Modern Slavery

For our society slavery is evil. The word "slaver" is similar to what "demon" was a few centuries ago. No politician in their right mind would get up on TV and say "I think we should bring back slavery". The funny thing is, it's all about the word "slavery" rather than the reality of the thing.

The wikipedian gods say that "Slavery is a form of unfree labour where a person (called a "slave") is compelled to work for another (sometimes called "the master" or "slave owner")". Remove the "slave" and "owner" qualifiers and you have the situation that prevails in much of the world today. What we called slaved a few centuries ago is what we call cheap labour today. There is not much difference between someone getting paid just enough to feed his family and another person getting paid in food for her family. The problem is that our society functions in such a way that the use of cheap labour is inevitable. Market forces drive prices in such a way that to increase profits you have to lower prices. There are two ways of doing so. One means investing in technology while the other focuses on getting cheaper labour. The latter way has been proven to work through millennia while there will always be a great deal of uncertainty about the former as you'll always be dealing with new technologies.

In the end even with our best efforts, our society will keep plummeting towards cheaper labour and we will probably be recognized through history as a slaver-like civilization (much like Europe during the Middle-Ages). The only thing that could potentially change this, at least as far as humans are concerned, would be for machines to become advanced enough so that they could reinvent themselves and become automatically reliable and efficient at doing new work. The easiest path to increase profits and increase comfort would then become the technological one.