Those biorobots are limited to what a human is able to do. A Roman slave can only lift as much as the strongest human. A forklift can lift far greater weights, a printing press can make far more copies than an army of scribes could produce. their economic conditions and culture had them stuck in a local maxima, but what a maxima it was. What are we currently stuck in a local maxima because we're hamstrung by economic conditions and our culture? housing and zoning seems to be a big one.

> Those biorobotics are limited to what a human is able to do

Well humans are and were able to use tools to multiply their strength so this isn’t really the limitation that could be inferred by the position and wording of this statement

I wouldn't say we are stuck in a local maxima. The world has developed intensenly over the past decade, and particularly over the past 30 years with the internet and widespread computing moving things along.

You can feel just how fast we are moving monthly.

In the US, life expectancy has plateaued and wages are roughly the same as 50 years ago for people without a college degree. Internet and wide spread computing have caused one of the largest increases in mental health problems since we’ve been tracking such things.

Progress in terms of actual improvements to human lives has been very limited.

We are progressing just in which direction I don’t know

If we evolve into Eloi and Morlocks, I want a time machine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morlock

It hasn’t, it just mostly hasn’t been in the industrialised world. China, India, Vietnam and many other countries have seen tremendous advances in development in the last couple decades.

Good point, I was just talking about the US.

Those are political outcomes. They're the result of deliberate choices by people and enacted by policies.

Yes, that's why scientific and technical advancements alone are insufficient for progress. It's necessary to have the right cultural and political systems in place to benefit from those advancements as well.

Why do you extrapolate the situation of the US to the world? I want to understand your USDefaultism.

I live in the US. No, this doesn't apply to the whole world.

it's undeniable there have been vast advancements in recent times, but thinking that we can't possibly be in a local maxima in any area seems like plain hubris.

At one point the senate had plans to make slaves special clothing to distinguish them, but then dropped the idea because if the slaves saw how they outnumbered their masters they might revolt.

(Seneca, Of clemency)

https://spartacus-educational.com/ROMslaves.htm

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23232665

Wage slaves are an upgrade on slaves because they have reduced rates of escape and revolt.

Wage slaves revolt by starting companies themselves. That is productive and helps society unlike violent revolutions,

How out of touch must you be to believe that a wage slave can start a company? With which initial capital?

> Until Christianization slowly eradicated the institution of slavery,

Or the Empire couldn’t expand anymore, so there weren’t any more slaves from conquered peoples.

Roman slavery was hereditary. I’m not a Christian apologist, but it is true that the christianization of Rome introduced laws that made it relatively easier for slaves to become freed, such that the birth replacement rate was insufficient. And aa you note, there weren’t other sources of slaves available. Eventually the number of slaves was too small to be economically meaningful.

There are more civilizations in human history that had slavery than the ones who did not. So slaves can not be the differentiating factor in what the Romans achieved.

It's not an accurate claim either.

Agreed. There's nothing inherent about slaves that is more efficient than paid laborers. It's just cost and time. It can look incredible that the Romans built these huge structures, but the timescales were measured in decades. Same with cathedrals in the middle ages. If you've got 200 years to build something you can really do a great job.

> Until Christianization slowly eradicated the institution of slavery

That didn't really start until the eighteenth century though, did it?

Even then Christian god fearing slave owners continued running plantations in the Americas either directly or more indirectly (if British) for some time.

Why Did So Many Christians Support Slavery?

~ Key reasons advanced by southern church leaders

https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-33/wh...

https://archive.md/EdOQ6

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_slavery

There practically were no slaves in europe in the middle age.

Rich people might have a couple, but in the middle age slave labour was negligible.

    In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period (also spelt mediaeval or mediæval) lasted approximately from 500 AD to 1500 

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages

   Slavery in medieval Europe was widespread. Europe and North Africa were part of a highly interconnected trade network across the Mediterranean Sea, and this included slave trading. During the medieval period (500–1500), wartime captives were commonly forced into slavery.

