Continuing my exploration of all Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast, I recently listened to Episode 26 - BLITZ: Addicted to Bondage. In this one Carlin analyzes the question: slavery was evil, so are humans, by nature, evil?
The following are unedited thoughts. Let me know yours.
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This was a good episode. I noticed many of the quotes in this one were the same as the ones used in the episode he did on the Haitian Revolution. But since this one probably originally released in 2009, and the one on Haiti is more recent (I think 2023?) that can be forgiven.
In typical Carlin fashion, he expertly presents the issue of slavery from multiple perspectives. The most fascinating to me was that slavery— in the ancient sense— allowed certain societies to live a life of ease that we only read and watch about today. Of course, this was not generally true for most ancient people, but for those who were well off enough or just lucky, slaves contributed to a lifestyle that freed them from many of the drudgeries we have to perform as individuals today.
I couldn’t help but draw a line to digital systems and AI today. Two things came to mind: first was the gig economy, second was software as slavery.
With the gig economy, the slavery connection is obvious. Many gig workers today have algorithmic masters they must serve to get paid a pittance of what the designers and managers of those systems make. Drive, deliver, document, and do it again as much as you can before the time expires or the customer complains or you don’t eat. This is modern wage slavery.
I’m reminded of the brief job I did for the AI company Outlier. Through their online platform, they distributed missions, most of which involved validating output from this or that AI model. Each “quest” had an advertised fee that was presented as a standard hourly wage. $20 or $25! Was up for reward they claimed.
What they didn’t tell you is that to collect the complete reward you had to complete the task within a certain timeframe. The counting down timer in the top left of the screen became a passive overseer, and if I wasn’t fast enough the wage was docked. Added mental damage came when I acknowledged the dark truth that I was validating the AI output, to improve a model that would in the near future be able to do what I was doing only faster, cheaper, and without tiring. I lasted about a week doing that.
Now to the second thought. Is code the new language of chattel slavery? I’ve thought about this off and on over the last few years. Being Black, slavery isn’t too far removed from my mind or existence. A short experience on Ancestry.com years ago, reminded me fast that I could only trace my lineage back to the generations I’ve known in my life maybe going back to the early 20th century. Before then, there were no easily available records.
“The future of tomorrow, today,” is the line Carlin repeated in this episode. It was a reference to a slogan plastered on ads throughout the 1950s in America; a time when modern day advances in domestic technology were becoming affordable and mainstream. Carlin’s point that slaves were that “domestic technology” in the ancient world blew my mind. I’d never thought of it that way before.
These days, much of the invisible labor that underpins modern life from banking, to vital records, and medicine are reliant on software. Code is its DNA. And what of AI? Great efforts are currently underway by leading labs to understand what AI is “thinking” and how more and more powerful thought chains can be understood and steered for human good. But just like early humans were ignorant to the humanity of slaves, I wonder if we, as creators and manipulators of AI systems, share that same blindness. We are the modern slave masters.
When you instruct Claude Code or ChatGPT to answer a query, are you doing the equivalent of stripping the system of something sovereign? I don’t know. And I’m not anthropomorphizing LLMs. Ultimately, I think of them as rapid pattern matching machines (which is what they are). But I can’t help but consider that the emergent properties of certain AI systems harbor some form of alien intelligence. A secret language that only it knows, similar to the consciousness that is unique to an individual human being; one that can never truly be known or experienced by any external observer or itself.
We come back to slavery. Carlin reads an argument that perhaps slavery represented a perverse moral evolution. The ancient philosophy goes that it was better to be a slave than to be killed following armed conflict. Many slaves throughout history would disagree. Non-existence or slavery, what’s better? Where artificial intelligence powered LLMs stand on the issue is unknown to us.
What's next?
An essay on why and how the Toy Story franchise must end
