Aristotle dreamed of the robot revolution. A slave is a living tool that serves multiple purposes; likewise a craftsman’s assistant (Politics 1253b). This is demonstrated by the fact that, if every tool could perform its own work when ordered, or by seeing what to do in advance, like the statues of Daedalus or the self-moving tripods of Hephaestus, craftsmen would have no need of assistants or masters of slaves. Tools are an essential component of the state; workers, maybe not so much.
Back in the 1980s, the Italian archaeologist Andrea Carandini sought to characterise the impact of the rise of the ‘slave mode of production’ in Roman Italy by describing slaves as “ancient computer-robots”. The point was that the transformation of the Italian countryside in the 2nd-1st centuries BCE was not just a matter of the replacement of one sort of worker with another (free peasants with slaves), or of the reorganisation of the land into larger, more productive units, but of the introduction of ‘thinking tools’ that could be set complex tasks within a new semi-industrialised production system. The consequences of this change were then seen in growing inequality, political instability, the anger of the now displaced and impoverished peasants etc., leading to the collapse of the old political order – but not to any changes in this system of exploitation.
I always found Carandini’s argument disturbing because of the risk of complicity with the slave-owners’ perspective, seeing slaves solely in terms of productivity and erasing their humanity (I was at the same time reading similar criticisms of Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the Cross, which attempted a cliometric analysis of the economic benefits of slavery in the USA). But it continues to offer food for thought; and, in the face of a continuing stream of articles and television programmes about the rise of the robots and the inexorable spread of automation in the present, I’ve started to wonder about the possibility of focusing the analogy in the other direction: what can we learn about our possible future trajectory from studying a past society where ‘autonomous tools’ were ubiquitous?
Automation permeated the Roman economy; it’s not that every enterprise employed robots, but the largest, most market-oriented ones did, vastly increasing the profit margins and market share of those who could afford them. Moreover, wealthy Romans handed over much if not all of their financial affairs to the machines, which were theoretically dedicated to the service of their masters but enjoyed significant autonomy and independence (assuming that their masters could have understood their dealings if they troubled to investigate).
Even more significant for our purposes is the way that non-human intelligences could be found in every area of social life as well, to the point where their supposed owners ceased to register their presence much of the time. Roman masters entrusted confidential information and secret messages to their machines – and lived their lives surrounded by them, carrying out all the mundane tasks of household management and personal care in the background, silently watching and learning.
With high rates of divorce and remarriage, as Keith Bradley has argued, children might be largely raised by robots, forming their most long-lasting and intimate bonds with their robot nannies and tutors. Some adults, too, indulged in the pretence of equal, affectionate relationships with certain of their non-human servitors, perhaps even believing that their responses were genuine and spontaneous (“Thank you, Siri.” “You don’t have to thank me.”). But they equally regarded them as unproblematically available for sexual exploitation or physical abuse; they were things, not humans, even if they sometimes looked and behaved like humans; they were property, to be used as their owner wished.
Not implausible? The aim of the exercise is not to make us think differently about Rome, but to establish a basis for developing the analogy for the modern period, that the pervasive presence of artificial intelligences in our lives is sufficiently similar to the pervasive presence of slavery in the Romans’ to make it worthwhile exploring further. Because a crucial point about a ‘slave society’, as discussed by historians like Finley and Bradley, is that it affects (infects?) everything. Social relationships, family relationships, economic activity, cultural conceptions about freedom and philosophical debates about the nature of justice are all affected.
That is, the implications of the modern rise of automation go well beyond the question of what happens, in purely material terms, to those people who lose their jobs as a result; it raises questions about our ideas of work, leisure, the purpose of life and the nature of the human, it places our system of values under strain. These are to original observations; my suggestion is simply that we might learn something from studying how a different culture was shaped by similar circumstances. I’m thinking of re-reading Fitzgerald’s Slavery in the Roman Literary Imagination as a starting-point.
There are other possibilities too. Probably trite to consider the issue of slave revolts, though the Romans’ relative success in limiting rebellion largely to small-scale, individual acts of resistance (non-cooperation, dumb insolence, ordering unwanted items from Amazon etc.) is noted. The issue of manumission – why the Romans granted such autonomy to ‘things’, so frequently, and how they negotiated their transition to personhood – is certainly worth thinking about. Still more, the fate of the redundant masses, excluded from meaningful activity and reduced to aspiring to own robots of their own – echoes here of one of Peter Frase’s Four Futures.
