Will slavery survive in postmodernity?

Almost all observers agree that the activities implying human imagination, creativity, and empathy at their essence will survive in the era of total automation. Artists, writers, singers, dancers, actors, poets, nurses, priests, and whoever else applying unique human feelings to what they do will unlikely be replaced by even the smartest AI systems. Their activities are based on what any machine is incapable to grasp — the non-existing feelings rooted only in human emotions.

Any emotion is nothing but a bug, an error, a mistake in terms of programmable machine logic. Once any computer algorithm is aimed at error-free modus operandi, spontaneous and rationally unexplainable human emotions will always remain beyond artificial intelligence. That’s why a general abbreviation for the sector in which machines will have nothing to do can be defined as H2H — Human-To-Human.

Another type of activity that can be left for humans belongs to the opposite end of the spectrum of jobs. Hard manual labor is unlikely to be addressed by the developers of robotics. We can see an exemplary case of this in Congo where open-pit mining provides about 60% of the global delivery of cobalt.

Few recent scandals regarding 40 thousand Congolese children intensively exploited for hard manual work at cobalt deposits for transnational mining corporations have ended up with nothing — the gap between a market price of cobalt (too important for our electric vehicles and gadgets) and a prime cost of its mining by African slaves appeared too large. This is pure capitalism with its expenses-&-profits ratio.

Profits are large enough to spend some money to bribe the corrupt Congo government and make over-zealous media shut up. It happens to be more profitable than to arrange any open-pit automation. If you have dozens of thousands of starving and voiceless people around, why the heck should you spend millions of dollars for any robotized substitute for those poor manual laborers?

Humans can still be cheaper than machines if they do not demand anything beyond what they get from an employer. Colonialism and slavery have not gone anywhere because the slave trade has been invented by Western society in modernity that has been running up to now as well.

The extremely anti-human aspects of modernity can appear in postmodernity as a dialectic opposition to the hyper-industrial paradigm. Moreover, postmodernity as the next phase of the development of modernity can just reveal those social contradictions that are camouflaged by the humanistic rhetoric of liberal modernity.

In this regard, it should be noted that the upcoming paradigm is not about a dystopian paradise of the “green” self-sufficient megalopolises with a happy idle population. This is about a new battle for the expropriated vital energy of a maximally mobilized human factor with all the attendant problems.