    About ten percent of England’s population entered in the Domesday Book (1086) were slaves, despite chattel slavery of English Christians being nominally discontinued after the 1066 conquest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_medieval_Europe

Rebranding "slaves" as "serfs" was a smart move, but a Rose still has thorns when called by other names.

Just because:

    The Church prohibited the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands, for example in the Council of Koblenz in 922, the Council of London in 1102, and the Council of Armagh in 1171.

doesn't mean that there were no slaves within Christian lands, it just meant there wasn't a profit to made trading across those borders (for Christian slave merchants) ...

    As a result, most Christian slave merchants focused on moving slaves from non-Christian areas to Muslim Spain, North Africa, and the Middle East; and most non-Christian merchants, although not bound by the Church’s rules, focused on Muslim markets as well.

I'm not seeing any support for your "practically no slaves" assertion.

I am reading explicit mention of ongoing Christian slave merchants post Roman Empire .. which goes to my point that aside from rebranding and cross border regulation the post Roman Christians took a long long time to outright ban slavery.

I'm not seeing any support for "it was full of slaves everywhere" either…

So ... no support for an assertion I did not make? That seems .. random.

But a contradiction of the claim that you made?

    Common knowledge would have it that slavery did not exist in medieval Europe.

    However, there is a thriving body of scholarship which demonstrates that slavery was practiced widely in various forms in Europe during the Middle Ages, alongside captivity, serfdom, and other types of unfreedom. 

    [ What "common knowledge" claims, where that came from, ... ] 

    Yet into the 14th and 15th centuries, medieval Europeans continued to own slaves, trade in slaves, and enslave each other as well as non-European others. They used slaves for agricultural and artisanal labor as well as domestic, sexual, reproductive, and military service

https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-97...

( from an assistant professor of history whose research interests covers practices of slavery in the medieval Mediterranean, particularly the slave trade from the Black Sea to the markets of Cairo, Genoa and Venice during the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. )

With references for you to read should you wish.

I didn't claim it didn't exist. I claimed it was not widespread at all.

I just checked a map of Europe - from Dublin to Venice appears to be widespread.

You're aware that entire cities in Europe were considered hubs of the slave trade during the period in question?

Worth checking out.

What do you think a serf was?

Someone whose day to day existence was mostly under their own control, so long as they stayed tied to the land and produced. Both slavery and serfdom are terrible, but they are not the same.

From the perspective of industry though, serfdom is a purely agricultural institution.

Not a slave.

They couldn't be sold. They had rights. In general the classic school hierarchy of emperor, vassals, valvassori (dunno in english), valvassini (also don't know in english), serfs has been debunked.

This is straight up incorrect. Only 20-30% of the population of Rome was enslaved, and most of those were agricultural laborers.

That doesn’t contradict what I wrote.

Slavery didn't ended in Rome or Europe because of Christianization. Some 5%-25% of inhabitants surveyed during the Domesday Book census of 1086 were slaves in the thoroughly Christianized British Isles. It took a Pope to mostly end Christian slavery of other Christians but of course the enslavement of non-Christians expanded to fill that vacuum for slaves that Christian Europe didn't seem to be able to shake. Christianity even provided a moral and ethical framework for these religious slavers to justify their enslavement of Africans and Asians and pretty much anyone they could get away with. It's not the only religion with a history that doesn't match its rhetoric but I suppose I'm not responding to a post making claims about those.

Wow, you’ve got a bone to pick.

Look, the early Christian emperors passed laws making it easier to free slaves, and harder to maintain or punish slaves, citing biblical commandments. That’s a fact and you can look it up. That’s all I was talking about.

Idk lots of civilizations had slaves (I almost wrote ancient, but slavery didn’t go away until less than 200 years ago, and human trafficking is still a big issue). But compare Rome with say the Spartans, who had an insanely big slave class, but who didn’t produce the same types of things as Rome.