I could easily see the rise a new slave era.
No unpaid labour, no shackles, no physical torture. Just regular physical or service work, paid with higher than subsistence level wages, preserving the physical, and to a certain degree the mental dignity of the new slaves.
In many ways, the new slaves would have a better life than most labourers today.
Fully automated production environments will reduce or eliminate the need for any heavy physical work, the expanded omnipresence of robots to do dirty or unsafe tasks will make their lives much easier than today. Sweatshops would be replaced three dimensional printing.
So that’s not the question.
The new slave class will not be compared to the lowest levels of societies of yesterday or today;
The new slaves will be defined by the standards of tomorrow: they will be slaves in the context of an infinitely augmented knowledge base that will be the hallmark of the brain elites as well as the middle classes of tomorrow’s knowledge society.
The fact is that the volume of the human knowledge base already expands at an exponential rate. And so, the tools to required to master and exploit this knowledge become more sophisticated by the day. (The very real question of sustainability of these exponential growth factors both in evolutionary and statistical terms will be a post for another day.)
Being a full member of society will mean being an active citizen of this currently exploding knowledge empire and the reference points for a life worth living will have moved considerably from physical survival into the realm of the abstract world of knowledge.
Quality of life will no longer be measured by the amount of physical calories available to each individual (that will be a given by then, like air and water have been until the recent past).
Quality of life will be measured by the individual’s ability to access, consume, digest and create bits of information.
Life and the value of life may well be determined on a totally different plane and being human (in the full sense of the future ethical environment) may mean being an active part of this invisible mental universe.
Everything else will be for the robots. Or the new slaves.
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