Morning Must-Read: Aristotle: Slavery or Technology? From “Politics”

…the means of procuring them must certainly be part of household management, for without the material necessities it is impossible to live, let alone live well. All the arts share the property that the proper tools must be available if they are to be properly proper conducted. So is it in the art of managing a family. Now of tools, some of them are alive and others are not. With respect to the pilot of the ship, the tiller is not alive, the sailor is alive. In many arts the necessary tools include servants. Property in general is a tool for living. An estate is a collection of such tools. And a slave is a living tool. A tool that can take care of its own self is a more valuable one than any other tool. Suppose if every tool could, at command, or from discerning its owner’s desires, carry out its tasks (as the story goes of the automatons of Daedalus; or what the poet tells us of the serving-carts of Vulcan, ‘that they rolled of their own will into the gathering of the gods’), so that the shuttle would then weave and the lyre play of itself. Then the architect would not want living servants, or the owner want living slaves…