Elon Musk has predicted that AI will prevent anyone needing to work and will raise worldwide incomes at the same time. But will it rustle up a quick lamprey à la Bordelaise at a minute’s notice, to be washed down with a vintage Ch. Bruce Anderson? Greek comic poets had far more satisfying fantasies.
Perhaps encouraged by philosophers like Plato who dreamed up visions of past times when, for example, birds and animals were tame and conversed happily with men on a wide range of topics, comedians took to constructing a fantasy derived from the almost universal ownership of slaves; the point being that, although slaves should do everything you wanted, they were so devious, incompetent or simply lazy that there was no guarantee anything would be done properly, or indeed at all.
So the comic fantasy comprised a golden age without slaves, when everything was done for everyone automatos (good Greek word), to perfection, no human effort required.
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