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Comment by falcor84 | Hacker News Reader

There might be some version of a future where robots take care of managing the industry for our benefit in a post-scarcity setting, allowing us humans to live as simple a life as we want, knowing that when a material need arises the robots will be willing and able to quickly fulfill it for us.

I don't think that's where we're headed, but I like imagining.

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But… why? What you describe sounds like a dystopic vision, but you seem enthusiastic about it? Why?

I grew up watching Star Trek and its replicators ("Tea, Earl Grey, Hot"). So a core part of me is excited about this ideal future world where we wouldn't need to work to sustain ourselves, but would be free to use our time to explore the universe, or learn, or make art, or manage a vineyard.

To me this vision of us being able to do whatever we want, while machines are available to take care of our necessities, to the extent we chose to rely on them, is almost heaven-like.

And for a prehistoric context, according to researchers such as James Suzman, earlier in human history, we were a lot closer to this ideal than we are now [0].

[0] https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/for-95-percent-of-human...

Chief O'Brien is the underappreciated hero of Star Trek making Picard's lifestyle possible. I'm happy to see his hard work, often crawling on all fours in awkward spaces, got highlighted more in DS9.

Or in other words, there were no automatic maintenance machines in the Star Trek universe at the time, it was all handwork still. Manufacturing and food prep was done by machines which solves some part of it I suppose.

With the direction everything is moving, we will get back slavery faster than we will get robots and AGI.

Slavery never went away, it just changed its name to Prison Labor. For fun here's a pair of stories about people being held past their release dates:

* https://promiseofjustice.org/news/louisianans-illegally-kept...

* https://www.corrections1.com/law-and-legislation/articles/re...

For a lot of countries, it did go away.

I think if you look closely it was just hidden behind various structures, like e.g. hiring seasonal workers from abroad, housing them in your own (substandard) buildings, and cutting their wages by the amount of rent that you charge so their take-home is well below minimum wage. But they tolerate it because it's still better pay than they can get in their home country.

It may have been made illegal, but it hasn’t gone away.

While slavery exists in various forms (wage slavery, prison labor, etc.) it is still important to make the distinction between those and the extreme form of chattel slavery that existed from the 16th to 19th century. People, and all their descendants, being literal property, able to be tortured, raped, and murdered with the same legal status as a couch tossed in a dumpster, is not the same as modern versions of slavery.

My impression from school was that in the well-known slavery societies, slaves or serfs outnumbered free men.

Maybe the number of sailors in deplorable conditions is equal to number of prisoners, worldwide. 0.2% of world population?

My sci-fi filled head makes me most concerned they these will arrive concurrently.

Do you know that in History every increase in productivity is appropriated by the ruler class?

Your future isn't realistic.

Just workers organization and democracy prevents it

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