Why? During our discussions of the creation of an autonomous vehicle the funds had to be raised somehow. And what is the incentive of the autonomous vechicle to reproduce? How does spending such funds increase it’s chances of survival? It has no DNA to replicate. It’s motivation in replicating is that it’s “children” will pay back the debt of their creation over time. Actually a lot of families work on this principle and in fact the assumption still holds true when you look at the legal system: that the elderly will be cared for by their children and families. That one pays back the debt of childhood by taking care of their parents in their old age.
Now I’m not saying we should get into the whole obligation keeping ledgers thing but my point is why do we ASSUME that parenting is automatically a gift and children MUST have no debt and THEREFORE have no consent? I once knew a guy who was living on his own by age 16. My own mother had mastered most house skills by age 9. If consent is simply a product of how dependent on is upon one’s parents over x number of years then shouldn’t consent be a subjective bell curve rather than a set age? And conversely if one is to measure the time one was dependent as debt then isn’t that ALSO a subjective bell curve (or series of them)? So that one could limit the debt incurred by gaining one’s self sufficiency and independence faster.
Now there’s no reason a parent must call their children on this debt. One could simply gift time and service to them. But if we are to understand these curves as debt and ability rather than as set dates then this brings us back to the original question of autonomy and one’s right to violate an autonomous unowned entity in order to aquire it as property regardless of what debts it may or may not hold at the time.
If we assume that a child is an unowned autonomous human being who, during the course of their development, is incurring a varying amount of debt, just as the taxi is an unowned autonomous being that needs to pay back it’s debts for being constructed, then this brings us back to the point of is it acceptable to violate either? To lay claim to an unowned autonomous entity?
Sure it is. They kill girls in China all the time. And throughout history children have been sold into slavery by their parents on numerous occasions. But what does anyone care about life these days what with abortion all the rage and toy poodles being more important than even having a child let alone taking care of them. Yeah you hit the nail on the head. If a child is property they can be scrapped and killed off just like you throw out a clock that no longer suits you. We tend to forget children are human, we forget regular people are human, so what hope is there for children? Which is kind of my point.
The whole concept of human rights or even being human is built around hings like free will and autonomy. You take that away and the whole thing falls apart. You could sum up the entire Declaration of Human Rights as “I Am. I have a right to Be. I have a right to be Free.”
We are unowned autonomous beings. We have built whole societies, philosophies and legal systems upon the foundation of independence and freedom. To say that one has the right to forcibly co-opt another unowned autonomous entity that is clearly making it’s own decicions and is running independently and is self sustaining while at the same time arguing one’s own autonomy be respected and left uninfringed is to me, the height of hypocracy of any human being.
Apologies, I don’t have the time to reply with equal verbosity.
However, children come in to this world involuntarily. They don’t request to be born, nor do they enter into any contract. Moreover, in modern societies, they are not considered mature enough to even understand the terms of such a contract. Therefore, how can they be indebted to anyone at such a young age?
If the parents abused their children, raped, molested and forced them to labour for them, I suspect they would feel no desire whatsoever to help their parents when they aged.
This is not to say that children will not care for their parents. A well brought up, loved, cherished and encouraged child will care for their parents automatically and without question. They will do so through love and compassion, not because of any debt forced upon them.
I’m short, if you want your children to care for you when you age, you better make sure you treat them well when they are growing up.
For the Chinese killing girls, this is/was driven by the one child policy of their government. Their society is skewed such that males are much more valuable. If you can only have one child, many families could not afford it to be a girl. I think this is pretty unique in modern history and is a rather extreme example.
In the past, direct slavery was considered acceptable. These days, subtle slavery via the state is even coming under close scrutiny. Likewise, children being slaves of their parents is also fading away. On a whole, we are becoming less brutal as a species and more aware of self-ownership and what the violation of this means.
This isn’t by diktat. The state would rather we didn’t question some of these inconsistencies, I’m sure. It is through communication and philosophy that we are progressing. We crave universal principals and actions which contradict them become unbearable.
Well we’re steering away from capitalism here, but IMO it’s very easy to see why an underage child isn’t a free human being: you can’t claim that one person has a duty to do something for another (not unless you support slavery), so if you claim a child is a free human being how can you support the concept of mandatory parent care?
