Google’s AI-driven Search Generative Experience have been generating results that are downright weird and evil, ie slavery’s positives.
I think this is an issue with people being offended by definitions. Slavery did “help” the economy. Was it right? No, but it did. Mexico’s drug problem helps that economy. Adolf Hitler was “effective” as a leader. He created a cultural identity for people that had none and mobilized them to a war. Ethical? Absolutely not. What he did was horrendous and the bit should include a caveat, but we need to be a little more understanding that it’s a computer; it will use the dictionary of the English language.
Slavery is not good for the economy… Think about it, you have a good part of your population that are providing free labour, sure, but they aren’t consumers. Consumption is between 50 and 80% of GDP for developed countries, so if you have half your population as slave you loose between 20% and 35% of your GDP (they still have to eat so you don’t loose a 100% of their consumption).
That also means less revenue in taxes, more unemployed for non slaves because they have to compete with free labour.
Slaves don’t order on Amazon, go on vacation, go to the movies, go to restaurant etc etc That’s really bad for the economy.
Look at the Saudi, China or the UAE, it’s still a pretty efficient way to boost your economy. People don’t need to be consumer if this isn’t what your country needs.
Those are very specifics examples, with two of the biggest oil producers, and the factory of the world. Thus their whole economies is based on export, so internal consumption isn’t important.
Moreover what proof do you have their economies wouldn’t be in a better shape if they didn’t exploit some population but made them citizen with purchasing power?
China has slavery? Also Saudi Arabia and the UAE import slaves, which is better for the economy than those people not being there at all but worse than them being regular workers.
That really bad for a modern consumer economy yes. But those werent a thing before the industrial revolution. Before that the large majority of people were subsitance/tennant farmer or serfs who consumed basically nothing other than food and fuel in winter. Thats what a slave based economy was an alternantive to. Its also why slvery died out in the 19th century, it no longer fit the times.
I wish it did die out in the 19th century. We have more slaves now than ever.
And isn’t the economy much better now than before the industrial revolution?
I think the problem is more that given the short attention span of the general public (myself included), these “definitions” (I don’t believe that slavery can be “defined” as good, but okay) are what’s going to stick in the shifting sea of discourse, and are going to be picked out of that sea by people with vile intentions and want to justify them.
It’s also an issue that LLMs are a lot more convincing than they should be, and the same people with short attention spans who don’t have time to understand how they work are going to believe that an Artificial Intelligence with access to all the internet’s information has concluded that slavery had benefits.
what’s going to stick in the shifting sea of discourse
This is what I think too. We’ve had enough trouble with “vaccines CaUsE AuTiSm” and that was just one article by one rogue doctor.
AI is capable of a real death-by-a-thousand-cuts effect.
that was just one article by one rogue doctor.
That was pushed by many media organizations because its sensationalist topic. Antivaxers are idiots but the media played a fucking huge role blowing a pilot study that had a rather fucking absurd conclusion out of proportions, so they can sell more ads/newspapers. I fucking doubt most antivaxers (Hell I doubt most people haven’t either) even read the original study and came to their own conclusions on this. They just watched on the telly some stupid idiots giving a bullshit story that they didn’t combat at all
Your and @WoodenBleachers’s idea of “effective” is very subjective though.
For example Germany was far worse off during the last few weeks of Hitler’s term than it was before him. He left it in ruins and under the control of multiple other powers.
To me, that’s not effective leadership, it’s a complete car crash.
If you ask it for evidence Hitler was effective, it will give you what you asked for. It is incapable of looking at the bigger picture.
