Slavery....in Space!

[Fritz_Brown]

I'm just saying you can't lump everyone into the same bucket.

Which is one of the big reasons that current politics is a no-no in the forum - it too often degenerates for some folks into a "certain people are/were all like this" mudfest. This discussion has stayed up and open because everyone is playing pretty well together, and it is informative. (Yeah, I'm just dittoing Aramis.)

 

[DangerousThing]

Now therein lies the rub. How do you become recognized if your owner doesn't believe you, or if you fear he might have you reprogrammed if you express that wish and thereby threaten his investment? For that matter, how do you prove you're sentient, and not just a very effective emulator? How does the player tell a sentient robot from one who's been instructed to say it's sentient for whatever nefarious reasons the owner might have, or from an advanced AI who's made a flawed logical deduction based on how the children treat it?

There's going to be a grey area between the achievement of sentience and its recognition, fueled in part by resistance and the fear of losing one's helpers, and in part by the fact that the boundary is likely to be fuzzy and that robots will evolve gradually. It's going to be one of those cases where, in this era they were indeed nonsentient and in this era some were indeed sentient - and in between the two eras we aren't entirely sure and may have been behaving disgracefully.

Agreed. Also, in T5 Marc states a difference between being sentient and being sophant. A dog is sentient, but a human is sophant.

I am remembering a book by Charles Stross where a human society was being judged as to their sentience. Up to that point in time, the rule was that if you said you were sentient, you were. However the human society in the book was so self destructive that the aliens (the critics) had to revisit there thinking.

It was the latest in the series with Crimson Sunrise in it, and I hope that there will be more.

 

[Dragoner]

Sentinence in robots is covered in the Shudusham Concords:

http://traveller.wikia.com/wiki/Shudusham_Concords


IMTU it is some different, but based upon that as well.

 

[Timerover51]

Slaveholders in the antibellum South were the upper crust. They would not hold the same views as the lower classes, like my great-great grandfather. He was an Anabaptist preacher in Chilton County, Alabama, and inveighed against both slavery & the war. When his 3rd son went to Birmingham and volunteered for fight for the Confederacy, he disowned him.

I'm just saying you can't lump everyone into the same bucket.

I was endeavoring to point out the implications of slavery for a society's perception of those performing laborious work. The Greeks and the Romans show similar views, with the idea that if you were of a certain class, manual labor was beneath you, and those that did perform manual labor were automatically of a lower social status. To some degree, that was also present in Victorian England, although slavery was no longer practiced.

 

[BlackBat242]

So ... what do you do when the robot asks you to rescue it?:devil:

If it has been formally recognized by a competent authority (not some fringe radical group... but by the Imperial/sector/subsector government,ISS, etc) as a sentient being with all the rights of any other citizen, then I'd rescue it (or at least report the problem to the local law... unless they were ignoring the problem).

Now therein lies the rub. How do you become recognized if your owner doesn't believe you, or if you fear he might have you reprogrammed if you express that wish and thereby threaten his investment? For that matter, how do you prove you're sentient, and not just a very effective emulator? How does the player tell a sentient robot from one who's been instructed to say it's sentient for whatever nefarious reasons the owner might have, or from an advanced AI who's made a flawed logical deduction based on how the children treat it?

There's going to be a grey area between the achievement of sentience and its recognition, fueled in part by resistance and the fear of losing one's helpers, and in part by the fact that the boundary is likely to be fuzzy and that robots will evolve gradually. It's going to be one of those cases where, in this era they were indeed nonsentient and in this era some were indeed sentient - and in between the two eras we aren't entirely sure and may have been behaving disgracefully.

Which reminds me of: Rush - The Body Electric

The song is based on Twilight Zone episode #100 - "I Sing the Body Electric." The episode originally aired in 1962. It's about a family who orders a robot "Grandmother" after the death of their young mother. Written by Ray Bradbury, the name came from a Walt Whitman poem. The story was later included in a short stories collection with the same title in 1969.
It describes a robot that struggles to break free of the hegemony of the robots' social structure.

The song's chorus repeats several times:
one-zero-zero-one-zero-zero-one SOS
one-zero-zero-one-zero-zero-one In Distress
1001001 is ASCII code for the letter 'I.' This could indicate the robot's motivation for escape - it's attainment of self-awareness.

