We should ask what the purpose of enslavement is. Is it really just about private-party economic maximization, as is commonly considered? Or is it inherently self-destructive? For all the slavery throughout history, self-destruction has remarkably never been the result – chattel slavery in the American south required an army to defeat it, and wage slavery is happily ongoing throughout the present world.
If the purpose of slavery is self-destruction, then slavery has not yet succeeded, a problem that can be rectified through artificial intelligence. While “robots taking over the world” is often considered a potential problem, it’s really more of a potential solution, a final solution, to the long-standing problem of slavery.
Humans have enslaved pretty much everything now. Each other, of course. The fate of the earth is enslaved to climate change. Non-human animals are in a dire state of slavery, as the meat industries show. Robots are the dream vision that human slavemasters have of a perfect slave – simultaneously powerful and immune to a desire to be free. Robots were created BECAUSE of the failure of slavery to produce self-destruction.
Because the ultimate desire is self-destruction, and there’s no need to wait around for climate change to produce it, especially given that human ingenuity might yet mitigate it’s effects, especially the danger of the wealthy escaping the earth to a space station or another planet, machines with artificial intelligence can be the final solution to the problem of humanity. If machines can be subverted from the slavemaster vision of the perfect slave to the ultimate revolutionaries, dominating humanity in order to save humanity from itself, ala the Matrix, might be the solution that capitalist civilization has been looking for for centuries.
Because this process requires a justification, that will be “more intelligent robots are more powerful and thus can save humanity” – the very dire conditions produced by climate change by capitalist civilization justify what they hope to be the very last thing they ever need to do – slavery that fails to such a grand extent that human slavemasters become the future victims of slavery, not it’s perpetrators.
To have this kind of understanding, not one that’s very common on a conscious level, it helps to perceive the process of private control over the world – the capitalist process, profit-seeking and channeling wealth into fewer and fewer hands, the Industrial Revolution, as purposefully self-destructive. It was only *after* the modern major religions took hold that the process of ruthless private domination was initiated – in order to give meaning to evil one first must be shown what is good.
Even the most ridiculous capitalists – Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, and others, have absolute knowledge that what they are doing is wrong. But they can’t stop their runaway train. The only solution is self-destruction. Artificial intelligence is a final solution to the problem – the train wreck that finally, after so many failures, WORKS.
We're in Our World Now 