Will Robots make Slavery Obsolete?

Why bother feeding slaves, when you can charge them instead?

Slavery has a long and dark history throughout the world.

Slavery is so prevalent in the history of the world that there’s hardly a single culture that hasn’t had slavery in some form. From communist nations, third world tribal villages to early America.

The Bible gives us lots of instruction, both in the Old and New Testament, on how masters are to treat their slaves, but also in the New Testament’s letter to Philemon we learn how slaves are to treat their master.

The truth is, from a purely business perspective, the modern version of slavery we all know from American history is hard. You have to source slaves, mostly illegally and through kidnapping. This requires immense international trade networks for trafficking, you have to hire people to manage and ship them. They have to be fed and disciplined. They can’t escape or die. There’s value in having to hire a doctor to treat their injuries and increase life expectancy. There’s also a lot of terrible PR involved in slavery. Oh, and it is 100% illegal.

There is also that whole thing about losing your soul too.

So yea, no matter how great your vertical slavery SaaS deck is, it won’t be invested in.

Slavery is a terrible business idea.

And yes, Slavery still exists in some form all over the world. Whether that is slavery via massive taxation by governments or sex trafficking. Or human slavery as factory workers in Third World countries. It is still around. It’s just not as publicized.

And now we are on the forefront of a new kind of “slavery” with the ability of every home-owner to own an Indentured Servant or two.

These indentured servants will most likely be shipped shoulder to shoulder and packed tightly by cargo boats across the seas, and end up in homes in both the North and the South and all over the world. They will work constantly throughout the day, maybe even the night. You won’t have to pay them a wage. They will cook your meals, and they won’t have to ever eat a single meal.

These new indentured servants are humanoid robots, manufactured by Tesla and 1x.

Elon Musk says the Tesla Robot might be the largest new market in the history of the world. With people having as many robots in their home as they have cars.

The ability to have a robot in your home that actually functions like Rosie did in The Jetson’s is something people have longed for and is a staple of almost every science fiction movie over the past fifty plus years.

Star Wars had robotic servants that were heros like C3P0 and R2D2, while also showing robots who were treated poorly and were part of civilizations which treated Droids cruel as slaves.

Imagine having your own robot in your home that can do things that at present steal productive time from you? The ability to have a Tesla Robot that always without fail takes out your trash, waters your garden, washes your dishes and cleans your toilet bowl. Imagine the time your wife will get to spend with one on one time with her children. Your children’s chores will become far more productive as well. Instead of having your children “take out the trash” to learn responsibility, they will have to “tune up the robot.” instead.

Suddenly the household chores shift real-life experience from low skill, low income dishwashing, to highly sought after robot repair.

You don’t have to feed it. Just charge it up at night.

It doesn’t need to sleep. It won’t need its own room.

You don’t have to worry about it escaping.

You won’t have to worry about being caught owning one, or even owning a hundred.

In fact, I would argue that the very existence of high performing, autonomous robots will make slavery unprofitable ventures. Why would anyone go through the hassle of imprisoning humans when you can just grab an army of robots, that require far less maintenance and daily expense?

Sure, we will have underground criminal organizations that steal robots, hack them and wipe any connection to their original owner. There will underground black markets for parts and dark web networks and infrastructure to maintain and keep stolen bots online. Just like in Star Wars.

But criminal organizations do this with cars now.

Slavery will always exist in some form or another. Whether it’s through corrupt communist governments or human trafficking. But I’d argue that the economic benefits of these new autonomous robots are going to make old world style slavery incredibly unattractive and unprofitable.

Yet a majority of people still seem skeptical of this new technology in the home.

With every new technology, there are pros and cons. But in almost all cases, the good outweighs the bad. Even Nuclear Bombs were turned into plow shares and used to create incredible amounts of electricity.

We went from washboards to washing machines. We stopped hauling and boiling buckets of water, to unlimited clean water right into our homes. From manual dishwashing to dishwashers, and stopped chopping wood and building fires before we cooked our food. Not only that, but we don’t even have to hunt for our food anymore. We have grocery stores filled with aisles upon aisles of food prepared by robots already. Neither of these inventions would we be willing to give up because “it’s important for a human to have to do their chores.”

Instead, in each of these instances the time saved with such life changing technologies lead to a greater, more productive economy. Freeing humans to be more creative, building multi-billion dollar entertainment industries and economies around leisure and vacations.

All this to say is that humans are created to do human things. Create, imagine, go on adventures and discover the world in which God made, and we’ve done that for the better with every new technological revolution.

So my advice is this. Make slavery unthinkable, unproductive and a waste of time.

Get excited by robots. Invest in them now. What we are seeing being demonstrated now is just in the dial-up modem or brick cell phone era. They are inevitable as a microwave.