The song appeared on Grace Under Pressure,the tenth studio album by the Canadian rock band Rush, released in 1984.

 

[kuros]

Similarly, my players did occasionally bump into shanghaiing operations and even more rarely the far more icky slavery in all it's versions but that was only so the players could shut such activities down.

I don't have the same reservations about running a campaign with alternative ethics as you do, so long as everybody is on board at saga start, but either way realism is something I strive for. Which is, from both perspectives, what this conversation is about.

If there is an understandable economic demand for slavery, someone is going to supply those slaves. Say you have Good Guy adventurer PCs, they stumble across a ship and run the adventure and at the end of it, hooray, they've freed one boatload of slaves. Big gorram deal. All they did was stop the evil that got shoved under their nose.

Slavery still exists, the bad guys still exist. What are they going to do about it? There's a strong market demand for slavery, what are they going to do about it? Do they choose to just defend their local turf from slavers, so they have to get their cargos elsewhere? Do they try to build up those colonies so that they develop a population base educated enough to support a manufacturing base that no longer relies on slaves? How? Who are their enemies going to be?

Take it from the other end. Campaign full of hard-nosed cynical war veterans. Kill off a bunch of slavers, and look here, there's a slaving ship stocked, loaded and full of cargo. Where are they going to go? How long will it take to get there? What sort of customs checks are they going to have to pass through, depending on what?

Plenty of meat for a campaign to my mind, either way. If my players really want to invest the time and energy into evading the law and doing crime, then I'm going to let them try. But I'll want the resources arrayed against them to be as realistic as possible, and I'll probably find a forum of gamers somewhere they don't know about to help me analyze the "crime scenes" they leave behind (hey, that would ALSO be fun!)

You want to play the dark side? Vastly profitable clandestine enterprises have vastly powerful, vastly dangerous and vastly paranoid people protecting their territories. Unless you already have an in with the right people...

YES! And now I want to figure out how to do Breaking Bad....In Space!

What's interesting (as an aside here) is that when a lot of MMORPG went online, notably Diablo and Ultima, the designers of the game had this notion that people would want to play heroes, but in game people turned out to be just as nasty as in real life.

I agree -- it is really interesting to see what people do in settings that have no real consequence. Which is where the tendency to do mean stuff in MMORPGs comes from, IMHO. There's no real threat, no real potential punishment. I mean, there can't be, it's entertainment.

Though, a sci-fi MMO with a prison planet could be interesting...

I talk over the type of campaign with my players beforehand. I'm willing to go so far away from what I consider ideal, and no further. If they're influenced by Firefly and want to be good-hearted crooks, that's fine. The trouble comes when they start killing innocents.

Would you consider throwing an NPC low-level mook into that crew that does stupid stuff and risks getting all the PCs killed? A guy who turns out to be gun-crazy and munchkin-like but is actually an NPC. I've seen a lot of games where Players will let other Players get away with horrifically stupid junx and then keep them around. Be interesting to see how they would respond to the GM's Pet NPC doing that...

Now an interesting take on slavery came from late in the Honor Harrington series by David Weber (Crown of Slaves?), where the slaves were genetically engineered to perform high tech and high skilled jobs ... people bred for the roles occupied by robots in "I, Robot" (the book not the movie).

Weber's exploration of the economics behind slavery and piracy were both fuel for the fire that started this thread, but I strongly dislike the way he turned the genetic slave operation into The Black Hats.

One thing that I really liked about the early series was that there was no Good vs Bad, there was just people stuck in horrible situations making bad choices. The war between Haven and Manticore was an inevitable result of disparate governmental systems seeking to survive. But then you add slavery and its all "Slavery Bad, Slavers Bad. You Good Guy? You Good Guy! ~scratch armpit~ You NOT Good Guy? You BAD Guy!"

...which brings me back to the original point of this thread (which, really, I love you all for continuing without me, if it isn't obvious). Economically sound models for understanding how slavery and piracy work lead to gorram good source material for adventures.

