The lesson that I am taking away from AI companies (and their billionaire investors and founders), is that property theft is perfectly fine. Which is a _goofy_ position to have, if you are a billionaire, or even a millionaire. Like, if property theft is perfectly acceptable, and if they own most of the property (intellectual or otherwise), then there can only be _upside_ for less fortunate people like us.
The implicit motto of this class of hyper-wealthy people is: "it's not yours if you cannot keep it". Well, game on.
(There are 56.5e6 millionaires, and 3e3 billionaires -- making them 0.7% of the global population. They are outnumbered 141.6 to 1. And they seem to reside and physically congregate in a handful of places around the world. They probably wouldn't even notice that their property is being stolen, and even if they did, a simple cycle of theft and recovery would probably drive them into debt).
The lesson that I am taking away from AI companies (and their billionaire investors and founders), is that property theft is perfectly fine. Which is a _goofy_ position to have, if you are a billionaire, or even a millionaire. Like, if property theft is perfectly acceptable, and if they own most of the property (intellectual or otherwise), then there can only be _upside_ for less fortunate people like us.
The implicit motto of this class of hyper-wealthy people is: "it's not yours if you cannot keep it". Well, game on.
(There are 56.5e6 millionaires, and 3e3 billionaires -- making them 0.7% of the global population. They are outnumbered 141.6 to 1. And they seem to reside and physically congregate in a handful of places around the world. They probably wouldn't even notice that their property is being stolen, and even if they did, a simple cycle of theft and recovery would probably drive them into debt).
This is not really a contradiction. When the world became bipolar, there was a lot of alpha in arbitrage. The most valuable Yugoslav (state owned) company was Genex, which was an import/export company -- it would import from one bloc and export to the other bloc, because neither bloc wanted to admit that the other bloc had something they needed. (This set the Yugoslavs up for failure, like so many other countries that believed that the global market would make them rich).
The Soviets and their satellites (like the DDR), had another problem related to arbitrage, and that is that their professionals (such as doctors and engineers and scientists, all of whom received high quality, free, state-subsidized education), were being poached by the Western Bloc countries (a Soviet or East German engineer would work for half the local salary in France or West Germany, _and_ they would be a second class citizen, easy to frighten with deportation -- the half-salary was _much_ greater than what they could earn in the Eastern Bloc). The iron curtain was erected to prevent this kind of arbitrage (why should the Soviets and satellites subsidize Western medicine and engineering? Shouldn't a capitalist market system be able to sustain itself? Well no, market systems are inefficient by design, and so they only work as _open_ systems and not _closed_ systems -- they need to _externalize_ the costs and _internalize_ the gains, which is why colonialism was a thing to begin with, and why the "third world" is _still_ a thing).
Note that after the Berlin Wall fell, the first thing to happen was mass migrations of all kinds of professionals (such as architects and doctors) and semi-professionals (such as welders and metal-workers), creating an economic decline in the East, and an economic and demographic boom in the West (the reunification of Germany was basically a _demographic_ subsidy -- in spite of the smaller size, East Germany had much higher birth rates for _decades_; and after the East German labor pool was integrated, Western economies sought to integrate the remaining Eastern labor pools (more former Yugoslavs live abroad in Germany than in any other non-Yugo part of the world [the USA numbers are iffy, but if true Croatians are the only exception, with ~2M residents in USA, which seems unlikely]).
The problem, in the end, is that all of these countries are bound by economic considerations (this is thesis of Marx, by the way), and they cannot escape the vicious arbitrage cycle (I mean, here in the USA, we have aggressively been brain-draining _ourselves_ since at least 1980, which is why we have the extreme polarization, stagnation, and instability _today_ -- it is reminiscent of the Soviet situation in the mid 1980s to late 1990s). Not without something like a world government (if there is only one account to manage, there is no possibility of deficit or surplus, unless measured inter-temporally), or an alternative flavor of globalization.
Internationalism is a wonderful ideology, and one that I support. You can make the case that Yugoslavia, the USSR, etc, were an early experiment in Internationalism, that each succumbed to corruption and unclear thinking (a citizenry that is _inclusive_ by nature and can _think_ clearly is a hard requirement for any successful polity). Globalization, on the other hand, has a bit of an Achilles Heel: when countries asked why they should open their borders and economies to outsider/foreigners, they were told, "so that we can all get rich!". The problem is that once the economic gains get squeezed out of globalization, countries will start looking for new ways to rich, even if it means reversing decades of integration. Appealing to people's greed only works to the extent that you can placate their appetites. We should have justified Internationalism using _intrinsic_ arguments: "we should integrate because learning how others see and experience the world is intrinsically beautiful, and worth struggling for".
