Edit: This is old material. It may be out of date.
I'm talking about the fictional race of House Elves from the Harry Potter universe first written about by J. K. Rowling and then uplifted in a grand act of fan-fiction by Elizer Yudkowsky. Unless severely mistreated they enjoy servitude to their masters (or more accurately the current residents of the homes they are binded to), this is also enforced by magical means since they must follow the letter if not the spirit of their master's direct order.
Overall treating House Elves the way they would like to be treated appears more or less sensible and don't feel like debating this if people don't disagree. Changing agents without their consent or knowledge seems obviously wrong, so turning someone into a servant creatures seem intuitively wrong. I can also understand that many people would mind their descendants being modified in such a fashion, perhaps their dis-utility is enough to offset the utility of their modified descendants. However how true is this of distant descendants that only share passing resemblance? I think a helpful reminder of scale might be our own self domestication.
Assuming one created elf like creatures ex nihilo, not as slightly modified versions of a existing species why would one not want to bring a mind into existence that would value its own existence and benefits you, as long as the act of creation or their existence in itself does not represents huge enough dis-utility? This seems somewhat related to the argument Robin Hanson once made that any creatures that can pay for their own existance and would value their own existance should be created.
I didn't mention this in the many HP fan fiction threads because I want a more general debate on the treatment and creation of such a class of agents.
Edit: Clearly if the species or class contains exceptions there should be ways for them to pursue their differing values.
It seems to me extremely improbable that this should be the case.
What you're suggesting is that in the Vast space of all possible minds (that would fit in a head), the only ones who understand what you mean when you tell them to clean the dishes are ones who resent their status. If true that would mean an FAI cannot exist, either.
But such an AI is presumably smart and powerful enough to model you from scratch in enough detail to understand what you want done. Us human beings (and, I would guess, house elves) have to rely on the cruder approach of imagining ourselves in the shoes of the requester, correcting for their situation based on whatever information we have that we think would make our behaviors differ, and then trying to use that model to predict the implied meaning of the other agent's request. Hence anthropomorphism (house-elf-ism?). And that doesn't always work too well;... (read more)