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Notes -
Technology as politics.
Feminism is more a product of the washing machine, the pill and air conditioning than it is political organizing. It is less an ideology than it is a set of opinions enabled by a certain level of technological advancement.
Anti-racism is more a product of the steam engine than it is of any moral progress. All of human history no one thought to free the slaves, until one day from out of nowhere.....the richest and most technologically advanced society on earth invented a way to turn fossil fuels into energy and all the sudden slavery and the racism that supported it isn't strictly necessary. Hence "moral progress".
Today, we all benefit from less-than-free labor in third world nations making us cheaper consumer products. In the most technologically backward parts of the world slavery still exists. That is not because those are worse people than those of us who can afford to pay for the labor that supports our first world lifestyles.
The "moral" arc of history bends toward whatever options technology provides.
What this means for the age of AI is anyone's guess.
This didn't pass the sniff test, and sure enough, France outlawed slavery in the 14th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionism
I think it works okay if you view things in a more fuzzy way. The idea of abolitionism didn't just magically appear at the time of the Industrial Revolution, just like the IR itself wasn't a single thing at a single time but a gradual progression over hundreds of years. Going from an idea written about by a few privileged elites to a movement endorsed by nation-sized populations and that nation-states are prepared to wage full-scale wars over is not an instant or automatic process. It seems very plausible to me that the IR powered the growth of abolitionism from something that they were willing to pass in places that didn't really have any slaves anyways to something that they were prepared to enact and enforce by force of arms in places where the entire economy was built on slave labor and the controlling imperial power was getting a fat chunk of the profits.
Slavery was extremely common in early Medieval England and yet it was abolished while still common.
I'm skeptical, but curious. I wonder exactly what "common" means here. Exactly how many are we talking about, who had them, how much money was invested in slaves in England overall, what kind of work were they doing, etc. The details could easily confirm or refute my presumption that it was relatively low friction to abolish in the places it was abolished early.
The elite class now sure doesn't seem to like farmers and ranchers, even though that's where their food comes from. It seems pretty plausible that a bunch of trend-following elites were willing to ban something that only hurt people they didn't care much about anyway.
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