There’s a substantial tradition, especially in the nineteenth century, of contrasting ancient slave society with modern capitalism. I always recall the Aristotle quote with which I started from Marx’s evocation of it in Das Kapital: foolish Greek, thinking that machinery would lead to a life of leisure, rather than being the surest method of lengthening the working day! Likewise, “the Roman slave was bound with chains… the modern wage-labourer is bound to his owner by invisible threads”. Manifestly, Marx failed to imagine that the remorseless logic of capitalism might lead workers to be displaced rather than exploited, and that we might be better off thinking of analogies between Juvenal’s “bread and circuses” snark and the joys of social media…
On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire. In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force. (Marx, Speech at th3 anniversary of the People’s Paper)
Sphinx 
Interesting to contemplate how advances in technology can be equally beneficial and corrupting. I especially like your point that it (our dependence on this slavelike, artificially intelligent, more or less invisible workforce of algorithms and behind the scenes software, as well as robots to come) “affects (infects?) everything.” The changes in the nature (ie intimacy or remoteness) of modern communication is but one example. And I worry about the implications on “cultural concepts of freedom and philosophical debates about the nature of justice.” The “master” of technology is inextricably linked by duties of management and supervision to the technology (updates, security patches, “checking” Facebook etc.). Is it any wonder that despite these “timesavers.” we all feel harried and overbooked?
https://thesphinxblog.com/2017/11/29/return-of-the-slave-society/
Hi Neville, Thanks for the insightful post on what can we learn about our possible future from studying a past society where “autonomous tools” were ubiquitous.
I’ve been wondering myself what we could learn about the future of robotic economics from the pre-Civil War US South and its slave-based economy. Given robots and AIs might have feelings in the future, that includes the previous moral justifications for what we now find abhorrent to do to people such as outlined in “Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South: A Brief History with Documents” by Paul Finkelman.
Thanks for expanding the picture for me to include reflections from Roman society. You might find of interest some of Marshall Brain’s speculative writings on the future of robotics and economics (and the resulting concentration of wealth) like in his “Robotic Nation” essays.
I especially like your tangential point that “Marx failed to imagine that the remorseless logic of capitalism might lead workers to be displaced rather than exploited”.
To go off further on that tangent (reflecting your Marx quote, including “At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy”), one of the saddest things about modern times is that all these advanced technologies — technologies that could be used to liberate people’s time in a post-scarcity way — these technologies are instead being used mainly to regulate people’s time via Orwellian 24X7 surveillance both at work and at home. People are even voluntary inviting Alexa, Siri, and so on into their homes to potentially eavesdrop on everything they or their children say — like with the human slaves of old. But there is a twist now of potentially recording everything said in a home and centralizing its storage where powerful actors can interrogate it as they wish — even decades later. And almost everyone is carrying position trackers with them via their cell phones. More subtly, such technologies are also used to regulate people’s behavior via other means of control like exploiting human nature via operant conditioning to random reinforcement via slot-machine-like social media or via over-the-top “Supernormal Stimuli” (see a book by that name by Deirdre Barrett). “Brave New World” explored these themes of control via pleasure as well. These are all ways human beings right now are potentially being made into controlled robot slaves — the digital chains are available, even if all the locks aren’t engaged yet.
Reflecting “new-fangled sources of wealth … are turned into sources of want”, these technologies are also being used to create “artificial scarcity” in several ways including through digital restrictions management and overly broad copyright and patent laws. For example, legislation is being passed in the European Union right now where every website accepting user contributions (even this one?) will need to run contributions (like this one?) though a (proprietary?) “upload filter” with no sense of “fair use” and potentially enforcing arbitrary censorship. Search on “Article 13 upload filter”.
One can also look at what is going on with the internet in China and with the “social credit” score there for another example.
Yet it is hard to be totally against things like persistent identity on the internet or efforts to weed out noxious and misleading information given all sorts of abuse that is happening on the internet. Search on a Nautilus article from 2015 of: “The Future of the Web Is 100 Years Old: In the debate between structure and openness, 19th-century ideas are making a comeback” which reference Paul Otlet’s 1893 work and that of others. I commented on that on Hacker News citing the conclusion of Manuel De Landa’s essay on “Meshwork, Hierarchy, and Interfaces” and the need for an experimental attitude towards meshwork/hierarchy hybrids.
