…from that perfect pill, Charlie Stross:
(With the side note that this is coming from the same line of economic thought that gives us “employing people is exploitative under all circumstances”.)
I’m adding “robot robot overseer with an electric whip” to my project list just for him.
…far too many of the people that seemed to be interesting only ten years ago have seriously contracted Martian Brain Fungus.
My days of not taking Stross seriously are definitely coming to a middle.
Pretty much running a decade for my opinion of him (sorry, when you change the tone of your story to “choosing which rapist you want to take you” mid-stream starts to make me very, very angry).
Saturn’s Children?
(Aside: after that and Neptune’s Brood, it seemed inevitable that we would end up with a trilogy, final volume to be titled Spawn of Uranus.)
I tried to read Saturn’s Children but his “Heinlein-pastiche” effort just…didn’t work(1). Then I figured out the gimmick and I was even more upset. Then he wrote The Delirium Brief and…look I understand he hates American politicians that aren’t to the left of Lenin and what he perceives as the way America works, but when he goes “choose your rapist to fuck you/Great Old One to devour you”…I get enough of that watching Dad’s choices on Netflix.
(1-At the end of the day, at his very worst, Heinlein was an optimist. There’s always some hope, even if only for tomorrow, but you have to work for it. Just about every Heinlein “homage” I’ve seen in the last twenty-five years hasn’t been optimistic.)
See: Robots Enslaving Robots - TV Tropes
That line of thought belongs to the same family as prostitution/sex-work is exploitative and non-consentral under all circumstances.
Of course the Eldrae would Likely consider employment as it is typically practiced on Earth (selling hours of your life in many cases doing menial labour) at the very least undignified and not something a civilised sapient should want engage in if they can at all avoid it (Note that this paragraph is unrelated to the text within adult topic)
ObWord: vetel i-seldá.
Like the old blue and orange post says:
One that is worth noting is with regard to employment; employment as we know it is practically nonexistent – not because it actually violates the strict moral precept, but just because selling off chunks of your time in which you will work under orders, vis-à-vis contracting to perform a particular task at your own will, is insufficiently dignified for a free man.
I’m sure that back in the bad old days, when there was a servile darassef, they would point out that you can’t eat dignity.
Later on, they would indicate the mass graves of korasan and point out that dignity can eat you.
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Stross is absolutely right that there are many korasan among our plutocrats, but absolutely wrong to make such sweeping statements. I want to chuck the entire Iain Banks corpus at his head… the Culture had non-exploitative sophont AI long before the stories’ setting, and their present digi-paternal anarcho-socialism absolutely requires ubiquitous digisophonce.
My breaking point was his fantasy about George W. Bush getting nuked.
The Eldrae are also somewhere in the neighborhood of 8000 years of having droids to perform work under orders, that Free Men can contract to perform tasks as their discretion.
He can write well, when he wants to. Not as well as he once could, but well enough to read. But the diagnosis of Martian Brain Fungus is real.
I am basically waiting for his existing series to time out, just to see how the characters I liked so much before end up. I would like to know about Bob Howard and Mo.
And then I will watch quietly for a decade as pretty much none of his hysterical forward-looking statements and claims come true and see whether his head implodes or explodes.
I’m more-or-less waiting for the Laundry series to end…and there isn’t any reason for me to buy his books at this point (digital and hardcover only these days in the US).
That just means they solved the darassef problem by themselves, and did it over 8000 years ago.
Assuming we’re looking at the dawn of the Empire there, that was basically the equivalent of classical levels of technology, where peak clank meant clockwork automata and maybe a rewinder or two based on the principles of Hero’s aeolipile or more advanced running-dog technology.
(Admittedly, proper steam engines turned up earlier in their timeline, around 720, due to the lack of the Dark Ages and were applied, along with Stannic cogitators, to making better clanks and eventually electronic automata, but you don’t see really smart robots for another millennium-and-a-half beyond that.)
Leaving aside, for the moment, the question of what people are willing to put up with, consider for a moment the oft-mentioned demographic issues and consequent structural labor shortage that has existed more or less perpetually.
They don’t have minds to waste on multiple layers of intermediate management and supervisory positions designed to ensure that the workers are continuously monitored and corrected to make sure that they’re doing their jobs properly. They need people who are capable of operating in a professional model where they can be hired to do a job and then trusted to do it, and do it well¹, while working independently.
What that means in practice is that anyone who can’t operate that way (meaning, in their terms, roughly “can secure an apprenticeship in a skilled trade and qualify as journeyman²”) occupies a position on the corporate utility scale somewhere just above “oxen”³ and “furniture”.
