The market for robot labour is older than we are ready to admit.
Issac Asimov gave The West the word 'robot', in the 1950's
it was a Hungarian word that meant 'slave'. Nowadays
the 1950's is as far back as some folk like to mis-remember.
Asimov meant by 'robot' 'mechanical domestic labour'
and wrote stories casting robots as boons to women,
to keep them happier whilst they remained in their homes,
separate from the men who wholly owned them and the home,
men who claimed the women as their companions,
whilst making something lesser-chattels-out of them
this idea of robots as 'chattels of chattels' remained unsaid.
Real women, and companions of whatever gender,
would have preferred a device that gave that validated
them leaving the house, not being property,
however useful or not, and not being seen as same.
The modern history slavery grew up with modern empires
The British, the Dutch, the Spanish the Germans and the Portuegese
all had them, other countries too. Out of such finery came America.
Where for the many coloured imported humans 'freedom'
was the freedom to be a slave, and for a white few
freedom was their 'duty' to be their owners.
The words 'sadism' and 'masochism' had not yet been coined,
neither as states of heightened emotions in relationships between individuals,
nor as words that described the normalising of cruelty between races.
But the evidence for those terms hid in plain sight, for all to see, or avoid.
Under empire 'slave' meant 'mechanical labour
that meant nothing the slave owner when the slave's body
stopped working and died, because according to their owners
only the slave owners 'had souls and feelings', understood refinement.
Their owners clearly felt a lot, and both their soul
and their capacity for violence came from the right
to render others property, remove and rename them.
According to how the slave owner treated them
the only eternity for the whole of their property
was the eternal 'now' of their enslavement.
Other ideas of slavery and robotics also existed,
when the Czar of Russia freed the serfs in 1871
he achieved it with relatively little loss of life
compared with the suffering of America
in it's Civil War, which probably because of the war
aborted the enlisting of former slaves into full citizenry.
Nowadays we in the west can leave our houses
and have the world brought to us. We live
is such luxury that robots do everything but live for us.
Electricity and technology are like that.
We work for this these luxuries and are changed in our work
by how the language of robotics has re-invented
us beyond all belief, and we have trouble adapting reinvention.
We don't know whether to give up on the idea of 'a soul'
or whether to claim a soul, and be cruel and self righteous.
For humans to work well they need feel good together.
to do that they need a sense of being a team.
Thus employers will work hard on rhetorical P.R.
that make working for them an attractive prospect.
If this gives the boss a self-righteous soul
with which to hoodwink would-be employees
into pretend mutual agreement then so be it.
But woe betide anyone of us
when they get unfit for for work
or when work gets unfit for the doing.
Issac Asimov gave The West the word 'robot', in the 1950's
it was a Hungarian word that meant 'slave'. Nowadays
the 1950's is as far back as some folk like to mis-remember.
Asimov meant by 'robot' 'mechanical domestic labour'
and wrote stories casting robots as boons to women,
to keep them happier whilst they remained in their homes,
separate from the men who wholly owned them and the home,
men who claimed the women as their companions,
whilst making something lesser-chattels-out of them
this idea of robots as 'chattels of chattels' remained unsaid.
Real women, and companions of whatever gender,
would have preferred a device that gave that validated
them leaving the house, not being property,
however useful or not, and not being seen as same.
The modern history slavery grew up with modern empires
The British, the Dutch, the Spanish the Germans and the Portuegese
all had them, other countries too. Out of such finery came America.
Where for the many coloured imported humans 'freedom'
was the freedom to be a slave, and for a white few
freedom was their 'duty' to be their owners.
The words 'sadism' and 'masochism' had not yet been coined,
neither as states of heightened emotions in relationships between individuals,
nor as words that described the normalising of cruelty between races.
But the evidence for those terms hid in plain sight, for all to see, or avoid.
Under empire 'slave' meant 'mechanical labour
that meant nothing the slave owner when the slave's body
stopped working and died, because according to their owners
only the slave owners 'had souls and feelings', understood refinement.
Their owners clearly felt a lot, and both their soul
and their capacity for violence came from the right
to render others property, remove and rename them.
According to how the slave owner treated them
the only eternity for the whole of their property
was the eternal 'now' of their enslavement.
Other ideas of slavery and robotics also existed,
when the Czar of Russia freed the serfs in 1871
he achieved it with relatively little loss of life
compared with the suffering of America
in it's Civil War, which probably because of the war
aborted the enlisting of former slaves into full citizenry.
Nowadays we in the west can leave our houses
and have the world brought to us. We live
is such luxury that robots do everything but live for us.
Electricity and technology are like that.
We work for this these luxuries and are changed in our work
by how the language of robotics has re-invented
us beyond all belief, and we have trouble adapting reinvention.
We don't know whether to give up on the idea of 'a soul'
or whether to claim a soul, and be cruel and self righteous.
For humans to work well they need feel good together.
to do that they need a sense of being a team.
Thus employers will work hard on rhetorical P.R.
that make working for them an attractive prospect.
If this gives the boss a self-righteous soul
with which to hoodwink would-be employees
into pretend mutual agreement then so be it.
But woe betide anyone of us
when they get unfit for for work
or when work gets unfit for the doing.
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