Technological Slavery: Enhanced Edition: 1

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You’ve written a lot about empathy and how these technologies are making it harder for us to be empathic. I wonder if you think they’re encouraging us to treat other people as objects or as actors in our own personal drama. As you say, we’re always living through our screens, always performing, always projecting our image and our story. Sherry Turkle By way of illumination, compare the two-million-year lifetime of humanity with a 50-year-old man. Humans have been non-hunter-gatherers—that is, farm-, village- or city-dwellers—for only the past 10,000 years; this so-called civilized portion of history represents a mere 0.5% of our species’ lifetime. On a scale of 50 years, then, this ‘modern’ existence corresponds to just three months. The UNFPA-UNICEF Global Programme to Accelerate Action to End Child Marriage promotes the rights of adolescent girls to avert marriage and pregnancy and enables them to achieve their aspirations through education and alternative pathways. A key peremptory norm of general international law, the prohibition of slavery is entrenched in various instruments. It is incumbent of every country to take measures to ensure that forms of slavery do not persist within its territory. The 1998 Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court also lists enslavement as one of the crimes against humanity within the jurisdiction of the Court. [5]

The 1926 Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery (the Slavery Convention) defines slavery as the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised. [1] This definition was expounded in 1957 through a Supplementary Convention [2] that extended the legal scope of the Slavery Convention in relation to other international frameworks. It recognized that slavery, the slave trade, and similar institutions and practices prevailed in all parts of the world. Gradual abolition of slavery took place over hundreds of years, from the early 1800s with the United Kingdom and the United States and the abolishment peaking in 1807 and 1808, respectively. [3] Theoretically, slavery was completely abolished in 1981 , when Mauritania became the last country to outlaw forced labour. [4] This book was never intended to be a biography, but it is worth recalling a few basic facts of Kaczynski’s life story. He was born in Chicago on May 22, 1942. From his early childhood it was clear that he was an academic standout, and he excelled at school. Skipping two grades, he left high school for Harvard at age 16. By 1962, at age 20, Kaczynski had completed his Bachelor's degree in mathematics. He headed to graduate school at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where, over the next five years, he earned Master's and PhD degrees in math. In 1967 he acquired a teaching job at the prestigious University of California at Berkeley; it was a position he held for just two years. By 1971 he had decided to buy some land near Lincoln, Montana and make a homestead there. He worked odd jobs and was periodically seen in nearby towns, but by and large kept to himself. Then we turn him loose. We give him a few dollars, a small home in the suburbs, dress him up in a suit and a tie, and say, “Have a good life.”“Be a good citizen,” we say; “and don't do anything wrong. But don't worry, you'll adapt—we did!” According to The Global Slavery Index, government response to Modern Slavery varies widely. Countries like the Netherlands, UK, and USA takes the issue very seriously. Reuters (2019) CHRONOLOGY-Who banned slavery when? Available at https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-slavery/chronology-who-banned-slavery-when-idUSL1561464920070322

Where (as today) problems of transportation and communication do not constitute effective limitations on the size of the geographical regions over which self-propagating systems operate, natural selection tends to create a world in which power is mostly concentrated in the possession of a relatively small number of global self-propagating systems. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine.

What is the present state of affairs? (in terms of human stress and indignity, environmental damage, etc).How bad are things at the moment? Also, science and technology constitute a power mass movement, and many scientists gratify their need for power through identification with this mass movement. Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research. Just then came a major turning point in my life. Like a Phoenix, I burst from the ashes of my despair to a glorious new hope. I thought I wanted to kill that psychiatrist because the future looked utterly empty to me. I felt I wouldn't care if I died. And so I said to myself why not really kill the psychiatrist and anyone else whom I hate.… I will kill, but I will make at least some effort to avoid detection so that I can kill again.Under different circumstances, we might never have heard from Kaczynski again. But this was not to be. In one of his letters to me, he recounted how both recreationists and the forest service continually pressed in on him—to the point where a peaceful life was no longer possible. This invasion constituted a kind of war, and Kaczynski began to defend himself.