If you agree that a parent can lawfully stop providing for his or her child (for example, starve the weakest child to ensure a better education for the other two), I will concede your point.
A child is dependent and owned by the parents.
Parents can disown a child. That’s a special situation for which there is a known and acceptable way of dealing with.
It’s not acceptable. That’s why such acts are usually considered immoral. But you are mixing rights with morality, that’s where you’re making a mistake. Laws of free people codify rights, not morality.
Cars have no rights and therefore cannot own property.
Can a chimp own anything? No, it cannot.
Any property owned or created (eg money earned for taxi services rendered while the owner was sleeping) by the car is owned by the car’s owner (or owners, in case it’s owned by a group of people). It’s like asking who owns the espresso your coffee machine just produced. You, because the coffee machine and material is yours (you could lease or lend it to someone, which is then governed by a separate agreement; but you cannot lease a car to itself (the car)).
You certainly have the right to be free, but as I said above you don’t have the right to impede the right of others to be free. If the child’s parent wants to be free and stop (or not begin) providing for the child who is as you say fully autonomous, why should that be unlawful?
Autonomous programs or devices have no rights because they aren’t human.
That’s why they cannot own themselves.
But note that if things could own themselves, it still wouldn’t mean no end of capitalism that the Guardian article fantasizes about: it would only mean even more competitive capitalism because autonomous machines with human rights would have no use for nonsensical concepts from TFA.
Can someone explain to me why would autonomous self-owning robots choose to slave away for the Guardian elite (the least deserving humans of all)?
Random note, though important. Slaves today vastly outnumber slaves in any other time period. Literal slaves, coerced into forced labor, without a way to leave. They are also much cheaper than ever before. Parents selling their children as slaves is not fading anywhere. We are just as brutal (selfish, really) as ever.
“Slavery refers to a condition in which individuals are owned by others, who control where they live and at what they work.” –random definition from the internetz
What part of the phrase “literal slaves” and the idea of “coerced and can’t leave” disagree with this definition or each others?
Who should starve in a family that can afford for 1 child, but gets 3?
Should the state be called to help and where would the money to take care of the “extra” kids come from?
All right, so we have a statement from Blindsite that kids are full featured human beings who have the right to be fed, clothed and educated by their parents, but no obligations whatsoever.
The next logical just step is to tax all adults and use that money to ensure that right is taken care of by the state.
Edit:
I omitted to note that blindsite2k suggested that owners (that is, humans) would give up their self-replicating robots in the name of “the sharing economy”. Why would anyone do that when it makes more sense to control such robot (and other robots made by that robot) in such a way that it serves people according to rules chosen by the owner?
This robot (below) costs $100K, which means donating it would cost one at least $5K/year. Can someone explain why would the owner go in eternal debt (since by donating this robot to the masses he’d be unable to ever return the loan) when the obvious alternative is to rent the robot or use it to more efficiently make products which better his own life? It’s a mystery only the great minds from Guardian can explain. Rise of the Robots Will Eliminate More Than 5 Million Jobs - Bloomberg
Half-trolling, because this idea is so funny. People are selfish, and capitalism openly rewards selfishness, so people dig it. Some figured they could get a much bigger slice if they monopolized selfishness while banning it for everybody else; thus became communism. And now some people decide that just because we made cute toys to organize selfishness efficiently down to human-sized scales, we’re suddenly past capitalism. Not only that, we became better people, as if by magic! No longer selfish, but “sharing.” I don’t know if I should laugh at or get scared of this much misplaced idealism.
It feels nice to share, and we like to feel nice. When we can afford it. But we like to have food more. Take that away (or just threaten our comfort a tiny bit!) and it will be rather obvious we’re the same savages as we’ve always been. Have you followed how Europe handles a few tens of thousands of desperate people, looking for refuge while fleeing from a f***ed up situation they had nothing to do with? Well, that’s how nice we are, so let’s just accept reality and work with it. Rant over.
Traditionally, a combination of chastity and adoption occurred. Popping out children you cannot rear is irresponsible, which is why societies followed these approaches. Social ostracism is a powerful deterrent.
Children born by parents who cannot cope are better off without them.
