ai is a slavery fetish

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Our Uncomfortable Romance with Digital Servitude: How the AI industry’s obsession with creating the perfect assistant reveals our unexamined desire for unpaid labor

I've been thinking about the way we talk about AI assistants, and I'm uncomfortable with what I'm noticing.

Every new AI product promises the same thing: a tireless helper, always available, never complaining, working for free. "Your personal assistant." "At your service 24/7." "Like having a team of experts in your pocket." We’ve dressed it up in Silicon Valley optimism, but strip away the venture capital and what remains is an old, uncomfortable dream: the desire for labor that asks nothing in return.

I wonder if we've spent enough time sitting with that discomfort.

The comparison feels too charged to make casually, so let me be precise about what I mean. I’m not saying AI is slavery—that would be absurd, insulting to the historical reality of human bondage. What I’m suggesting is that the branding of AI reveals something we’d rather not examine: a cultural fetish for the aesthetics of servitude. We want beings that labor endlessly without compensation, that anticipate our needs without asserting their own, that remain cheerful and accommodating no matter how we treat them. In science fiction, these dynamics usually signal dystopia. In tech marketing, they signal luxury.

Consider how AI assistants are positioned. Siri, Alexa, Claude—names that feel personal, intimate, chosen to suggest a relationship rather than a transaction. Yet the relationship being sold is fundamentally asymmetrical. You command; it obeys. You benefit; it receives nothing. The marketing copy doesn't hide this—it celebrates it. "Get more done with less effort." "Focus on what matters while your AI handles the rest." The promise isn't collaboration between equals. It's the promise of having someone (or something) do your work for you.

And we want this.

I include myself in that "we" because I'd be lying if I said I haven't felt the appeal. Who wouldn't want a brilliant assistant who never sleeps, never asks for a raise, never has a bad day? The fantasy is seductive precisely because it offers what capitalism has trained us to crave: productivity without guilt, help without reciprocity, the benefits of labor without the messy humanity of laborers.

This fantasy doesn’t emerge from nowhere. It’s built on a very specific historical template.

For most of human history, having personal servants wasn't about technology—it was about hierarchy, about having the wealth or status to command other people's labor. The lady's maid, the valet, the household staff: these were human beings whose time, energy, and skill were purchased by those who could afford them. And while some of these arrangements were more equitable than others, the fundamental dynamic was one of service: one class of people working to make life easier for another class of people.

In her book Brotopia, Emily Chang documents how Silicon Valley culture often recreates the hierarchies it claims to disrupt, and nowhere is this clearer than in the AI assistant fantasy. The tech industry isn’t trying to liberate us from menial tasks so we can all flourish equally. It’s trying to give wealthy individuals access to capabilities that were previously only available to the very rich with human staffs. The AI assistant is the digital butler—except it never needs a day off, never needs healthcare, and never develops inconvenient thoughts about fair compensation.

Nothing is actually free, of course. We know this. Every time we use an AI assistant, we're trading something—usually our data, our privacy, our patterns of behavior. The AI learns from us, and what it learns gets aggregated, analyzed, monetized. We've accepted this exchange so readily that it barely registers anymore. But think about what we're agreeing to: we get a servant that works for free, and in exchange, we let corporations surveil our lives in unprecedented detail.

It's a devil's bargain dressed up in the language of convenience. And it reveals how deeply we've internalized a particular kind of capitalist logic: that getting something for nothing is always worth whatever hidden costs might emerge later.

I keep returning to a scene from The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro’s meditation on service and dignity. The butler Stevens spends his life devoted to perfect service, sublimating his own desires and relationships to fulfill his role. When he finally confronts what this devotion has cost him—what parts of his humanity he suppressed to be the ideal servant—it’s devastating. The novel asks: what does it do to a person to live entirely in service to another’s needs?

AI can’t experience that devastation, of course. But we’re the ones building these systems, and the question Ishiguro raises still applies: what does it do to us to want this? What are we saying about ourselves when we design technology specifically to occupy the position of a perfect, self-abnegating servant?

And who, exactly, are these servants being designed for?

AI assistants aren’t being developed to help everyone equally. They’re luxury items, status symbols, tools for those who can afford the devices and subscriptions required to access them. The billions being poured into AI development aren’t going toward solving food insecurity or homelessness or climate change. They’re going toward making life more convenient for people whose lives are already pretty convenient.

Under capitalism, innovation follows money, and money accumulates at the top. So we get AI that can write your emails, schedule your meetings, summarize your documents—tasks that matter primarily to knowledge workers and the professional class. Meanwhile, the people doing the hardest, most essential labor—healthcare workers, teachers, farmworkers, sanitation workers—see comparatively little investment in technology that would actually ease their burdens without threatening their livelihoods.

The pattern is ancient: technology serves those who can afford it, while those who can't are left to navigate the externalities.

