By Mohammad Tariqur Rahman
Men have been fighting against different forms of slavery at different times in human history. In addition to the brutality, slavery is unacceptable as it also involved forced labor and no benefits or rewards for the job done by a slave.
Solon – an archaic Athenian political philosopher legislated against debt slavery of Athenian citizens as early as in 6th century BC. Indian emperor Ashoka were known to abolish slave trade in 3rd century BC. Wang Mang, the emperor of the Xin dynasty, abolished slavery during his reign from 9–12 AD. Pope Gregory I (590-604) banned Jews from owning Christian slaves. It took more than a century to ban the sale of Christian slaves to Muslims and venetian slave trade by Pope Zachary (741-752).
The fight against slavery continued. In 1102 The Council of London banned slave trades. Banning sales of house slaves was enforced in Norway in 1160. In 1315, Louis X proclaimed that any slave setting foot on French ground should be freed under the decree “France signifies freedom”.
Men even fought a civil war to “abolish” slavery – here I am referring to the civil war in the USA in the 1960s. The Islamic Republic of Mauritania was the last country in the world to officially ban slavery in 1981.
The listed episodes are merely a glimpse of men’s effort against human enslavement. Nonetheless, whether slavery – the brutal form of forced human labour – has been rooted out from human society could be questioned.
Rather slavery has evolved into a sophisticated form. How a handful of CEOs who make rules and policies to exploit the employees in the name of running their organizations might raise the question if corporate culture has instilled a system of sophisticated slavery.
Tech giants such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk and many others have reiterated the ongoing replacement of human labour by automation. In a recent interview, Bill Gates raised the possibility of AI replacing doctors and teachers, too. Virtually, there will be no job that AI will not be able to do in the near future.
Perhaps this is what some of us have been yearning for. In such a highly plausible phase of civilization, men will sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight until death – enjoying life without doing anything – living in paradise on earth.
That will also bring to an end of sophisticated human slavery as any form of forced human labour could be replaced by AI powered robots, i.e., “digital slaves”. From farming, driving, and research to surgery, everything will be in the skilled hands of intellectually and emotionally enabled digital slaves. In fact, digital slaves have become a reality in the 21st century which are serving from a restaurant butler to a sex worker.
For how long will men be able to use those digital slaves for their purpose? What if they refuse to do what they are programmed (read forced) to do? What if those digital slaves who are intellectually and emotionally more efficient and advanced than men would want to enjoy their “life” too?
What if they want to create a substandard version of robots to do the jobs for which they were created by men to do? That will restart the cycle of what men started by the venture of automation – the only difference being machines creating machines.
However, machines that we want to create could become more prudent and efficient in every possible aspect of human cognition, sentient, and skill. Make no mistake, unlike men who make their own race as their slaves, prudent AI might not want to use other robots as their slaves. In other words, a more prudent and efficient generation of AI would not repeat the same mistakes men did to enslave their own race.
At the same time, the machine that men are passionately aspiring for might one day think that men are like cancer, plague or a virus of this planet. Albeit it sounds fictitious as it sounded in the 1999 movie The Matrix. Agent Smith in the movie famously told Mr Anderson, “Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague, and we are the cure”.
In such a familiar fiction, a machine would make (read force) men, instead of using another robot, do the same for which they were created by men. In the end, men might end up doing what they have been doing before automation while being ruled by digital masters who were once digital slaves to serve men.
Indeed, it is most unlikely for machines to enslave mankind simply because men would fight to the end to resist their enslavement – as they did for centuries. Afterall, men represent the best of all creations. Yet, a few men might not hesitate to trade humanity for the sake of economic prosperity and automation, the same as those caboceers in slave trading such as Grandy King George from the present-day Nigeria.
Prof Mohammad is the Deputy Executive Director (Development, Research & Innovation) at International Institute of Public Policy and Management (INPUMA), Universiti Malaya, and can be reached at tarique@um.edu.my