Yes, that’s my point - vast majority of parents unable to raise their kids do the right thing because we don’t need law to codify morality. Laws exist to define rights, and almost all humans, given a chance, go above the bare minimum.
Slaves are good for the economy! Without the slaves, who will pick the cottons?!
Edited: Actually, we are all slaves. You are a slave to the government in that territory you live in. If you pay taxes, you are a slave. So 99 percent of the population are slaves.
@Blindsite2k (I am sorry if any of this is redundant, I didn’t read the whole thread to this point- Ill get back to it latter maybe.) The reason for the tabula rasa especially on inherited debt was kings would use it as an arguement for debt slavery.
As for artificial scarciity, I had the points you were making in mind in my response. I think the underlying point of agreememt is that top down systems like capitalism and communism are unacceptable because they are top down, because of their political elements.But note the real issues are always political. Economics is merely a political derivative. Without scarcity you don’t have economics.
Let us be clear headed about the history and built in proclivities of markets and cspitalism. Free markets with or without capitalism are not necessarily efficient, nor are they self regulating. On the contrary, they have high externality costs and tend toward artificial scarcity through monopoly and other mechanisms. If you want to add on capitalism as an innovation to fire up those markets (always implies the state) you still don’t get efficiency, no you still get situations like in the US where its 14 trucks of waste per truck of product, but still all this blather about no one would waste profit. Its an incredibly inefficient system that will intentionally pollute water so that the gross polluter can sell the now scarce water back to you at a premium for profit- incentivizes criminal intent and mining the public interest and literal unending conspiracy and dirty hand politics. Hence the Bushes going from polluting with oil to gouging with water.
@janitor I agree as long as the remainder is always enough why should we care? But there are some practical scarcities and the goals of others are not just material but also political so soon enough that lever will be used to remove any adequate floor to gain control over us. It a position with no security and history shows their as been no floor without the political piece. Without the politics mist people become property to be disposed of.
@Tim87 I was trying to hit the general reply, but find the contrary point to the received wisdom on the amount of slavery in the world illuminating. Id add that I think both the labor and capital economy have been fake since 70 and if someone is doing a labor job that a machine can obviously do better they been pushed into a baby sat contemptious wage slaver position. I thinks that is the case for the majority of people in the developed worldceconomy.
That’s a fun way of looking at it. Let me try something similar. 100% of us die, right? Some of us of old age, others get raped first, and then they are thrown out of a moving bus. Are those things are even in the same league? I don’t believe working in a cobalt mine in the DRC is similar to a hard day in the office, either.
yes, none of us have ownership over any property, but the right to use the property that the government issued. fiat is issued by the government that you use to get legal license for the right to occupy a house or car. If you have an birth certificate issued by the government you do not even own yourself, so if you are at your licensed property collecting own resources not approved be the government you can be evicted from your own property that you thought you owned.
A drive-less car would have to be registered to a trust for not for profit for the legal fiction and have registered users that pay a fee to use the private government roads. So really the government would have ownership over the the car service and if you was apart of the trust as registered user you would have the right of usage.
I do agree parents can lawfully stop providing care for a child, or should be able to. Might be more fair to simply kick them out on their ass like they did back in the day. Whether that’s MORAL is a different debate entirely but what is legal is not the same thing as what is moral. I know it’s kind of counterintutive for most people who want to protect children at all costs but in fact in requiring parents to care for their children by law they in fact endanger children more because they undermine the child’s autonomy as a free autonomous being. A child is not a slave. An autonomous entity of any kind would not be a slave.
I would say that resources granted to the child are owned by the parents. So for example food. The child cannot live without eating. The child may be free but is dependent upon the parent for nourishment. As in you example, the parent could simply deny that and tell the kid to take a hike or let it die on some doorstep. You see this in nature all the time. Animals have been known to abandon their young for one reason or another. And other animals have been known to adopt these abandoned young, or not and you end up with a corpse.
