Return of Slavery?

In this essay, I continue a thought from the previous essay. In O Holy Night, Adolphe Adam said “the slave is our brother,” and looked forward to a glorious dawn in which slavery would vanish. I explained that slavery came to an end in the United States not because God performed a miracle but because America fought a war against itself to eradicate it.

But even if America had not fought the Civil War, slavery would have come to an end. It was economically unfeasible. It was a system of dehumanization and oppression that was maintained by force, not by profit. Clearly a system in which free people produced market goods would have been superior to a slave economy. It was pride, not profit, that kept Southern land owners defiant against the calls for emancipation. Eventually, the world economy would have preferred cotton from non-slave sources over slave cotton, and the South would have collapsed. We do not have slavery today mainly because it is not profitable. We like to think we have lofty religious and ethical reasons to not have slaves, but it is the unprofitability of slavery that has given us the freedom to think lofty thoughts.

Slavery was profitable for millennia because empires fought other empires and made all their captives into slaves.

But what if slavery should ever become profitable again? We like to think this is impossible. And as artificial intelligence and robots become better and better and better at doing almost everything, it would seem impossible that there would ever again be human slaves. Robots have no legal rights, and we could just make a large number of robot slaves to do the dangerous, dirty, and repetitive tasks that no human would do unless enslaved. Robots are also cheaper, since they need no salaries, vacations, or health care. Or even bathroom breaks.

I have been reading a 2022 novel The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler about a future world (not far in the future) in which robots do the dangerous and dirty work more cheaply than humans would, in general. But robots are complex machines that are now, and will be far into the future, expensive to make and to maintain. For some dirty jobs, robot maintenance would be very expensive. Nayler’s example is deep sea fishing, in which fish blood and guts create thick layers of slime on ships. It would be expensive to keep the robot circuitry and mechanisms clean under such conditions. Human slaves, however, can work ankle-deep in slime, all day every day, and all they need is a little cheap food. Most of the expenses of a human work force are those that were considered unnecessary for plantation slaves.

So on the fishing trawler in the novel, human slaves (kidnapped from Asian countries then brainwashed) gut the fish that machines have harvested. But even brainwashed humans can imagine freedom. The human slaves are watched over by brainwashed human soldiers who beat them. The whole trawler is controlled by an artificial intelligence, kept clean inside its hatch, that issues the orders.

It was not economically viable for any wealthy nation to patrol the high seas and stop AI trawlers from kidnapping men from poor nations, so no serious effort was mounted to stop this practice.

In the nineteenth century, it was not a “glorious dawn” of religious inspiration that brought slavery to an end, but because slavery was not profitable. In the twenty-first century, slavery might become profitable again. And if it were profitable, no force on Earth could keep slavery from returning.