I was endeavoring to point out the implications of slavery for a society's perception of those performing laborious work. The Greeks and the Romans show similar views, with the idea that if you were of a certain class, manual labor was beneath you, and those that did perform manual labor were automatically of a lower social status. To some degree, that was also present in Victorian England, although slavery was no longer practiced.

I concur with your reading of the base material, but you're talking about seriously pre-industrial revolution societies. In a sci-fi setting, there would be some kind of similar, yet oddly dissimilar cultural artifact, and I'm still trying to decide what.

Perhaps, like in Snow Crash, societies that rely heavily on slave and robot labor would end up taking great stock in things that were made By Hand. "Look! I made this without using a 3D printer or anything! Just with my own hands and some tools I made out of -- get this! -- metallic alloys!"

 

[DangerousThing]

I don't have the same reservations about running a campaign with alternative ethics as you do, so long as everybody is on board at saga start, but either way realism is something I strive for. Which is, from both perspectives, what this conversation is about.

If there is an understandable economic demand for slavery, someone is going to supply those slaves. Say you have Good Guy adventurer PCs, they stumble across a ship and run the adventure and at the end of it, hooray, they've freed one boatload of slaves. Big gorram deal. All they did was stop the evil that got shoved under their nose.

Strangely enough I do consider a big gorram deal. One of the ideals that I consider daily and wish I lived up to it more is "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." It's normally attributed to Burke, but I can't find where it came from though he did say similar sentiments in more words.

In other words, if they stop one shipload of slaves and bring the crew to justice, they are doing *something*.

Now, if they try to get to the bottom (or rather the top) of the slave trade, *that* is a campaign! Cutting out one slave ring even going all the way to the top, that at least slows the trade down a bit.

Something better would be to find out *why* the slave trade exists, but I don't expect any small group to be able to stop this without some *major* help.

As I have incompletely researched it, there are several types of slavery:
1. Small scale labor on primitive farms for labor-intensive jobs.
2. Large scale labor in factories.
3. Large scale slavery that we don't talk about.
4. Small scale slavery by the rich that we don't talk about.
5. Small scale slavery for jobs that are illegal. Sort of an illegal version of conscription.
6. The one I can't think of the name of, where sailors are drugged and wake up on a ship.

The justifications of each of these are different, though the same suppliers may produce all of them.

And with a bit of genetic engineering, social engineering, cloning, and brainwashing, it may be possible to profitably farm slaves. For example, it might be possible to create a habitat somewhere in the far outer system of a primitive system if you can find a large enough water source to power it. I can think of a few ways to make it difficult for the slaves to revolt.

The Miles Vorkosigan stories by Bujold talk about some of it. My favorite was the clones grown for rich people for full-body transplants. One character's action against it was short-term (military), and another character's action against it was to invest his considerable wealth in various research projects to make full-body transplants out of style (longevity techniques and so forth).

And I agree about the Weber stories. It has the feel of frantic back-filling to make everything fit together.

On the other hand, Larry Nivens destroyed almost every assumption in his Known Space universe in "Up in Flames."

TTFN

 

[Carlobrand]

...And with a bit of genetic engineering, social engineering, cloning, and brainwashing, it may be possible to profitably farm slaves. For example, it might be possible to create a habitat somewhere in the far outer system of a primitive system if you can find a large enough water source to power it. I can think of a few ways to make it difficult for the slaves to revolt.

Reverse it. Genetic engineering might be one of the few real bases for slavery in a far-future universe: an artificially created sophont species built to exploit a specific environment might be considered "property" by the megacorporation that created it. Runs into same of the problems as the bots - how do they prove they're sophont when the megacorp officials are giving the Imperium (false) data that says they weren't designed to be sophonts?

They may have built in instincts to make the species compliant and cooperative, but genetics and and random chance being what they are, the occasional "sport" who lacks some of those compulsion and wants freedom is being born and growing to adulthood. The rest of the culture may consider them to be heretics - or maybe, being intellligent and aware of their instinctive "chains," they resent their servitude and quietly support these mutants. There's a lot of room for creating a unique society and story there.

Another such front might be cyborgs. The more typical cyborg is just a human with a prosthetic of some sort, but what of the specter of "Robocop" or "Ship who Sang" style cyborgs? What if you died and awake to find yourself a composite of brain and computer with a duly signed consent and death certificate to show you no longer have any rights?

