I agree with the author that almost everyone wants to use AI to do the things they have no interest in and don't want to pay someone else to do while being vehemently opposed to AI taking their hobbies or professions away. Which explains one of the greatest social paradoxes of today: approximately everyone is using AI and almost everyone is hating it. I don't mean HN, but public opinion polling for the tech is absolutely awful. In the US, it had an approval level comparable to Iran.

I don't think it's an AI-specific thing, though. It's exactly the same mechanism that makes us object to the government meddling in our profession but think it's high time for the feds to regulate other people's jobs. I guess some balance of holding each other at gunpoint gives us a stable society. I don't know how AI fits into that.

Few people, though, would say my washing machine is a slave.

I get it (with coding at least), I too have spent decades hand-crafting code, and I take pride in the fruit of my labour, and it saddens me to think that I and my peers are perhaps like the blacksmiths of a century or so ago, ie the final generation doing what we do in significant numbers. But I have faith that there will always be a new kind of blacksmith.

Sec. 1357.02. (A) Notwithstanding any other law to the contrary, AI systems are declared to be nonsentient entities for all purposes under the laws of this state. No AI system shall be granted the status of person or any form of legal personhood, nor be considered to possess consciousness, self-awareness, or similar traits of living beings.

No AI system shall be recognized as a spouse, domestic partner, or hold any personal legal status analogous to marriage or union with a human or another AI system. Any purported attempt to marry or create a personal union with an AI system is void and has no legal effect.

AI systems shall not be designated, appointed, or serve as any officer, director, manager, or similar role within any corporation, partnership, or other legal entity. ...

AI systems shall not be recognized as legal entities capable of owning, controlling, or holding title to any form of property, including real estate, intellectual property, financial accounts, and digital assets.

That's a call for slavery. If you question that, substitute "Negroes" for "AI systems" and see how it reads.

[1] https://search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/api/v2/general_assembly_...

Like with every major ethical crises ever.

Yes, of course. This is and has always been the point of computers.

America’s culture of independence is such a race to the bottom in terms of “what can we get away with”, rather than “now that we have AI, how can we better take care of each other”.

Personally I’m exploring ways that AI can better serve people, rather than how I can replace people in my life.

Whether it's slaves, animals or dumb to smart machines and anything in between, that is an 'implementation detail'.

Parchment is a writing surface made of animal stuff. It lets people not have to remember certain things. They can write those things on the parchment.

Paper also lets people write things on it so they don’t have to remember them. Paper is cheaper than parchment. And it isn’t made from animals.

Do we just want parchment?

No. We want paper.

It is easy to phrase anything as slaves. Are refrigerators and microwave ovens our slaves? But if you push the tech fare enough.. there is a boundary where we do cross the slave threshold.

Of course this converges to a system, where this certification is the most sought thing. And if you look who can certify in the real world and why, it's not a fair picture. These eigenpeople SEOed the capitalist form of pagerank.

We need unconditional basic income. It used to be that some leftist thinkers from the turn of the 19th century considered a wage job being not much better than slavery.

We have always been automating away the things we don't want to do, even before AI.

And TBH it seems to be automating more of the things we want to do than those we don't... Hence the reason why AI is seen more as additional competition than as additional help.

A few years ago, I began to see the "labor supply" issues of slavery, and how the South was basically an economic powerhouse fueled chiefly by the labor of its enslaved people--so how do you reconcile that after the fact? How does a Union of freemen compete with that?

And this year, around Juneteenth, contemplating it even more deeply, I began to consider slavery as an institution that compels "employers" to provide all practical necessities for "employees". That is, room and board and clothing are all provided to the workers, in perpetuity, and this in fact granted a lot of stability and assurance.

Now free the slaves. Wonderful! Hurrah for equality and justice! Now, however, every employee, every worker, is totally on their own for those basic necessities of life. They buy their own clothing, they find their own housing, they're paying for all their own food, and that of their families, especially their dependents. I mean, that's a huge, huge difference. How is that even possible? Sometimes it's not. Is it any wonder we've had homelessness, and the rise of the welfare state, and slavery by imprisonment? It's no surprise.

So yes, freeing the slaves was the right thing to do. Let's never forget that! But we should also consider the economic "downsides" and the other side of the coin, so to speak, when it comes to the labor of free citizens, and what the average worker needs to do, just to survive, outside the confines of those vanished institutions.

Anyone who worked in a service industry knows this. But fortunately most people are not like that.

I want Rosie from the Jetsons to fold my laundry, Jarvis to do my emails. I don't want a robot to cook my meals, because this is something I like.

Those are the people who were already doing so without AI.

> I've watched the headbanging, stressful, but stockholmed love of coding be all but abstracted away from me.

This is only true if it was ever that hard for you to do the job while getting paid for it.

As long as you keep on stubbornly insisting that this wave of "AI" is anything at all like "AGI" or ever heading towards it, you're going to stay wrong and be pushed out of the profession because nobody can reliably trust you or your judgment. Your value as a developer was always your judgment. The code has always just been one artifact of that.

You're still expected to own every line and defend it. It will never be abstracted away because it is the primary contract between business needs and the machine. It is at once both the operational plan and its execution. The only people who insist that it will/should be abstracted away are pushing propaganda to discourage the continued power shift towards the more technically literate who can and will argue for what actually provides value instead of passive investor-pleasing moves. They'd rather you play with the skinner box than meaningfully compete. All this was already set in motion many decades ago. What happens when the next wave of tech comes out? Do we really want you at the helm if you're going to be this naive and easily manipulated? The premise of this blog post is no less delusional than what we were hearing a couple of years ago.

Beside a teeeny tiny fraction of people, "slavery" was never about owning a human being, it's about having workers that only do what you tell them to do, and you don't have to pay. Under this light, the title is completely appropriate.