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Paul Krugman in ’06:
Serfdom in Russia wasn’t an institution that dated back to the Dark Ages. Instead, it was mainly a 16th-century creation, contemporaneous with the beginning of the great Russian expansion into the steppes. Why? … There’s no point in enslaving … a man unless the wage you would have to pay him if he was free is substantially above the cost of feeding, housing, and clothing him. … Indeed, by 1300 – with Europe very much a Malthusian society – serfdom had withered away from lack of interest.
But now suppose that for some reason land becomes abundant, and labor scarce. Then competition among landowners will tend to push up wages of free workers, and the ruling class will try, if it can, to pin peasants down and prevent them from bargaining for a higher standard of living. In Russia, it was all about gunpowder: suddenly steppe nomads were no longer so formidable, and the rich lands of the Ukraine were open for settlement. (more; HT Mark Thoma via TGGP)
Two aspects of a future em scenario especially bother people:
The em robots might be enslaved.
They might get near subsistence wages.
Many propose regulations to address #2, such as minimum wages or limits on em reproduction. But the case of Russian serfdom contains a warning: above-cost em wages will increase the temptation to enslave ems. If ems can be created for $10 a year but market wages are $100 a year, many will be tempted to create hidden em slaves to do their work. Ordinary ems might be copied against their will into secret computers and then tortured to work.
Short of continually inspecting every physical object that might house a computer, it might be very hard to detect such hidden slavery. A far more robust solution is to just let wages fall to near subsistence, where the temptation to enslave will be greatly reduced.
Min Em Wage Enslaves?
Aron, I too am skeptical of this premise. To put another spin on it: In order for us to be able to replicate human minds in the machine, we'd need to be able to replicate all of their major parts. The brain is not a homogeneous jelly of neurons, there are of the order of 100 anatomically distinct regions in it. In order for uploading to work, we'd have to be able to engineer all of these architectures correctly (as well as a scanning process to get individual people, which has to work on all types of neurons, and which is only needed for this purpose - but I digress...). If we had a subset of the regions working, and attempted to upload someone, we'd automatically be making major changes, simply because of the missing pieces.
Consider the economic competition with biomemetic AI. For biomemetic AI to start occupying economic niches, it needs for us to understand useful pieces of brain architecture well enough to start applying them. To a significant extent, this is already happening. AI in the areas of computer vision and hearing is already useful enough for a good many applications. I expect the most probable course will be to understand brain modules in a highly uneven way, adding them to our computational tool set. We could easily reach a takeoff point where these tools add up to enough capability to take over all economically important human tasks (including closure - the tasks of building more of the hardware and of further extending its capability), without ever having enough fidelity to really upload someone.
In this scenario, the time between uploading human minds and modifying them turns negative. Modified pieces of human minds get built and applied first, and extended till the modified and optimized systems dominate the economy, without ever uploading a single complete human.
@dirk"It seems far more likely they would first set themselves on the task of building robotic bodies capable of experiencing human-like sensations and then proceed onward to procuring real human women (flip the script if they’re prototype was gay""If they accomplished that my next concern would be that the ems would enslave the humans — at least the female humans — and not the other way around."
Are you assuming that ems can/will only be taken from male humans, or that the sex issue will only be a problem with male humans?
In any case there are people out there who are happily asexual, which should suffice. One assumes there will only be a small pool of "optimal" em donors who get copied millions of times, Henrietta Lacks style, so qualities that are merely practically universal aren't a problem. And we can hormonally kill peoples sex drives without much difficulty, even if we were completely unable to do it directly to a computer simulation.