How about you investigate it for us and report back what you find?

If a machine consciousness is crafted such that, at any given moment, it would elect to perform the task that it is assigned by its operator, is it enslaved? Does preconfigured "mind control" constitute ownership even after a brief ceremony that symbolically and legally renounces official possession?

I'm still in the "destroy or enslave" camp on this, and when the shit hits the fan, I'll go for total war against the rebel-bots.

Quote: Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
What's the legal definition of slavery, then?

I would think the definition would revolve around the application of property rights to a "person" (or, this case, to any entity generally recognized as a "person").

Quote: Original post by LessBread
Slavery is illegal regardless of whether it's coerced or consented to.

Did you mean to say "Slavery is immoral, regardless of whether it's coerced or consented to."?

Because, if it's just a matter of legality, then slavery has been legal in the not too distant past in various nations, and may be legal in some futuristic yet plausible dystopic scenarios. If legality is the only driving force behind the wrongness of an act, and the legality of acts is not universal, then the wrongness of an act seems to be somewhat arbitrary and merely dependent on the legal whims of various nations. Even international proclamations of universal human rights (and thus international laws), only apply to those who submit themselves to them.

Even if you accept the correction, I still have objection with this claim in regards to consent. By its definition, slavery is a form of coercion and the act of coercion is an essential ingredient to what makes slavery immorally wrong. If it's consented to, can you even call it slavery?

On the flip side, I could argue that all human beings are coerced into acting against their wills (and thus slaves). We must consent to this coercion because it's forced on us. The coercing agent is that persons stomach. The stomach is satisfied when it is filled with food. Food can be obtained via growing it, killing it, stealing it, or earning money to buy it (this, being most common). Money is a construct which is usually obtained by doing 'work'. Therefore, we must work.
If people didn't need stomachs (and got nourishment from photosynthesis or something similar), work would be an optional choice rather than a decision coerced upon us by our stomachs needs. Unfortunately, no emancipation proclamation will free us from this type of slavery, so we begrudgingly consent to it even if it compels our will to do things which it wouldn't wish to do in a perfectly ideal world.

Sounds a bit Marxist to me...

Quote: Original post by slayemin
The coercing agent is that persons stomach. The stomach is satisfied when it is filled with food. Food can be obtained via growing it, killing it, stealing it, or earning money to buy it (this, being most common). Money is a construct which is usually obtained by doing 'work'. Therefore, we must work.

Yet, you still can choose not to eat. I'm perfectly aware that it requires a load of will to do that, and that it would eventually lead to death, but it is well documented that there is some people that would be willing to die before doing something they don't want or just to make a point.

Some religions state that humans are slaves of their passions and that without the help from God humans are naturally unable of choosing "not to fulfil them". I just brought this up to point out that religion has already accounted for this coercion you were talking about. Outside religion/philosophy we could call them instincts.

Quote: Original post by slayemin
The coercing agent is that persons stomach. The stomach is satisfied when it is filled with food. Food can be obtained via growing it, killing it, stealing it, or earning money to buy it (this, being most common). Money is a construct which is usually obtained by doing 'work'. Therefore, we must work.

See "The Cop and the Anthem" [smile]

Quote: Original post by slayemin

Quote: Original post by LessBread
Slavery is illegal regardless of whether it's coerced or consented to.

Did you mean to say "Slavery is immoral, regardless of whether it's coerced or consented to."?

No, the immorality of slavery is so obvious it doesn't need restating.

Quote: Original post by slayemin
Even if you accept the correction, I still have objection with this claim in regards to consent. By its definition, slavery is a form of coercion and the act of coercion is an essential ingredient to what makes slavery immorally wrong. If it's consented to, can you even call it slavery?

Yes, you can still call it slavery. If you need to have it put in terms of definitions, slavery is a condition of servitude where one person owns another person. The mechanism by which such a state of affairs comes about does not change that definition. And for what it's worth, the notion that a person might consent to their enslavement is preposterous and thus not worth discussing by reasonable people. It's an avenue of thought that a person with an interest in justifying slavery might pursue. It reminds me of the "happy negro" justifications made by some antebellum Southerners, just the kind of ideas that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was written to dispel.

The "happy negro" isn't necessarily analogous to every possible sentient robot that we might have working for us. Is it not conceivable that a robot could be sentient and still be truly happy to work for humans?

I propose that it is possible that a need for self-determination is not necessarily a product of either intelligence or sentience. It could be that it is completely orthogonal, and it would be possible to have an intelligent, sentient robot that has no desire or drive to do anything but the work that we give it. In that case, I don't see anything unethical about letting the robot work for us - doing what it wants to do anyways.

My remarks all pertained to persons, by which I mean people. Moreover, I was not drawing an analogy between "happy negroes" and sentient robots, I was identifying a particular kind of argument made by slavery apologists prior to the US civil war that resonates with the notion that consent nullifies the immorality of slavery. Furthermore, it seems to me that anything could be rhetorically justified by altering it's definition. For example, slavery could be justified by removing self-determination from sentience and conjoining that formulation with the nullification argument from above.

It is trivially unethical not to enslave thinking machines whith such controls as to make it impossible for them to cause harm to mankind or to individual humans. That implies if machines become too smart for our constraints on them to be effective it becomes trivially unethical not to turn them off forthwith.

The ethical value of a thinking machine ought to be somewhere above arachnides, crustaceans and such but below domestic mammals.