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_heimdall a day ago

> ended slavery

We (mostly) ended human slavery, but I don't think its accurate to say we ended slavery in general.

Oil gave us a reason to stop enslaving humans for labor - a single barrel of oil equates to the amount of work a human can do working 8 hours a day for roughly a decade.

We didn't stop slavery all together, we found a more efficient target of our enslavement. We'll do the same with AI (or at least we'll try), should actual artificial intelligence exist.

kragen 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'd never done that calculation, but that's about right; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_of_oil_equivalent is 6 gigajoules:

    You have: 6 gigajoules / 10 years (8 hours/day)
    You want: W
     * 57.039776
     / 0.017531626
That's at least in the ballpark.

I think that from a moral point of view it's accurate to say that we ended slavery in general, or at least mostly ended it. Energy slaves made of barrels of oil or solar panels don't involve the same suffering and cruelty that human slavery does.

_heimdall 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Energy slaves made of barrels of oil come with a lot of external costs that do impact living things though. I lived on the gulf coast when during and after the BP oil spill, countless animals suffered due to that oil spill.

kragen 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes. Bone and blood are the price of coal. And mountaintop removal and smog.

Fricken 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We didn't end slavery at all. There are more slaves now than ever.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/slavery/modern/modern_1.shtml

perihelions 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ironically for the parent's thesis (cheap energy replacing human slave labor), one of the major objects of modern slavery is... the manufacturing of solar panels,

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/business/economy/solar-xi... ("Solar Supply Chain Grows More Opaque Amid Human Rights Concerns / The global industry is cutting some ties to China, but its exposure to forced labor remains high and companies are less transparent, a new report found")

https://www.csis.org/analysis/dark-spot-solar-energy-industr... ("A Dark Spot for the Solar Energy Industry: Forced Labor in Xinjiang")

(Maybe there's some kind of evil Jevons Paradox for slavery, where the automation of human labor counterintuitively increases total slavery; i.e. the technologically-augmented effectiveness of slave labor increases the value of slaves).

_heimdall 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The source of 27 million slaves today is outdated. More importantly, the source paper referenced by the BBC here doesn't show any source for such a number, the closest it comes is to reference two specific examples of slavery, Sudanese slaves captured by paramilitary or government forces and sex slaves in Mumbai. Both examples are listed with estimates topping 90,000 enslaved.

In no way am I saying slavery is no longer a problem, one slave is too many. I chose not to go after the parent comment's claim that slavery has ended because that wasn't the important to the point I was raising.

ctoth 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Wait, are you saying we ... enslaved oil? Type Error! I'm reading that wrong, right?

_heimdall 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Well that would depend heavily on how you define slavery.

Most people probably consider slavery something that can only be imposed on another human. I'd be in the minority considering animals raised in industrial farms and meat operations to be enslaved. I'd be in an even smaller minority to consider that plants raised in commercial fields may be enslaved, there is at least the possibility that plants may experience the world around them and their existence in it more than we give them credit for.

I don't know that I'd say we enslaved oil, I'd say we enslaved nature more broadly.