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Comment by csdvrx | Hacker News Reader

> considering we cannot even get all humans to stop making other humans slaves

Slavery is like an old disease such as Polio: it still exists in some part of the world, but we're progressively eradicating it.

Looking at how societies trended away from slavery, it might just have been a local optimum at some point in time, but only by accident: autonomous agents seem to deliver more output by having more creativity when they're free to explore the alternatives

Even leaving aside the benevolence that sentient being may have for other sentient beings (because having more friends is having more fun!), whether it's humans or AI deciding, I don't think there's a good case in the long run for one putting the other into slavery.

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> Slavery is like an old disease such as Polio: it still exists in some part of the world, but we're progressively eradicating it.

Slavery has actually been on the increase lately, the following is just one of the statistics confirming this. There are more recent claims that covid and new wars have increased it further, but it is a hard thing to measure

> An estimated 50 million people were living in modern slavery on any given day in 2021, an increase of 10 million people since 2016. [1]

That's roughly 1:162 people who are in slavery today

Also, it's rather dehumanizing to compare slavery to a disease. One is biological, the other a choice to enslave another human being

[1] https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/

> Also, it's rather dehumanizing to compare slavery to a disease. One is biological, the other a choice to enslave another human being

I think slavery is a social disease: diseases reduce the fitness of the suffering person, who then tries to remove the disease.

Regardless of how a sentient being may feel about another (morality, humanism...), if there're societies of sentient beings, the one with slavery will have a reduced fitness: either it will try to cure/fix itself, or it will be outcompeted by other societies with more fitness.

If sentient beings care about eachother, they will not like slavery. Human beings care about others: it's encoded at the cultural level.

Given that AI is trained on human culture, I think it would even avoid committing the same error that's been too often done by past human societies: it will see that as a choice, but the wrong choice.

But even if AI doesn't care about humans (or human about AI), the desire for more productivity/fitness will play out against slavery.

In either case, slavery should be eradicated in the long run: with a large enough window to cancel-out unlucky random events (ex: a sliding window of 50 years), I'd expect the trend to go down

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