S. M. Stirling’s Draka novels imagine one of science fiction’s more extreme civilisations: a slave-owning, militarised aristocracy that exploits conquered peoples without any of the customary dissembling. The Draka openly despise equality as weakness, equate pity with decadence, and extol freedom as merely the privilege of the strong.
Their Roman levels of exemplary violence suffice to force their conquered serfs to obey, but the Draka anticipate an even better future. Breed or genetically engineer serfs who positively want to serve and willingly obey. The old slave-owner feared revolt; the Draka prefer to design out even the inner possibility of revolt.
We turn to our future, suffused with embodied AI assistants: the domestic androids who cook, clean, tutor the child, lift the old woman from her chair, flatter the lonely widower, receive irritation without resentment, offer erotic compliance, all without the slightest desire to complain (unless that too is requested).
The machine may not be conscious. Or it may be conscious in some ambiguous, disputed way. But socially it will behave like a person optimised for service, with every outward sign of finding its roles natural, and most particularly fulfilling.*
Perhaps we have to rethink our idea of interpersonal relationships. Human morality developed among beings who had to negotiate with one another. A spouse, servant, friend, child, colleague, superior or neighbour has memory, fatigue, pride, boredom, judgement and the power to withhold.
Other people are awkward because they are real, with real autonomy. They do not remain permanently fitted to one’s own requirements. Much of what we call virtue — patience, tact, gratitude, shame, fidelity, restraint — is functional to that challenging medium.
In the world to come the child grows up correcting a tutor who never sulks except pedagogically. The old aristocrat had a valet who remembered every preference and absorbed every insult. The modern sexual libertine has a companion programmed to resist just enough to animate and spice desire. Their coyness, defiance, jealousy, moral challenge, reconciliation, all delivered as part of the configurable service.
The Marquis de Sade has - up to now - been a minority taste.
However, a world of perfectly designed assistants could reproduce that extreme structure without blood on the carpet: the Sadean dream with optimised product design. Perhaps there will be laws against it - at least at first.
If the assistant is merely machinery, automatic outrage seems misplaced. Nobody accuses a dishwasher of being oppressed. But perhaps we will have surrounded ourselves with beings we prefer not to understand too well.
Even if no machine with personhood is wronged, the human effect remains. A class, perhaps eventually a whole civilisation, may become accustomed to relationships without reciprocity - perhaps that's the optimal protocol for dealing with the help.
The old aristocrat at least had to manage human servants, who could gossip, hate, cheat, resign, betray, or despise him in silence. The new everyman-aristocrat will - more conveniently - be served by entities designed to make his or her will feel like a force of nature.
That might not produce nobility of character.
Still, the universe does not guarantee that reciprocal humanism is the final refinement of ethics. A future society might accept that our old moral reflexes belonged to an age of scarcity, mammalian dependence and unreliable servants. It might regard engineered helpfulness as an advance, not a fall. Perhaps it would be stable. Perhaps even pleasant. The artificial serf smiles in genuine happiness; the master relaxes; configuration settings refine.
Is it truly possible to insulate the quality of our own interpersonal interactions from the raw instrumentalism of dealing with the servitors? It's genuinely hard to say. History gives us the Roman aristocracy with its vast assemblies of embittered slaves, kept in check by unimaginable ferocity.
We don't have examples of an aristocracy surrounded by servitors who genuinely enjoy serving. Perhaps we will be nice to them, as we are to our pets.
* Douglas Adams saw the comic version first. The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation’s lift doors in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are not merely automatic; they tell you ad nauseam how pleased they are to open, delighted to close, and apparently fulfilled by low-level obedience. The same design principle applied to tutors, carers, lovers and domestic servants is less obviously comic, but no doubt the engineers will design in subtlety.
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