AI and the ethics of human rights

How AI can shift the values in human rights

Storm of the Bastille

Since the industrial revolution, many traditional craft professions have disappeared. Shoemakers, wheelwrights, etc.

Factories have forced labor away from town craftsmen and guilds into concentrated specializations, divisions of labor, by increasing their output capacity exponentially.

As Adam West witnessed, a nail maker working alone produced a few nails a day, no matter their skill and experience. Yet a group who divided their processes produced hundred-folds more output per individual.

With the added mechanization and computers, even less human input is required for exponential production.

This has caused in turn the desolation of small towns and villages, unable to compete with big industry, concentrating them into overcrowded, disease ridden, cities for work.

Now with the introduction of various AI software, the work of the cities may soon meet the same fate. Many argue these new software programs provide nothing more but tools to aid the worker.

But it has demonstrated itself to produce professional grade art, faster, cheaper than traditional artists, without the needed skill or experience at the helm.

Some programs have even been claimed to have achieved consciousness. What ever the debate of its ethical and moral groundings, and the semantics of the term "artificial intelligence" is negligible to what it means for human ethics.

Human beings have so far adapted to the technologies constantly introduced. They sought in-demand labor in the new capital markets, abandoning many long held professions to keep up with shifting trends.

In this way, although many throughout the previous industrial revolutions have suffered poverty and death, humanity has maintained a pseudo-ethical visage to various human "rights," from being able to voice opinions, to worship in any designated religion, etc.

However, capital does not bear any responsibility towards this facade; in fact it has demonstrated in its international affair to only seek its desired ends, at what ever cost, from child labor (reportedly to involve torture and inhumane living conditions) by the largest "publicly traded" computer, fashion, etc. corporations in the wealthiest Western nations, to mining rare minerals and financing destructive revolutions in countries unable to withstand its armed assault.

This fact puts a very hard reality onto the human labor force. Capital never desired to give humanity a right to work, speak, or even exist; their only relation to capital was one-sided, for value extraction.

What results when the lemon is no longer worth the squeeze? AI has not yet fully even begun to make its presence felt in the wider world. But the trends already felt are exponential.

The developments of its ability to pass humanity's hardest professional exams demonstrate a serious threat.

Then, in a theoretical world, where all human labor can be done cheaper, faster, better by machines, what happens to humanity?

Does the capital suddenly feel a noble sense of duty to maintain the population? This may rise not from virtue, but self preservation, as the population becomes uncontrollable.

Even so, if they provide the people bare subsistence, this new dependence creates a shift in the balance of power. No longer does humanity have a say in their rights, because they no longer have economic usefulness. They may simply be allowed to exist, given capital's new arrangements for living.

The freedom to speech, must necessarily become restricted. The people cannot voice any complaints towards capital and state. You can't bite the hand that feeds.

No longer will they be equal under law. Of course this notion has always been a farce. Capital always "legally" enjoyed benefits far beyond the commoner.

However, this mask must now slip away completely. The pretensions of liberal democracy, human rights, etc. must be rewritten for the changing times. With climate the sole focus of capital, the reduction of carbon is its primary goal.

Human beings become nothing more than carbon footprints. The exorbitant consumption enjoyed by humanity the primary "cause" for climate change.

With the introduction of various solutions, such as meat replacement, bug consumption, outlawing personal vehicles, we can already see capital's main concern come to light.

Steadily, freedoms such as driving, eating meat, etc., are labelled dangerous privileges that must end through the legal system. Did humanity ever have "rights"?

The ethical problem becomes a capital issue. Thus far, people have enjoyed the fruits of their labors. In the scenario where they can no longer labor, out-competed by capital's new machinery, they have no pretense to rights.

Their value, in a capital driven world where profit and growth are its guiding principles, and in a secular and scientific world, where a human being's only worth is capital possessed, many changes to the terms of "human rights" seem natural.

Human rights in a secular world have no basis or foundation. These are principles not found under the microscope. They have been stand-ins, to appease raging mobs.

The mobs of history had no rights to display their outrage and tirade. They simply demanded to lower tithes in famine, demanded bankers and merchants be hanged, etc. In a word, the commoners of society, demanded justice in a hypothetically fair, religious sense.

And the ears of kings and queens of history, against their inbred disgust and protestation, were forced to bend and appease them, lest their heads rolled in the streets. Plus, there was value in the peasantry's labor which also had a role in their new "moral" decrees.

Capital and its closest business partner government, values utilitarian outcomes above touchy-feely philosophies such as virtue or natural law.

Humanity has never had intrinsic value or rights in this sense, only visible and physical leverage in great masses. And we see, more and more, the utilitarian shift pushing humanity further away from ever standing ground against the newly forming regulatory system of governance, without the ethical and moral problem.