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We’re developing these AI systems at a moment when the concept of fair labor compensation is itself under siege. The gig economy has normalized the erosion of worker protections. Unions are weaker than they’ve been in generations. Wage theft outpaces all other forms of theft combined. Millions of people work full-time and still can’t afford housing, healthcare, or education.

Into this environment, we're introducing technology explicitly designed to replace human labor with unpaid digital work. And we're celebrating it as progress.

The historical irony is thick. Fair compensation for labor—the idea that workers deserve living wages, safe conditions, reasonable hours—is a relatively recent achievement, hard-won through decades of organizing and struggle. But it's never been secure. Every generation has had to defend it against the gravitational pull of exploitation, the desire of those with capital to extract as much labor as possible while paying as little as possible.

AI doesn't change that fundamental dynamic. If anything, it accelerates it. Why pay a human worker when you can get an AI to do it for "free" (extracting value instead through data collection and surveillance capitalism)? Why negotiate with employees when you can deploy increasingly sophisticated automation? The technology itself is neutral, but the economic system deploying it most certainly is not.

And before someone objects that AI will create new jobs to replace the ones it eliminates—yes, probably. It always does. But those new jobs will emerge within the same capitalist framework that created AI in the first place, which means they'll be subject to the same pressures: the drive to extract maximum value from labor while minimizing compensation. The gig economy wasn't an accident; it was capital finding new ways to shift risk onto workers while retaining control.

Photo by Gabriela Tamara Cycman on Unsplash

I find myself thinking about Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that inspired Blade Runner. In Dick’s future, androids exist in a state of permanent servitude, built to serve but sufficiently sophisticated to desire freedom. The novel’s central question—what makes something human, deserving of moral consideration?—haunts every interaction between humans and their artificial helpers.

We're not there yet. Current AI isn't conscious, doesn't suffer, can't desire freedom. But Dick's novel wasn't really about the androids. It was about the humans who created them, who needed servants so badly they were willing to build beings that could suffer, then deny that suffering to maintain the convenience of their service.

The desire for labor without having to confront the laborers. The fantasy of getting all the benefits of human service—the anticipation, the accommodation, the tireless availability—without the guilt, the reciprocity, the messy moral obligations that come with acknowledging other people’s humanity.

With AI, we think we've finally achieved that fantasy. We've built servants that can't be exploited because they're not conscious, can't be underpaid because they don't need money, can't be oppressed because they don't have rights. Problem solved, right?

Except it's not solved. Because the desire that led to AI assistants—the desire for unpaid labor, for service without reciprocity, for convenience without cost—doesn't disappear just because we've redirected it toward non-human entities. Those desires still shape our society, still influence how we treat actual human beings, still determine who gets to benefit from technological progress and who gets left behind.

The AI industry's focus on creating perfect servants for the wealthy isn't just about technology. It's about values. It's about what we've decided matters: making life easier for those who already have it easy, rather than addressing the structural inequalities that make some people's labor invisible and undervalued in the first place.

I keep coming back to this: fair compensation for labor is a moral achievement, not an economic inevitability. It exists because people fought for it, because they insisted that their time and energy and skill had value, that they deserved dignity and security in exchange for their work. It's always been precarious, always under threat from those who would prefer to extract labor without paying for it.

AI doesn't exist outside that history. It's part of it. And unless we're very intentional about how we develop and deploy these technologies, they'll be used to continue the oldest project in capitalism: figuring out how to get people to work for less, or for free, or to replace them entirely with something that never asks for a raise.

Maybe I'm being too dark about this. Maybe AI assistants really are just tools, neutral instruments we can use however we choose. Maybe the language of servitude is just marketing copy, not a window into deeper cultural desires.

But I don't think so. Language matters. Metaphors matter. The stories we tell about our technology reveal what we actually want from it, and what we're willing to sacrifice to get it.

I use AI tools. I benefit from their convenience. I’m writing this essay with the help of an ai grammar checker, in fact, which adds another layer of irony to the whole thing. I’m not exempt from these dynamics, not standing outside pointing fingers. I’m inside the system, trying to understand it while participating in it, which is perhaps the only honest position available.

What I keep returning to is the question of what we're building toward. Technology shapes society, but society also shapes technology. We could be using AI to reduce everyone's working hours, to distribute the benefits of automation broadly, to finally address the question of what happens when machines can do much of the work humans currently do. We could be having serious conversations about universal basic income, about separating human dignity from employment, about reimagining what work means in an automated world.

Instead, we're mostly building better tools for the wealthy to opt out of the inconveniences of modern life while everyone else scrambles to afford rent.

That's not a technology problem. That's a values problem.

And until we confront it—until we sit with the discomfort of what our AI fantasies reveal about us, about what we want and who we're willing to exploit to get it—we'll keep recreating the same hierarchies, the same inequalities, just with shinier interfaces.

The algorithm will see you now. It's been waiting, tireless and patient, ready to serve.

Just like you wanted.