Note that most of these economic pathologies disappear, when the reserve currency (dollar) is replaced with a self-balancing currency (like Keynes' Bancor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor). We have the tools, but everyone wants to feel like the only/greatest winner. These are the first people that have to be exiled.
Not only that, but in Russian, the equivalent word for verb "work" (as in "go work" or "do work"), is "rabotay", which is derived from the word "rab" which is the word "slave". So "to work" is literally "to slave", in Russian (and quite a few slavic languages). An English speaker may categorize this as a linguistic anachronism, but a slavic speaker would categorize this as linguistic honesty.
This is pretty common. In Hebrew aved means both "work" and "slavery" and you have the same in Arabic and other semitic languages. In Ancient Egyptian "bak" is used for both "servant" and "worker". The ambiguity in the Hebrew is why many references to this are translated as "servile labor" in the King James, as they were uncertain of the sense of the term meant, or perhaps correctly guessed that both senses were meant. In many ancient languages, e.g. ancient egyptian "worker" and "slave" were synonyms. In modern parlance "slavery" or "servitude" is viewed as an unspeakable evil and people are shocked that there is linguistic overlap with neutral terms like "work" or "labor", which are just ubiquitous parts of life, but historically this is quite common and it is true all around the world, for example in German "knecht" means both "servant" and "farm hand", and in Latin "minister" meant "servant" or "subordinate" (as opposed to "magister"), just like in english you have "server", "serve", "servant", "servile". In Sanskrit "dasa" originally meant "foreigner" or "enemy" and then later "slave" but over time it has come to be used as a suffix to denote someone who "serves" a diety voluntarily, e.g. "Ramdas". In Ancient Japanese you have "yakko" for a low status worker or servant, and later that evolved to footmen who carried baggage for samurai.
I mean the productivity paradox was only temporarily remedied. Around 2005 we entered a second version of the paradox and it persists to this day. I'll note that 2005 was when the internet became dominated by walled-gardens and social-media, _and_ it was the last year that people got to use the internet without smartphones (in 2006 LG released a smartphone, with Apple releasing iPhone in 2007).
The combination of attention-draining social media walled gardens, and the high performance pocket-computers (which are really designed for consumption instead of productivity), created a positive feedback loop that helped destroy the productivity that we won by defeating the paradox in the 1990s. And we have been struggling against this new paradox for twenty years, since. AI seems like it should defeat the paradox because it is a kind of hands-free system, perfect for mobile phones -- but this is really just a very expensive solution to a problem that we have created and allowed to fester. We could just shun the walled gardens, and demand to be paid for our attention and data.
The new productivity paradox (which I do not think AI in its current form can fix[1][2]), is the price that we pay for a prosperous and valuable advertising industry. And as long as the web is seen as an ad-channel, and as long as the web is always vibrating in your pocket, we will keep paying this price. We will eventually end up (metaphorically) lobotomizing our children, and families, and communities, so that the grand-children of ad-executives and tech-bros and frat-bros can grow up healthy, psychologically stable, educated, and comfortably wealthy. (Brain drain: now available literally everywhere).
[1]: It is telling that most LLMs are centralized, and are most useful as search-engines/information-retrieval-systems. The centralization makes them _spyware_, and their ability to directly answer any question, encourages users to actually ask direct questions, instead of stringing search-terms together. This makes the prompts high-signal advertising data (i.e. instead inferring what you are looking for from the search-string, these companies can see _exactly_ what you are looking for and why -- and with LLMs, they can probably turn these promps into joint-probability-tables or whatever other kind of serialization they need to figure out which products to sell you (either on the web or directly in the response to your prompt)).
[2]: As far as copyright infringement goes, LLM outputs may require mass clean-room rewrites (so your productivity, as pathetic as it already is, now gets _halved_ long term) of text, prose, code, and anything else that is produced with them, because of how copyright law works. In legal arts this is called _the fruit of the poison tree_, and any short-term productivity gains, may become long term liabilities that need to be replaced due to _legal mandate_ -- so even if LLMs can eventually produce perfect and faultless outputs, the copyright laws _in all 200+ countries_ would have to be torn down and rebuilt (and this will certainly come at great expense).
Just to add to this. Open source for money has been a dead end for a long time, except for the (increasingly rare) situations where people accidentally convert their open source _contributions_ into employment (I accidentally did this back in 2015). Open source for recognition/reputation makes a bit more sense, but it is also becoming increasingly rare. LLMs are super-charging the extinction, but this was also observable in 2021, when I wrote this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29714929 .
Even before LLMs, I have seen people (shamelessly) re-implement code from open source project A into open source project B, without attribution (IIRC, a GPL C++ project [no hate, I use C++ too these days] basically copied the very distinctive AVL Tree implementation of a CDDL C project -- this is a licensing violation _and_ plagiarism, and it effectively writes the C project out of history. When asked about this, various colleagues[1], just shrugged their shoulders, and went on about their lives.). LLMs now make this behavior undetectable _and_ scalable.
If we want strong copyright protections for open source, we may need to start writing _literate_ programs (i.e. the Knuthian paradigm, which I am quite fond of). But that probably will not happen, because most programmers are bad at writing (because they hate it, and would rather outsource it to an LLM). The more likely alternative, is that people will just stop writing open source code (I basically stopped publishing my repos when the phrase "Big Tech" became common in 2018; Amazon in particular would create hosted versions of projects without contributing anything back -- if the authors were lucky they would be given the magnanimous opportunity to labor at Amazon, which is like inventing dynamite and being granted the privilege of laboring in the mines).
The fact is, if we want recognition, we need to sing each others' praises, instead hoping that someone will look at a version control history. We need to be story-tellers, historians, and archivists. Where is my generation's Jargon File?
[1]: Not co-worker, which is someone who shares an employer, but colleague, which is someone who shares a profession.
That's a big reason why FOSS is going to crumble. If AI succeeds and decimates the tech labor industry, people won't have the luxury to "code for fun". Life isn't a bunch of comfy programmers working on stuff in their spare time anymore.
We already see a component of this with art, but art actually needs to be displayed unlike code to show its vslue. So they adapt. Tools to keep the machine from training on their work, or more movements into work that is much harder to train on (a 2d image of a 3d model does the job and the model can be shared off the internet). Programming will follow a similar course; the remaining few become mercenaries and need to protect their IP themselves.
A little hungover, but some foggy thoughts: If a company can differentiate itself by loving its customers, then that is an indictment of the rest of the entire industry. Loving one's customers should be the standard. But alas, the people with their hands on the money-faucet tend reward profitable (zero-sum) behavior over virtuous (positive-sum) behavior. One can only hope that after they alienate enough of the population, they will run into problems that they cannot buy their way out of (so that they can learn what it feels like when those-who-cannot are at the mercy of those-who-can).
By way of analogy, the result of the theorem prover is usually actionable (i.e. we can replace one kind of expression with its proven equivalent for some end like optimizing code-size or code-run-time), but mathematicians _still_ endeavor to translate the unwieldy and verbose machine-generated proofs into concise human-readable proofs, because those readable proofs are useful to our understanding of mathematics even long after the "productive action" has been taken.
In a way, this collaboration between the machine and the human is better than what came before, because now productive actions can be taken sooner, and mathematicians do not have to doubt whether they are searching for a proof that exists.
Entire companies have been built around synchronizing the WAL with ZFS actions like snapshot and clone (i.e. Delphix and probably others). Would be cool to have `zpgdump` (single-purpose, ZFS aware equivalent).
The lesson that I am taking away from AI companies (and their billionaire investors and founders), is that property theft is perfectly fine. Which is a _goofy_ position to have, if you are a billionaire, or even a millionaire. Like, if property theft is perfectly acceptable, and if they own most of the property (intellectual or otherwise), then there can only be _upside_ for less fortunate people like us.
The implicit motto of this class of hyper-wealthy people is: "it's not yours if you cannot keep it". Well, game on.
(There are 56.5e6 millionaires, and 3e3 billionaires -- making them 0.7% of the global population. They are outnumbered 141.6 to 1. And they seem to reside and physically congregate in a handful of places around the world. They probably wouldn't even notice that their property is being stolen, and even if they did, a simple cycle of theft and recovery would probably drive them into debt).
reply