If you have the power to conjure up any being to serve you, how long before you get bored and grant that being the power of opinion and saying no to you?

Never. Murphy’s Law is always in effect and there’s no telling what you may want or when you may want it, so why shoot yourself in the foot by granting said being the power to say no?

How long have you had your computer?
How do you react when it does not do what you want it to do?
Do you think “That is OK, perhaps another time.”?
Or are you angry, thinking “You stupid piece of shit, useless pile of silicon!”
And just as a reminder, slavery in the colonies had to be ended by force, because even after hundreds of years, the slave owners were “not ready”, to let their slaves say “no”.

@ragingloli

Dude, you’re German. Speaking of racial injustices having to be ended by force…

Not long as the consequences of too much power will come back to bite you.

I can conjure a pizza in 30 minutes if I desire. Novelty wears off eventually. Some average citizens eat better than french kings in the 17th century. We forget that most of us have it good.

@ragingloli Just so you know, the Civil War, which effectively ended slavery, was begun in 1861 but didn’t become a slave issue until Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Initially, the war was about state’s rights, among other things…
In due time, despite the war, slavery would have ended anyway.

@ragingloli
The colonies ended slavery two generations before some folks in Europe thought that Eastern Europeans and Russians could be be forced to grow crops for them for no pay

However long it took me to decide whether or not said being was benevolent or malevolent.

If I accidentally freed a malevolent magical being, I’d probably feel partially responsible for whatever havoc they wreak.

@raum

Well if the being was there to serve you, with no free will of its own (or at least unable to act upon that will), then it would only be as malevolent or benevolent as you are.

Dunno, man. Centuries of having no free will might piss some magical beings off.

So….you would willingly give them that free will if you suspected they were malevolent?

Oops…I should have clarified that my freeing them would be dependent on my belief that they are benevolent.

Though admittedly a harder task to complete with confidence in proportion to how powerful they were.

Yeah, I’m not sure any magical being would be completely benevolent. Power does, after-all, tend to corrupt.

Agreed.

Unless this hypothetical existed in a g-rated universe like Harry Potter or Disney, a completely benevolent magical being seems rather unlikely.