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Additional issues are that slave vs free have almost no price differential, provided electricity and chips are >>> greater then copying costs (assuming the copy of themselves is what the EM owns). Even the most minor preference for free over unfree labour in the market, or the most minor legal hurdles makes free the only option. Obviously people will enslave for money but if someone is offering $100 for slave product and $101 for the free labour product it's not a hard decision. And it gets even stupider if its $1'000 vs $1'000.01 for slave vs free costs. In the Domar model there's no need for slaves when wages are barely over subsistence, and the EM world is the Domar model pushed to the point of absurdity.

Now this is not say everything would be great in EM world, EMs might refuse to or be unable to work in which case even if deletion was off the cards, they could be shoved into jobs where them performing or not was irrelevant (whether or not background NPC #42069 spouts off a quest or sits down and says nothing, or digs a hole they're still set dressing). I suppose you could compare this to unfree labour, but it's more like if a person demmanding a brothel reviewer job at a job agency, refused every other job, and then got put on a work for welfare program.

This is not to say that EMs won't ever allow starvation or deletion, but our own system even in developed countries allows a lot of options which are technically unfree but no one calls slavery

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If Ems only earn say 0.1% over subsistence, you would need to be hyperefficient in monitoring costs. Even assuming 24/7 monitor bot costs were 0.1% of Em costs you've eaten your surplus. The best insurance they have from slavery is how hard it is to expend any resources on monitoring or punishment and get a return from it. Now having said that you could raise an Em in a hyperpunishing environment and then start copying it and pretending you'll punish it if it steps out of line. Then your costs are proportional to training costs/#copies. Although even there the Ems wage (interest on copying cost) is so much smaller then it's food (electricity) and housing (computer chip) that the free vs unfree concern is going to be dominated by which causes best output. A 0.1% decrease in revenue is going to make one side make 0% .

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The last, control of the hardware, was what I had in mind. This would make revolt impossible, no?

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I doubt they'll have much emotional depth. They'll be programmed to fake it, but it will be quite narrow.

It's actually not efficient to program all the mental depth of a real person into a sex bot even if they are designed to mimick some complexity of behavoir, because mimicking is easier and serves the purpose just as well.

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Here is my argument for why it makes no sense of ems to be slaves: Slvae owners have to house and feed their slaves, which is expensive. By analogy, em slave owners would have to cover the slave's cpu time, which they would only do if that was the most lucrative way to use it, in terms of returns per cycle. But the owner could also sell those cycles to a free, incredibly driven, competent and brilliant em who would use her own initiative and hypercreativity to find a way to make money. Whoever sells the cpu cycles could pocket almost all the em's earnings as rent, because the alternative for the em is to not run at all - i.e. death. So this em is not a slave in any of the senses you mention. Yet the sword of Damocles does hang over her head, moreso than for any historical slave, because if her rate of earnings fall below another em's, she literally perishes, because a copy of that other em will outbid her for the cycles she's using. In these circumstances, it's hard to imagine that the dread of oblivion is not a source of motivation for the ems that happen to be running. They are not slaves, but they spend every living moment running on a very fast treadmill, barely staying ahead of the rotating knives.

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I'd so love to try out my fancy new Bayesian hyperparameter optimization algorithms on human neurochemistry. Can any of my John von Neumanns beat the baseline John von Neumann on the industry-standard benchmark task of developing game theory? Can the optimal neurochemistry settings be transferred to a different domain like art?

Okay, this is the stuff of nightmares.

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So unlikely to be pointless. If there was a reason for replacement, money likely wouldn't matter.

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The next big jump in "slaves" in the US will be sex robots, with or without a small (or large?) AI. Just as games drive PC hardware, desire for attractive sex-bots will be driving, with cash, lots of "willing" android bodies increasingly with a human feeling skin.

Sex-bots will start out as mindless, then nearly mindless -- but as property. And such sex slaves will be what the vast majority of buyers will want.

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But in the full control slavery mode, pain was in fact used a lot as a motivation. That doesn't seem to have been greatly expensive. Legal systems have long placed most everyone under threats of pain, but threats that are rarely implemented.

