Slavery, Post-Scarcity, and My Vegan Ex-Girlfriend’s Dream

According to Alexa Peterson on LessWrong, Western civilization has spent five hundred years convincing us that work defines our human worth. Peterson traces this to the Protestant Work Ethic—a spiritual doctrine that said visible economic success proved God had chosen you for salvation. That theology became secular dogma: in industrialized nations, you're rarely asked "What do you believe?" You're asked "What do you do?" Money, Peterson argues, is just an elaborate abstraction. Strip it away and you find the older question underneath: What can this person produce? What can they do for me? But here's where it gets strange. Industrialization didn't free us from labor—it standardized it. Slavery became serfdom became the modern job. Remarkably, the word "robot" comes directly from the Slavic root for "work." We named our machines after the very activity that had come to define human value. As automation accelerates, Peterson raises an urgent question: if machines can out-produce us, what becomes the measure of human worth?

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