Why should a very advanced society use slaves? They could use robots

This, and the fact slaves would come pre-built and they can teach each other how to work to avoid lashings and get food.

Why would you need strong ai. Wouldn't it be better to have a worker that can't think for itself.

>Why should a very advanced society use slaves?
The slaves are another engineered species that die without a master. The previous master race was destroyed by yours because they treated their slaves badly.

If your house is on fire, would you rather have a robot that doesn't understand what "a dangerous fire" is and won't act to put out a kitchen fire that's got out of control, or would you prefer a slave who can detect smoke and realise the kitchen's on fire and call the fire brigade?

The robot can't call the fire brigade because it can't differentiate between the fire of the oven and the fire on the walls.

...

This is pretty good.

I'd have just went with the advanced race being kinda dicks about being advanced. Keeping the less advanced race as powerless slaves stops them from educating themselves and rising up.

>they come prebuilt.
It takes 9 months to build a slave and even then they are mostly useless for the next 12 years.
Meanwhile it takes a car about 18 hours to build so I assume it would take a similar amount of time to build a robot.

It was the robots' idea. It was for this service to society that they were finally awarded full rights.

That's a dumb argument, of course a robot can do that without being a strong AI. We (almost) have self-driving cars now, and they can differentiate between moving objects which are not dangerous, and moving objects which pose a danger to the driver.

>just give them food and they repair themselves
If a slave loses an arm, they are not getting their arm back. If a robot loses its arm then you can just give it a new arm.

>Biological vs Mechanical
On average, there exists no mechanical machine as efficient as a biological one, so there's that. However machines are easily tailored to perform a task, they can be strong, live long, do not tire, do not give up etc. Any industrial task (which is what slaves are usually for) is better suited for machines because the task is usually repetetive and consists of simple parts.

Take the Ssaelit folks in Unsounded. This is a setting where undead 'plod' labor is cheap and effective for basic drudge-work, but the Ssaelit believe that corpses have to be cremated before rot sets in to avoid damnation, and further believe undead labor is blasphemy. So they still use regular slaves.

If a slave loses an arm you kill it and buy another 10 cents slave.

Slavery is cool.

I'd also like to add that slaves can easily be used to establish a sustainable or semi-sustainable community of themselves through breeding. There is no need for additional resources to do so (until after the birth, anyway). Robots, on the other hand, can be programmed to make more robots but each one takes more materials to build and if those materials are already expensive, that only compounds the issue.

>I will base my society upon intelligent robots
>what do you mean, a virus made them turn hostile?

>I will base my society upon unintelligent robots
>what do you mean, that rival faction used EMP?

>slaves
>cheap
Pick one

They are very cheap. Heck, even in real life you can get one for like fifty dollars. Just find a subhuman malnourished being.

In a slave society however, they would be massive breed so the price would be even cheaper. More slaves = more merchandise.

How do you think EMPs work?

>Why should a very advanced society use slaves? They could use robots.
The SW setting had this mentality.

Then the Great Droid Rebellion happened.

Are the robots sapient?

potatoes are cheaper then batteries

Fun fact, "robot" is from the czech "robota" meaning slavery

>potatoes are cheaper then batteries
But user...

youtube.com/watch?v=LNB3rDkedaM

Because they can and enjoy it in a sadistic way

Robots aren't lewd.

They use robots for industrial tasks and manual labour, as well as tasks which are too hazardous for organics.
They use slaves for tasks involving a more nuanced approach, such as cooking, singing, dancing, sex or blood sports.

Actually, it'd be interesting to have a sort of snobby rivalry between those who use robots and those who use flesh and blood slaves.
"Oh, my lord Balthasar, you still have flesh concubines? How quaint. Aren't you worried about them biting you?"

...

Because it's easier to deal with a slave rebellion than it is to deal with a omnic crisis

> Muh traditions (like India got to space)
> You can't get spiritual energy from robots suffering (dank eldar)
> Sentient robots have civil rights, so you use both meat slaves and robot slaves
> No sufficiently realistic sexbot in year 3000, WTF?

Robots are incapable of feeling pain, so you have to build a better robot to make them work harder instead of just hitting them more.

Your race people die if it doesn't have psychically linked puppets-slaves by the time they hit puberty. Of course, you won't enslave your own people anymore, but captives from undeveloped planets and criminals are fine to.

This only happened because they did the colossally stupid thing of letting really smart robots make lots of stupid robots. I believe there's also the implication that Talon or whatever big evil organization that Talon is a part of engineered the whole crisis so people wouldn't trust robots.

>more loyal than robots

I kinda doubt that. Slaves for the most part resent their masters.

True, but you could argue that if you don't automate the process of building robots, you'd need to get people to build them. And no one wants to work!
Also I think that god programs weren't full-scale sentient AI at first, and it took years for them to evolve. I definitely agree that Talon/that Eye organization are involved in this.

Slaves are cheaper.

Consider self replicating robots.
They would need several other materials to replicate themselves but would do it faster.

Slaves can self replicate if you have a handful of them and they wouldn't need more than their current supply of food, although they would need a lot of time to get the child ready for work.

Because societies aren't organized around maximizing efficient use of material and distributing labour evenly.

They have a religious duty to enslave the weak.

Pleasure slaves, and working in areas that are for one reason or another inimical to mechanical systems.

Our society is heavily automated now, but there are still fields where we need a great deal of human labour to perform given tasks. Slaves would just fill the roles that, these days, are unskilled or dangerous.

Why not have dumb robots doing repetitive/hard labour and then slaves supervising things?

You need materials and fuel/energy to make and maintain robots
You need food/shelter to accomodate slaves.

The problem of ressource is the same, with the difference that you can quickly increase your capacity to fabricate new robots... while the growth rate of your slave population is limited by biology.

How long does it take to build the factory that makes the car, the steel mills that make the metal for the cars, the iron mines that feed the steel mills, and the electricity and gasoline to run all of that?

Slaves, however, make more slaves. Just add food and a place to fuck.

Or just cram some into brainbox and call it smartbot.

Medical testing.

It would cost more to educate slaves in robotics and administration. It's more economical to make a whipbot that can service hundreds of slaves and managebot that can electrocute hundreds of whipbots.

>more loyal than robots
Just how bad at programming are these people, anyway?

Robots can be hacked, but slaves can be bribed or threatened, and are also capable of hating you or placing their interests above yours. Robots have repair costs, but slaves have medical costs. There aren't very many jobs where a slave would have a higher productivity than a robot, so the economic case would have to boil down to "slaves are very, very cheap." I think you have to invoke something well outside of economic considerations in order to come up with a reason for a technologically advanced society to practice slavery; I can't come up with anything better than the hypothesized intelligent species which needs masters to survive.

Psychology is a sonnuvabitch, and abusing people is far easier than programming machines. Depending on scale, the odds of a slave going Django to devastating effect are probably favorable to a full blown skynet scenario.

As a status symbol perhaps?

>I will base my society upon intelligent slaves
>what do you mean, an uprising made them turn hostile?
>I will base my society upon unintelligent slaves
>what do you mean, that rival faction used gas?

>Trandoshans
>Advanced
Pick one

>It takes 9 months to build a slave and even then they are mostly useless for the next 12 years
Not when you conquer a planet with 7 billion of them lying around, maybe 4 billion in good working order if you want to get technical.

I don't know how to build or program a robot but i could kidnap and psychologically break a person: very quickly.I doubt building a robot would get me hard either.

>doesn't get hard building robots
get out

They wouldn't. If robots exist to do manual labor, than slaves are functionally obsolete

Subpro (Co-creator of the Headhunter with Incom) is actually a Trandoshan company.

Huh. Well how about that. I thought trandoshans were basically only good for no brained muscle work.

>flesh and blood slaves cannot be hacked
No, they can just be convinced, blackmailed, enraged, bribed, or otherwise subverted in countless ways. Think before you post.

They were pretty cheap back in the day. The Spanish didn't even bother improving working conditions or do more than basic care for their slaves in the Americas because it was cheaper to just bring more in.

>What is a Jedi mind trick?

Genetically engineered slave species. Engineered to be incredibly loyal, intelligent enough for whatever role its meant to fill, strong, hardy, or whatever trait you could want.
It's not like the only slaves ever can be humans.

Because Trandoshans in particular were assholes and had a culture of slaving and hunting intelligent beings. They did it for ritual and cultural reasons, not practical reasons.

>Just make more arkanian offshoots! That didn't go poorly at all!

>more loyal than robots
>cheaper

A robot will do literally anything you tell it to so long as you can tell it in the right way.

A slave will do what you tell it to only if you threaten it with physical violence. An injured slave cannot work, either, so your threats must be carried out rather creatively if you want them to stick. Slaves also resent and inevitably work to impede the work of their master. They require constant surveillance, upkeep, and maintenance.

Robots only cost as much as power and maintenance do, which in a futuristic society should both conceivably be nil. If you can power a starship you can easily power a slightly more complicated toaster.

Slaves require food, tools, clothing, shelter, and medical care, which are all drastically more expensive in the long term than anything you'd need for SlavBot.

There is no practical benefit to choosing a human slave over a mechanical one.

>contrived scifi conflict plots will always happen in real life
>service robots and species will always rebel! always!

>Expecting star wars tropes to continue to apply in star wars.
Yes, and?

Depends on the form of slavery to be honest, the modern idea of slavery is one of the most cruel and barbaric forms historically.

What do you mean with modern idea of slavery?

Shh, he's a critical race theorist.

Slavery was actually an amazing social experiment practiced by the hyper-advanced Africans, and was in no way exploitative of anyone in any way until white people started doing it.

Just let him have this one.

Chattel slavery, I think. Not really that modern.

I can think of only two reasons. One is that the living beings you enslave are already there, you'd to build the robots. Two is that the robots might not be designed for the task you have in mind and you lack the ability to build the right kind of robot.

If the local infrastructure does not support automation, manual labor is required instead.

Depending on where you are, it might very well be cheaper and easier to house and feed a dozen slaves than power, repair and program a single robot or droid.

Presumably chattel slavery as practiced in the Americas as part of the Atlantic Triangle, with the possible addition of the Spanish efforts on Hispaniola and in their colonial possessions on the southern continent.

That shit would offend the Romans of the Principiate, for instance.

Robots are forbidden by Butlerian Jihad. Thou shall not make machine in semblance of man.

You don't need be people to build robots. Only supervise how one type of robots builds other types of robots and make occasional repairs on a conveyor line.

Yes, and then you need to train them. Build factories that will produce tools for them. Allow them access to high tech tools.

And pray that they won't try to build some guns instead of what you want them to build.

>That shit would offend the Romans of the Principiate, for instance.

Yeah, much better to make them fight to death for your amusement.

The spaniards were among the most brutal slaveholder in history.

It's the Law.

If you go with the slave rules the Jews had to follow, they're way more palatable and you can use the words 'indentured servitude' with a straight face. They had rights, privileges, and terms on their servitude, so they could still come out of it. Going all brutal on them would cost you in the eyes of the public, the law, and God.

This shit where people think we don't have slaves now because we have robots is hilarious.

An advanced society that is faced with the choice to either use slaves or robots DOESN'T use slaves. That's it. Slaves cannot possibly be better than robots.
A culture that doesn't get the choices, maybe because robots are heretics, maybe because you want to keep your defeated foes as slaves, will perhaps use them. But one major question that should be asked then, is, how would a civilizations that doesn't have robots stay competitive against civilizations that do?

Anyway I've noted that so far everyone who argued for "slaves are best" pointed out a completely made-up flaw to robots and ignored the much more obvious and costly flaws that come with fleshy slaves.

*Most* gladiators were actually free men, AND very few of them actually died, from what I recall in classical studies.

More like dangerous pro wrestling than dog fights.

All right, everyone, before you continue operating on the assumption that all slavery functioned the way that it did in the Americas, please look up slavery in ancient Rome as well as the Ottoman Janissaries.

>Searching...
>Answer formulated.
>The cluster census of 3071 shows that when a world reaches aproximately five million sophonts, it includes the necessary industrial and technological infrastructure to achieve core-world levels of automatization within 23 standard years.
>However, this is an average compiled from the data of 281.432 clades spread around 1292 star systems. Individual cases may present substantial deviation.
>Despite achieving industrial sovereignancy, the Gracchi Colony still employs great numbers of slave labor. Estimations range from 1.25576 to 3.04250 slaves for every citizen. The cause is mainly a developmental sinergy outside planned parameters: the romani memeplex starter pack and an unregistered hider enclave, leading to almost total enslavement of the illegals and sociopolitical reorganization into a "Neo Res Publica".

>of course a robot can do that without being a strong AI
You need a dedicated robot to do that; it's called a fire alarm. And that's just for one emergency. You going to get a robot just in case there's a flood, too?

You can't psionically control a robot, but you can use a slave to hit the controls for you.

Use both, of course.

Based on the level of wages and tax on wages living workers can well be cheaper than robots.

Source: chinese manufacturing, however let's just say the standard of living for a chinese worker is very low. As in so bad they need anti-suicide nets in some areas (like apple factories). They also force their employs to sign an anti-suicide pledge. Break it and they can fire & sue you.

Does that sound like something close to slavery? It sure does to me.

Ideology, cultural inertia, differences in technological capability.

It's sure looking like we'll be able to make a Genejack long before we can make a reasonably strong GAI whose behavior we can keep safe/pro-human in this timeline as it is.

A few possible reasons
1) Men of Iron / Skynet happened in the past. Any machine more complicated than modern automobile assembly line is heresy.

2) Comstar / Word of Blake style monopoly. Works best in a post Golden Age setting. One faction has a solid monopoly on robots and keeps prices high. The uber rich can afford bots but lesser nobles must make do with living slaves.

3) Why not both? Robots are used for hard labor but fleshy servants are used wherever a smile and customer service are desired. That darn uncanny valley is hard to get past.

4) Pacifist Masters: Young upstart human race just takes to the stars and starts nuking the shit out of other races. Your settings Vorlons/Culture/Ancients need to stop them but refuse to commit genocide. So a few generations of slavery should act as a good time out while they mature as a species.

>Spanish
>Slave
Every fucking time.
Go suck a negro dick you heretic anglo.