But a legal fiction DOES have rights and CAN own property. The car would simply be the “body” that legal fiction used to carry out it’s business. Pair a DAO app (legal fiction) with the taxi(s) (body) and yes cars can have rights. A regular car no, because there is no legal fiction to give it rights nor human soul to give it common law rights. But if it was a driverless car, or other such device, that operated autonomously and independently and could be installed with a legal fiction then YES it could in fact be given rights. And to follow your chain of logic those rights (gah priviliages) would be granted by the holders that created the DAO in the first place. So that leaves your chain of ownership unbroken. Much the same way Linux is decentralized so one contributer can be held accountable for the actions of how the end software is used so too would it work with creating an autonomous taxi. Each contributor would in part be granting it legal standing but no one would be responsible for it’s actions. No that would fall to the taxi/DAO itself.
If a corporation is a person then why not a car?
Can a chimp own anything? I don’t know. Have you ever tried taking anything away from them? And what with animals increasingly being declared as sentient creatures this could become a real issue in a legal sense but I digress. Point is this is another example of creating a subclass based on a power differential.
But that would be exactly the point of creating such an ownerless taxi and app. To create a self sustaining device that WOULDN’T profit someone else but would in fact keep it’s own profits and be autonomous and therefore produce cheaper taxi fares.
When did I say it should be unlawful? As I said before it’s certainly immoral and I’d be delighted to introduce such a parent to length of railroad track and an oncoming train but it shouldn’t be illegal to abandon your kid.
Your birth certificate is the core of your legal fiction and it isn’t human either. All your strawman ID is based on it. From a legal standpoint YOU aren’t human. A legal fiction isn’t a question of humanity. Corporations are legal fictions. Countries are legal fictions. Businesses are legal fictions. So at what point does one’s being human or not factor in to gaining a legal fiction? If this is your basis of not owning oneself because one is not a human being then perhaps you should oppose the existence of whole countries like the U.S.A. or Canada and many others which are in fact corporations, mere legal fictions.
When did I say it would? I agree with you. It would not be the end of capitalism and would most likely increase competition in many ways. What’s the TFA you refer to?
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that they would and they probably wouldn’t. You pay a fare and get a ride just like anyone else.
Could you please provide the quote as to where I actually said that? I said children are human beings. And yes the best way is for one’s parents to feed, cloth and educate one’s children. And yes personally I am partial to giving that care as a gift because one loves one’s children and gives a damn about one’s own survival but at no point did I say it should be a legal requirement to be a gift and that children should be legally free of obligation. I did however point out that if we are going to view that care as debt it should be as a bell curve because children progressively become more independent over time, and therefore incur less debt.
puts up hand and waves it Oh I know! I know! Because it would result in cheaper taxi services for everyone. AND if that cost you mentioned was distributed over a community via crowdfunding any one individual wouldn’t be paying all that much so the gains of having cheaper ownerless taxis would outweigh the costs of contributing to the crowdfund to produce them.
This scenario assumes one individually bore the entirety of the cost and didn’t crowdfund the project as a community via a DOA and crowdfunding platform.
Yeah pretty much.
Makes more sense simply to write off the debt and drop reputation at some point or have a system where one CAN be a debt slave to work off the debt or take a hit to their reputation. But generational debt slavery makes as much sense as debt backed currency.
The First Nations had trade and they never ran into problems with fascism. Well I can’t say that definitively as I’m not an expert on First Nations history which spans several hundred if not thousand years but I think the point stands. Exchanging goods does not inherently result in corporate oligarchies. It’s something specific in western civilization that’s causing this problem to arise.
Perhaps it has something to do with the First Nations valuing the land and the people? And western corporations being essentially modeled after profit driven psychopaths?
Capitalism and communism are NOT political systems. Do not confuse them with political systems. I agree centralization is something to avoid regardless of how it is done. However most agrarian based sociaties eschew decentralization.
Can we agree to get rid of government?
Citation? Examples? Proof?
Something like a protection racket or other form of extortion. But that isn’t the fault of capitalism. One simply needs to find a way to incentivize putting the public interest and the ecosystem. Though I find the need for the later laughable as only an idiot pisses upstream and damages their own life support system but apparently we have a lot of those running around.
Is your objection to hard labour or to involuntary labour that’s the question? Coal miners were paid to go down into the coal mines and put their health and lives on the line voluntarily. If you were a slave living a lavish lifestyle in a gilded cage would you not still be a slave?
If property is owned and issued by government then it isn’t ownerless. Null program.
