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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 has become a bit of a cliche but I think it's quite a lot more complicated than this. It's probably not wholly untrue, but, for instance, the issue of how efficient American plantation slavery was in the context of an industrialising economy has never really been settled. Time on the Cross has come in for a lot of criticism since its publication, but I think most people do now accept that American slavery was not simply going to be annihilated by the modernisation of the American economy; it really was quite 'efficient'.
Necro!
Anyhoo, I liked this particular bit.
Of course it's a lot more complicated, this was some Deep Thoughts With Jack Handy style analysis. I do think it's a useful frame.
Slavery counterfactuals aside, technology provided an option to slave labor. It didn't need to annihilate it. It just had to be a viable alternative, and I imagine that point in time was different for different technologies and different jobs. John Henry is a folk tale about this process, and he, of course, is a freed slave. Freed to have a labor competition with a steel-driving machine.
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