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Comment by yunwal | Hacker News Reader

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

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i am reading a book about the us civil war and seemingly the most compelling argument to the non-abolitionism set in the north was that it cheapened labor. seems like most of the north didn't so much care about abolition per say.

* per se

The suffering of the slave isn't the only evil of slavery. What it does to the master is to alienate them from the creative process and turns them into a dependent consumer of the work of others. The master becomes detached from productive work and therefore dependent and less free themselves.

> The thought of being under absolute compulsion, the plaything of another, is unendurable for a human being. Hence, if every way of escape from the constraint is taken from him, there is nothing left for him to do but to persuade himself that he does the things he is forced to do willingly, that is to say, to substitute devotion for obedience.[...] It is by this twist that slavery debases the soul: this devotion is in fact based on a lie, since the reasons for it cannot bear investigation. [...] Moreover, the master is deceived too by the fallacy of devotion.

- Simone Weil

No, you missed what makes AI bad in our culture. It doesn't just take your work, by your choice. It also takes your self-worth (because our culture is based on working being worthy) and for many people also a job (which is a material representation of that cultural value).

Trying to reduce how much you pay other people, with its attendant job and self-worth losses, has been happening since at least the Industrial Revolution; nothing about it is novel. The only novelty of the latest wave (AI) is that it affects a class of society (knowledge workers; smart people with degrees) that previously considered itself immune to this process.

If you also hold all technological advances since the Industrial Revolution to be "bad in our culture", then no contradiction arises. Otherwise, please explain why that was good, but this is bad.

I would go further, it's tied to protestant work ethic. And there always was an alternative - gradual reduction of work hours rather than unemployment.

Sounds like a cultural revolution is necessary.

Sure if you're a rich slave owner.

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