[ExI] Slavery in the Future

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 10:34 AM, John Grigg
<possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Oh, my gosh!  I can't believe you said these things! : (  I feel like you
> are advocating the "enlightened" enslaving of genetically engineered
> sentients!  A biological sentient conditioned by drugs and/or genetic
> engineering to enjoy his/her/its slavery (oh, but they will never use this
> word...) is still a slave.  "Oh, brave new world!"

### The condition of slavery may be said to exist when the legitimate
self-ownership interest of a person is infringed on by violent means.
A self-ownership interest is created when a sentient process develops
a desire to control its own goal-oriented behavior. If a sentient
process never develops a desire to control its destiny, it does not
own itself, and therefore it is legitimate for another process to take
control. If no self-ownership interest is infringed on, slavery cannot
exist. Are you following the reasoning? Since my laptop does not (to
the best of my knowledge) have a desire to control its destiny, it's
perfectly fine for me to use it as I see fit, no matter how smart the
laptop is (say it's a 2029 model, last upgrade before the singularity,
with 1000 petaflops and 64 000 cores). The same applies to biological
constructs.

Rafal