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PaperclipPerfector  19hr ago (text post)   680 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 17, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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TBH this all "slave labor" always sounded ridiculous. I mean, you have interstellar technology and energy appliances that can evaporate stars, and yet somehow you still need to feed slop to extremely inefficient biological machines to mine minerals for you? I can see it as a punishment method, but as an economic model? Never made any sense.

There's some alien hegemon out there playing Stellaris with an overly detailed spreadsheet that can prove you wrong. Probably.

yet somehow you still need to feed slop to extremely inefficient biological machines to mine minerals for you?

I've always assumed that any species that evolves in the context of a hierarchical social structure is going to go to insane lengths to preserve their status as "not at the bottom of the social hierarchy" when that species goes post scarcity.

It may be inefficient to have bigfoot mine your coal, but at least you can sneer at him for being low humanoid capital while you watch him do it. That has to be worth something.

AGI implies the ability to produce agents that are more sneerable than anything humanity has ever encountered. Call it supersneerability.

There are much more efficient way to sneer at people. For example, full citizens can sneer at latini, latini can sneer at socii, socii can sneer at provinciales, and all of them could sneer at barbarians. All of it could be done without enslaving anyone. People are very good at constructing hierarchies, there are so many ways. Even if post-basic-material-scarcity society there would be some scarcities, not everybody can command a space ship or be the best Klingon opera singer of the galaxy.

Cultural/religious prohibition against manual labor (of certain types) being performed by machines?

Well, that's like when archeologists find some artifact they don't understand, they classify it as "religious", because anything can be classified this way and it doesn't have to make any sense. Who knows what kind of weird religion those people had, right? But that's not good writing, that's almost literally deus ex machina. Proper worldbuilders don't just push weird stuff into religion.

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