Albert Einstein said in the 1940s: “The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking… the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.”
And Lewis Mumford said in the 1930s: “As a civilization, we have not yet entered the neotechnic phase: we are still living between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, in a cultural pseudomorph…. Paleotechnic purposes with neotechnic means, that is the most obvious characteristic of the present order.” (Technics and Civilization pp. 265-267)
My take on all this inspired by the Einstein quote is that the biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity. We need to think more deeply about our values and our potential — keeping the best of the past while accepting that some things have changed thus opening up new risks and new opportunities.
As is said in an essay by “Conceptual Guerilla” on “The Mythology of Wealth”, “Justifications for elites and social hierarchy goes all the way back to the pharaohs. … This is the historical background for those famous words of Thomas Jefferson. “Governments are instituted among men, and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed”. Everyone has heard those words. School children recite them. Few people appreciate that those words repudiated 6000 years of mumbo-jumbo to justify the existence of social classes and fixed elites.”
As John Gardner writes in “Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society”, to paraphrase, moral values are not some leaky reservoir inherited from the past but more like a pool that must be continually replenished — including by each generation or two re-learning for itself what the words on the monuments mean.
Or, as G.K Chesterton wtote (Orthodoxy, 1908): “But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. But this which is true even of inanimate things is in a quite special and terrible sense true of all human things. An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old.”
Hunter/Gatherers generally has a different (more egalitarian) mindset — see anthropologist Marshall Sahlin’s Original Affluent Society, where he concludes: “The world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo.”
For many, the ancient Aztec empire could not have been that great a place to live — given Tenochtitlan and its large-scale cult of human sacrifice (as now evidenced by recent archaeological evidence of a wall with on the order of 100,000 human skulls). Yet, many people potentially could just walk away after Tenochtitlan’s collapse in the face of the Spaniards and then live off the land. This was probably true to an extent for much of ancient society; see “Beyond Civilization”, by Daniel Quinn where he outlines how such cultural collapses happened over and over again with people just heading for the hills when cities (and their empires) became increasingly dysfunctional. See also “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, a 1973 work of short philosophical fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin.
I don’t want to overstate that ability to walk away even in the past because it takes a village to live well in the wilderness and ancient lands had many claims to them and often hostile neighbors. So walking away even then had its challenges — but at least walking away back then appears to be much more feasible than it is now. There were also sometimes tribes that would sometimes adopt strangers — like when indentured European colonists would run away from their indentures and their cruel masters and join Native American tribes to greater overall happiness. Even while there are happier and less happier countries people today can emigrate to, a big difference between the distant past and now is that it is much harder for most people to just walk away entirely from modern civilization given its planet-wide scale and increasingly automated surveillance. Even the Amish are dependent on selling their products to a larger world (given a need to pay land taxes and such and also to have access to some things like modern antibiotics or surgery for accidents). Our populations are too large to sustain themselves in the old ways relative to what the land can produce unaided by modern technology — and most people don’t have such skills anyway. And new challenges like radiation and engineered plagues from WMDs would also make such life much harder if there was a global war.
I hope we can meet John Gardener’s challenge to “re-learn what the words on the monuments mean” before it is too late. To do that may require re-envisioning our technology to be more compatible with such values (e.g. John and Mary Todd’s New Alchemy Institute in the past, Richard Register’s Ecocity Berkeley, Bucky Fuller’s “Livingry” and “Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science”, the Rocky Mountain Institute, and many similar recent efforts like documented at the “inhabitat” web site — as well as their digital equivalents for improved decentralized communications). And it may also require re-envisioning our formal economics as a healthier and more resilient mix of subsistence production, gift economy & volunteerism, exchange economy humanized by a basic income, and/or more inclusive values-based government planning accounting for externalities including risks — with the specific mix likely reflecting each community’s cultural history. And it ideally requires doing all that incrementally while avoiding a widespread social collapse that could cost the lives of many billions of people.
Thanks again for connecting some more dots between our past and our possible future.