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Asimov's Psychohistory Becoming a Reality?
northernboy writes "Today's LA Times has an article describing how a Wikileaks data dump from Afghanistan plus some advanced algorithms are allowing accurate predictions about the behavior of large groups of people. From the article: 'The programmers used simple code to extract dates and locations from about 77,000 incident reports that detailed everything from simple stop-and-search operations to full-fledged battles. The resulting map revealed the outlines of the country's ongoing violence: hot spots near the Pakistani border but not near the Iranian border, and extensive bloodshed along the country's main highway. They did it all in just one night. Now one member of that group has teamed up with mathematicians and computer scientists and taken the project one major step further: They have used the WikiLeaks data to predict the future.' Considering they did not discriminate between types of skirmish, but only when and where there was violence, this seems like an amazing result. It looks like our robotic overlords will have even less trouble controlling us than I previously thought."
"And in the countries the US hasn't gotten to yet, they just stone women who've been raped for adultery, sell daughters into marriage and generally work against any sort of progress."
Are you talking about Kansas?
>The mistake you make is the "because replacing a slave is expensive" - they're not. They reproduce just like free men do. And while a child isn't good for as much labor as an adult, they were certainly put to work as children...
That's a good argument - and like I said, I was not in the least trying to excuse slavery - I find the very idea abominable. But I do believe that slavery at least in the first generation may actually create an economic incentive for the well treatment of workers that is absent in unskilled free labour jobs.
This is not an excuse for slavery - but an assault on the working conditions we allow fellow human beings to be under, conditions which differ from slavery in name only.
It's interesting though that the idea of born slaves and life-long slaves was a relatively modern one. The confederate slave-owners cited biblical slave-owning as justification but conveniently forgot all the rules about slave-ownership established in the bible. Slaves could only be owned for 7 years, after which they had to be released, at this point a slave could voluntarily CHOOSE to enter lifelong servitude but this could not be enforced, and in order to do so the slave would have to get his ear pierced by the local priest (in theory - that means an independent witness to his further slavery being by his own choice). The children of slaves were born as free men, who could of course BECOME slaves later on, but nobody was born that way.
Now we can argue about how well the Israelites stuck to the rules, and whether those rules really would make it "okay" (I vote no), but it's just an interesting example of how those who use religion as an excuse for bad behaviour will always conveniently choose only the bits that suit them. "The bible said we can own slaves" but never "the bible also said we have to release them after 7 years". Or in it's modern form: "The bible says marriage is only between man and woman" but never "love thy neighbour like thyself".
In the end it comes down to what Terry Pratchett masterly summed up: All sin starts with thinking of people as things.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *