There is also the issue that many ex-indentures might not at all be unhappy with how things turned out. While the writeups in the books like to play up how awful is to be indenture for dramatic and perhaps ideological reasons, things are likely more mixed. People do adapt to fairly bad jobs and soon find something to enjoy, employers want adequately happy employees, and from a company perspective it would be great if people would want to stay after their contract is over (they have the right skills, their performance is known and they have a social network in the organisation). There is of course a sweatshop issue for some jobs where there is no reason not to use captive indentures to their fullest, since they will anyway run away at the first legal opportunity. But unhappy employees are ineffective employees in most modern jobs: it only works if you can handle lack of motivation. So these job would need skills or skill-levels (40+) not found in AIs (who are by definition motivated and loyal). But most high-level skills tend to rely on creativity and initiative. So they are in a relatively thin economic niche that is strongly affected by how good AI is and whether there are good ways of actually motivate the indentures. From an economic perspective the post-Fall situation consisted of a situation where the cost of labour went down a lot due to indenture (and due to the peculiarities of the Fall, this was largely highly skilled labour with good human capital). This was good for the reconstruction: without it transhumanity would not have recovered as well as it has in 10 AF, since there would not have been enough capital to actually do much. The problem with indenture coming to an end is rather that the cost of labour will be going up. This in turn means that places that can keep it down, for example nasty triad slavery rings or banyan copyrations filled with forks, will become more economically competitive and start grabbing a bigger part of the market. Maybe people will look back on the good old days soon...

Hypercorps can also do what they have probably become good at (corporations having lots of practice at this) and play one labor group against another. So you could have segments of the infomorph community being turned against the other, or AGI being used also to make labor markets 'competitive'. Squeeze lower wages or longer contracts out of infomorph with the threats of AGI replacements is one simple approach.

what could be interesting is a tournament between hypercorps endentured workers Part-Tekken (the semi-big budget flick for the corporate ads and product placement) part-Hunger Games (for the mendatory aspect of the game. if you're chosen, you play, but there's huge award for the surviv...I mean the winner) and part-Running Man (for being completely rigged). Romans had the gladiators, hyperelites...have them too!

It depends on the level of skill the task needed. Anything at around a skill of 40 can be done by any LAI programmed for that purpose, or by anyone with the proper skillsoft.

What, so they can then wreck it and use the flats as slave labor when the indentures run out?

Yes, well, Walmart can't reprogram its employees. Just something to ponder.

root@Indenture vs Banyan: Round Over 9,000 [hr]

Unity wrote:

You know what would be even worse? A banyan copyration that also made use of AIs and infomorph slave colonies in limited-access servers. The infomorphs would be motivated with psychosurgery. Because we are certainly not one of those.

And certainly not one that would cough up the extra rep and cash needed to afford qbit reservoirs as distributed cache memory. Nope. Not here. That sort of thing might attract the attention of Sarah Connor types, and the usually come in packing heat. As for the indenture service and the ethics of labor, there is the question of when it is ethical to push indenture motivation. There is also the question of "copy rights": are the indentures allowed to keep backups on the company dollar? If not, they are utterly powerless in negotiations against an immortal collective once they've signed on the dotted line.

root@Indentured [hr]

Unity wrote:

That is the point, yes.

I thought the point was whether that was a sustainable business practice or not. It isn't ethical, but it has been a very common tactic since forever. The only difference Eclipse Phase offers up is the employees being immortal, so in theory they will all work their way through their indenture period and the practice will end. I'm saying this isn't the case, since an indenture with no copy rights has to survive their indenture period to benefit, else the employer just reloads the original fork and starts the indenture period over again. The employer wouldn't even need to actively murder their indentured servants, as the probability of an un-copied morph surviving working conditions in any of the horribly dangerous places they tend to work drops asymptotically towards zero over any decent period of time. The sustainability of the indenture system for the employer comes from the Sisyphean task that is surviving an indenture period.

I agree the indenture system is unsutainable, by different reason -- advance in AI technology. With advance in AI technology, week AI labors will be more capable, less expensive and more reliable. And as older the Fall become, less fear people will have toward AIs. So why use indendures? Even in AF 10, one-year service by human costs Expensive, while a week AI(costs High) will serve forever. And anyone more capable than AIs have bought back themselve already, so remained intendures are less capable than AIs. Personally, I think hypercorps and other factions with infugee resource won't offer new indenture contracts no longer. If current indentures finish their work/die/flee, AIs will take over the work.

clockworkjoe wrote:

I think AI technology in EP won't advance much more than it is now. It seems they're at the threshold where they go from equivalent to humans in terms of capability to seed AIs. If you push them any farther they become too powerful to enslave.

AI motivations can be *weird*. Just consider how many humans enjoy certain forms of slavery or do things out of passionate love for somebody else. AIs can be made to have these traits by default. The slave AI might know how to transcend but will not do it unless Master orders it to. The problem is of course that such powerful systems can still be very dangerous even without rebelling. A digital jealousy equivalent might make the butlerbot set untraceable events in motion to 'protect' its owner from bad company, driving away the friends it estimates are going to have a negative impact through accidents, distrations or changed opinions about their former friend. There is also plenty of reason to work on limited but very skilled AI. Better pilot AI, miner AI or research AI might still be possible without full intelligence or agency, and would be economically profitable.

In any case, when have you known large organizations to actually consider the ramifications of their actions beyond 30-50 years? The people here may be immortal superbeings but they still have human minds with all of the shortsightedness and greed that comes with that. I would concede that there is probably a cadre of advisers clucking their collective tongues and telling the upper management that this will all turn out badly. I maintain that there is also an immortal paper-pushing bureaucrat who has shaved just a tiny bit off of the expense column in a report by employing yet another unskilled indentured contract worker from the seemingless endless pool of same.

clockworkjoe wrote:

The real danger comes from a slave AI that decides the best way to serve 'master' is to upgrade itself and becomes TITAN 2.0. At least that's what the EP policymakers are worried about so they won't okay improved slave AI research. So right now, limited AIs are equal to muses at best so they have limited functionality when compared to a full person or AGI. Improving limited AIs has a lot of risk - both practical and political.

All right, you've made your point. So I agree improvement in general ability will be unlikely. Though someone might figure they can handle it and try, let's aside such X-risk. But how about improvement in limited abilities(like Arenamontanus says) or cost? Those improvement won't make seed AIs or AGIs.

clockworkjoe wrote:

Real people and human equivalent AGIs are unpredictable - they silly things like money, rep, civil rights, freedom etc. This raises the cost of using them. Forcing them to work for low/no wages as indentures causes resentment/lower productivity.

Citizens(whether they are human or AGI) earn some payment and intendures work at little payment, but limited AIs work at even cheaper cost. Even if advanced but limited AIs cost more, they will be still more cost-efficiency than intendures. If some high-end AIs need more cost than intendures and you don't like it, you can have less expencive ones.

clockworkjoe wrote:

The real lesson is that there's no such thing as a free lunch. I think the comments about humans being poor long term planners is spot on. An EP game set +20-100 years AF would be interesting - a new civil war fought over indentures is a real possibility. Imagine exoplanets run by indentures declaring Independence or a full blown revolt on Mars.

I think the whole intendure infugee trend has happened because it was at AF 0. I mean, I figure AIs at 10 years ago are less capable, more expensive and less trustworthy than AIs at "today" or unskilled infugees. So there has been some merit to employ intendures.