in pursuit of more wealth.
So when they tell you that the risks and dangers are overstated, and not to worry about it, because the benefits will surely outweigh everything else, come back and remember that the wealthy said the same thing about slavery. For them, the benefits did outweigh everything else. That wasn’t the case for people who were different from them.
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