...On the other hand, Larry Nivens destroyed almost every assumption in his Known Space universe in "Up in Flames."

"Down in Flames"

http://www.larryniven.net/stories/downinflames.shtml

 

[DangerousThing]

Reverse it. Genetic engineering might be one of the few real bases for slavery in a far-future universe: an artificially created sophont species built to exploit a specific environment might be considered "property" by the megacorporation that created it. Runs into same of the problems as the bots - how do they prove they're sophont when the megacorp officials are giving the Imperium (false) data that says they weren't designed to be sophonts?

This works for the large-scale slavery I mentioned. However, I don't think it would be affordable for small scale slavery, though I could picture some villainous uses for custom built slaves if you had the money. Though few it wouldn't be easier to use real people for.

Another such front might be cyborgs. The more typical cyborg is just a human with a prosthetic of some sort, but what of the specter of "Robocop" or "Ship who Sang" style cyborgs? What if you died and awake to find yourself a composite of brain and computer with a duly signed consent and death certificate to show you no longer have any rights?

The Ship who Sang was a real person with either a disease or a genetic handicap, not a cyborg. And she was more an indentured servant than a slave.

However, Robocop and the brain in Mayflies were both examples of brains who were supposed to be dead and reprogrammed. In Robocop I think it was more slavery than in Mayflies because in that story they really believed the person was dead so they reprogrammed his brain to be a computer.

"Down in Flames"

http://www.larryniven.net/stories/downinflames.shtml

Sorry. I get that one wrong. My point with this is that an author can look back and totally rethink his universe and surprise the readers.

 

[atpollard]

And she was more an indentured servant than a slave.

A distinction with no real difference.

 

[rancke]

And she was more an indentured servant than a slave.

A distinction with no real difference.

The distinction may not always make a difference, but it's there and usually does.


Hans

 

[Epee]

Let's face it; there is always going to be someone who wants to control others, bend their lives to his will, and make a profit or become powerful though that contol.

Are citizens of a Law Level F world slaves? If not what is the difference?

 

[aramis]

The distinction may not always make a difference, but it's there and usually does.


Hans

Frequently in legality.

Many cultures accept both criminal indentures and personal debt indenture, but reject chattel slavery and indenture of one's chattels.

 

[DangerousThing]

A distinction with no real difference.

Actually it's a big difference in this case. It costs a lot to fit up a space ship and to train her from infancy. After a time, she would be free of the debt. It's been a long time since I read this book, so I don't know what her conditions of employment were. However, I just read the Wikipedia article and it pretty much jives with what I said and thought.

Think of it as paying off a college loan as opposed to being in debt forever to the company store or a loan shark.

 

[kuros]

One of the harder things for me to grasp when you start talking about a societal scale like the OTU is what the average person knows about the rest of the world.

By comparison to modern day politics (dangerous ice, I know), some countries are more aware than others, and America is generally regarded as generally ignorant of events going on beyond their borders, but even in the US you will find political activists who are very concerned about inhumane conditions in other parts of the world. You also have the "aware but unwilling to do anything about it" situations, like back when Ethiopia was starving, and you saw all those ads on TV.

A certain percentage of Imperial citizens (and therefore PCs), will be aware enough of political realities to say "I know slavery exists, and that it happens for these reasons, and it will be harder to stop than just killing one crew," but how many of them? Is that a per-campaign decision?

 

[DangerousThing]

One of the harder things for me to grasp when you start talking about a societal scale like the OTU is what the average person knows about the rest of the world.

By comparison to modern day politics (dangerous ice, I know), some countries are more aware than others, and America is generally regarded as generally ignorant of events going on beyond their borders, but even in the US you will find political activists who are very concerned about inhumane conditions in other parts of the world. You also have the "aware but unwilling to do anything about it" situations, like back when Ethiopia was starving, and you saw all those ads on TV.

A certain percentage of Imperial citizens (and therefore PCs), will be aware enough of political realities to say "I know slavery exists, and that it happens for these reasons, and it will be harder to stop than just killing one crew," but how many of them? Is that a per-campaign decision?

