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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.
Slavery was abolished in England in the 12th century, replaced by serfdom, and then Elizabeth I freed the serfs in 1574. Some English people practiced slavery outside of England but on the island itself there was no institution of slavery. It's clearly not a purely technological issue.
Slave plantations are less efficient than small farmers. Slavery is just a way of giving the rich a larger share of the wealth at the cost of stifling economic growth.
This was not so for usual cash crops such as tobacco or sugar cane or other similar crops especially if these were grown in on large plantations in hot climates ridden with tropical diseases. After revolution in Haiti the newly freed slaves were not that keen on continuing growing cash crops and the revenue plummeted.
This is the opposite of grain or other type of crops that are more suitable for small family sized groups of yeomen farmers. Heck, even growing rice gives rise to different types of societies given that it is a very labor intensive type of farming that requires irrigation and other communal infrastructure projects. So yes, I'd say that slavery is also largely (but not solely) due to economic reasons.
Not sure is Haiti with its accursed history a good example of something not being a good idea.
If you consider only wellbeing of nobility/elites, then yes. But in this case profits are again wealth transfer from poor and it seems extremely likely that overall it was worse.
I am considering tons of sugar produced, in that sense slave plantations were more efficient compared to other forms of ownership. So no matter the initial organization of labor, slave plantations will be more efficient and thus will be established as dominant structure as that is how incentives are aligned.
By the way it is not dissimilar to some issues here an now: organic and ethical farms are less efficient compared to industrial agriculture and that is why we have the system that we have now. The same goes for textile industry and so forth. And even the do-gooders and Buddhist vegans may not be as squeamish buying illegal drugs with all the costs associated with financing criminal cartels wreaking havoc in many countries. I do not see the situation that different - if English ladies and gentlemen of 18th century wanted to sweeten their tea with sugar, they just accepted slave labor in the same way modern comrades in California accept some people being horribly executed by cartels just as a price of having fun when partying.
Organic and ethical farms are actually dramatically more efficient at turning energy into food than industrial agriculture. Industrial farming lets you turn petroleum/oil into food, and despite being less efficient (and causing damage to the soil to boot) the sheer amount of energy contained within petroleum lets modern industrial agriculture outcompete organic and ethical farming.
You may have your own metric of what is "efficient", I use markets and capacity to produce at scale. You may use different idea of what "efficient" means including efficiently satisfying your aesthetic need but then we are not discussing the same thing. Slave plantations were able to produce more cash crops for cheaper compared to other types of agricultural production, that is why they emerged in the first place and it did not matter if it was French or Portuguese or English or Dutch or later Americans being in control, all of them were running slave plantations despite being of different religions, cultures, languages etc. Playing word games of what it means to be efficient does not change the economic incentives.
As has been pointed out below, my metric is actually energy returned on energy invested, i.e. input vs output on an energetic level. To the best of my knowledge this is actually what people usually mean when they use the term "efficient" and I'm not trying to play any language games here. Organic farming turns 1 calorie of input into 10 calories of output, petroleum/modern agriculture turns 10 calories of input into 1 calorie of output. To go back to slavery, slavery might even be incredibly inefficient, but the slaveowner doesn't care because he's using other people's resources without compensating them - slavery isn't really about efficiency.
As for changing economic incentives, I think there's actually a very substantial chance of that changing over the next few decades - go look at a chart showing conventional oil discoveries over time (you can look at the non-conventional discoveries too, but they need to be accounted for differently due to depletion rates etc). Modern industrial agriculture relies on petroleum and there are no substitutes, so expect economic incentives to change dramatically as oil's price changes.
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From what I remember from his other comments, his metric of efficiency how much energy you need to put in vs how many calories of food you get out. It's a valid metric IMO, and markets obfuscate it when energy is cheap.
I could ride my horse to the next valley for 10 potatoes. Or I could walk there for 3 potatoes.
The market has determined that generally people's time is more valuable than the energy, and the market's efficiency is calculated by taking the two factors (among others) into account. To say that the market result is not maximally energy efficient is a trivial, one-eyed view. The labour efficiency of organic farming is abysmal.
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