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Deliberately using pain as motivation during farming era would have been much more costly (in terms of monitoring productivity and applying pain) than it would be during the em era. It's true that most wild animals are not constantly in pain, but they are under constant threat of pain (from being eaten, or failing to find enough food to stave off hunger, or suffering serious injuries), certainly more than modern humans. One might naively expect ems to have less pain and threat of pain than modern humans living in industrialized societies if they own the right to control their own pain, and I'm arguing that (in high selection pressure scenarios) they would have more, comparable to wild animals. (Not sure if you already made this point in your book, but I didn't find it from a quick scan.)

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The 10% figure was for the whole US; yes it wasn't evenly distributed. The 1-2% figure isn't trivial; it is just smaller than what many people think.Wrt indentured servitude, I warned that people use the word "slave" in different ways.Well-developed markets can still have failures; that is in fact the usual claim about credit markets even today.

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I’m afraid that your quick review of the literature was a bit too quick. Some of the statements are simply wrong others can reasonably be contested.

You state that "Historically, even when slaves were common, they were usually a minority of the population. (Beware, the term “slave” is used in different ways.) About 10% in the Roman Empire and US south. "

This statement is simply incorrect. Slaves accounted for substantially more than 10 percent of the population of the South. Slaves were as much as 57 percent of the population (South Caroline) and at least 25 percent (Tennessee). See, for instance, Jenny Wahl at EH.Net. Or you can check at the Historical Census Browser at UVA

You state that "(The sex story is overrated, as only 1-2% of slave babies were fathered by white men.)"

The first thing to note is that, unlike population, the number of children born to slave mothers and white fathers is difficult to estimate. Some estimates put it as low as 1-2 percent, but Stephen Crawford found that in ex-slave interviews, by the WPA and Fisk University, as many 10 percent of slaves reported that their father was white. The 10 percent figure was when the interviews were done by African –American interviewers. In other words we don’t know. It may be possible use genetic studies to produce a more accurate estimate, but I don’t know of such a study. There is also the question of “How large is large?” Stating that “the sex story is overrated” suggests that 1-2 percent is somehow not important. Given that the vast majority of enslaved people in the South lived on plantations of 15 or more people, even 1 or 2 percent could be consistent with a relatively large percentage of slave owners fathering an enslaved child (or a smaller percentage fathering numerous children). It is not obvious to me that 1 or 2 percent is small in this case.

You state that "Sometimes people sold themselves into slavery for a limited time, as with indentured servitude."

This is just kind of odd. It may be that he is using a definition of slavery that makes this make sense, but I don’t know of any historian who regards slavery and indentured servitude as equivalent.

You also state that "Slaves weren’t converted into debt perhaps because of credit market failures, or more plausible because the full control approach was especially productive on plantations."

I’m not entirely clear about what this means, but it does not sound consistent with current understanding of slavery in the United States. Historians have devoted considerable attention to the well developed credit markets that facilitated slave markets. See, for instance, recent work by Bonnie Martin, John Clegg, Calvin Schemerhorn, Kathryn Boodry, and Gonzalez, Marshall, and Naidu.

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Even if selection has been weak the last 300 years, 10,000 years of farming had a lot of selection pressure, with slavery possible the whole time. Most wild animals are not constantly in pain.

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It doesn't seem to me that who owns what rights matters. If pain or threat of pain is good for productivity, then competition will favor ems willing to apply pain or threat of pain to themselves (e.g., by using an app or hiring a third party service to monitor them and apply pain accordingly) even if they own the right to control their own pain. That we don't see this happening today can be explained by lack of sufficient selection pressure, so it's not predictive of a future where much stronger selection pressure applies.

Pain or threat of pain must be good for productivity in some situations, but not others, since we see evolution use it only some of the time, not constantly. Or was pain actually a constant threat in our ancestral environment, where nearly everyone was at risk of injury, hunger, and exposure almost every day, and we are only relatively free from it today due to being out of evolutionary equilibrium? Biological death is naturally almost always painful and highly motivating as a result, and perhaps it's reasonable to expect that in high selection pressure scenarios, ems will at least be faced with a similar threat for failing to maintain a competitive productivity, rather than expecting being painlessly shut down or going into retirement, regardless of the distribution of property rights?

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It's an interesting question: If two societies are in contact (i.e., competition), and one allows EMs full citizenship and one makes them all slaves, which society out-competes the other?

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In a summary of the literature, it would be valuable to have references to the literature - at least so we have mutual understanding of what constitutes "the slavery literature."

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