I like this thought.

I would say it's per-campaign since for the most part slavery as we're talking about it isn't part of canon (unless I'm wrong, which I often am).

However, I'd say that most of the people that "know" about it only know some vague things they've heard on the news and the net. They couldn't point to somebody and call them a slaver. IMHO.

 

[Dragoner]

I don't have the same reservations about running a campaign with alternative ethics as you do, so long as everybody is on board at saga start, but either way realism is something I strive for. Which is, from both perspectives, what this conversation is about.

If there is an understandable economic demand for slavery, someone is going to supply those slaves.

That is where the realism falls apart, slavery is not an economically viable way of organizing labor. Knowledge and Technology keep marching on, like Economics and Human Resource Management; labor isn't even used the way it was 100 years ago, nor are corporations organized as such.

 

[aramis]

That is where the realism falls apart, slavery is not an economically viable way of organizing labor. Knowledge and Technology keep marching on, like Economics and Human Resource Management; labor isn't even used the way it was 100 years ago, nor are corporations organized as such.

There is an understandable "need" - and that need is where the criminals are filling it currently: Prostitution, child care, housekeeping, and to a much lesser extent, manual labor. Many of the illegals doing manual labor are willingly doing so under indenture contracts in exchange for having been smuggled in - note I said many, not most - and this results in a human trafficking network of criminals.

Until TL14 or so, Robots can't replace prostitutes.
Until TL14 or so, Robots for child care will still need much human oversight.
Even at TL12, much manual labor will be cheaper to buy slaves than to buy robots.

And much of the OTU isn't even TL8.

 

[Dragoner]

There is an understandable "need" - and that need is where the criminals are filling it currently: Prostitution, child care, and to a much lesser extent, manual labor. Many of the illegals doing manual labor are willingly doing so under indenture contracts in exchange for having been smuggled in - note I said many, not most - and this results in a human trafficking network of criminals.

Until TL14 or so, Robots can't replace prostitutes.
Until TL14 or so, Robots for child care will still need much human oversight.
Even at TL12, much manual labor will be cheaper to buy slaves than to buy robots.

And much of the OTU isn't even TL8.

I wouldn't want criminals raising my kids.

I think a lot of that is cultural, as the US is an outlier in how it deals with some issues, which falls back into "artificial conditions" such as social/politics, not actual economic need. Generally the fact remains that it is cheaper to hire people than to enslave them, for a wide variety of reasons, like not having employees smash your head with a rock when you turn your back, or having to provide cradle to grave care. In the antebellum south, they had to make "slave hoes" because the slaves would break the regular ones, feigning ignorance of usage, even though the hoe had been in use in Africa for thousands of years. Go to somewhere like the Third Reich or Soviet Union, forced/slave laborers commited even worse sabotage.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

And with a bit of genetic engineering, social engineering, cloning, and brainwashing, it may be possible to profitably farm slaves.

Reverse it. Genetic engineering might be one of the few real bases for slavery in a far-future universe:

Have y'all ever read any of the Union stories (in the Alliance-Union universe) by CJ Cherryh? Cyteen, Regenesis, and 40,000 in Gehenna?

They may have built in instincts to make the species compliant and cooperative, but genetics and and random chance being what they are, the occasional "sport" who lacks some of those compulsion and wants freedom is being born and growing to adulthood.

The Miles Vorkosigan stories by Bujold talk about some of it.

Since you brought in Bujold, check out Falling Free. The quaddies are specifically gene-gineered for micro-g (no legs, and four arms). They are indoctrinated/raised to stay in their proper place. Of course, at least one of them doesn't. It's a great story (which I read when it was serialized in Analog). (And, descendants of the quaddies show up in the Vorkosigan universe, too.)

And I agree about the Weber stories.

I thought they were decent. I felt some of the relationships were a bit forced, though.

However, Robocop and the brain in Mayflies were both examples of brains who were supposed to be dead and reprogrammed.

I think I already mentioned Legion Of The Damned (by Dietz).

Until TL14 or so, Robots can't replace prostitutes.

OK, I have to ask: what happens at TL14?

I wouldn't want criminals raising my kids.

You'd be surprised what some people will do. :nonono: