When I read someone else’s essay I may intend to write essays like that author. When I read someone else’s code I may intend to write code like that author.

AI training is no different from any other training.

> If a court determines that the AI output you've used is close enough to be considered a derivative work, it's infringement.

Do you mean the output of the AI training process (the model), or the output of the AI model? If the former, yes, sure: if a model actually contains within it it copies of data, then sure: it’s a copy of that work.

But we should all be very wary of any argument that the ability to create a new work which is identical to a previous work is itself derivative. A painter may be able to copy Gogh, but neither the painter’s brain nor his non-copy paintings (even those in the style of Gogh) are copies of Gogh’s work.

Once you have an army of robot slaves ... you've rendered the whole concept of money irrelevant. Your skynet just barters rare earth metals with other skynets and your robot slaves furnish your desired lifestyle as best they can given the amount of rare earth metals your skynet can get its hands on. Or maybe a better skynet / slave army kills your skynet / slave army, but tough tits, sucks to be you and rules to be whoever's skynet killed yours.

Similar to how advertising and legal services are required for everything but have ambiguous ROI at best, AI is set to become a major “cost of doing business“ tax everywhere. Large corporations welcome this even if it’s useless, because it drags down smaller competitors and digs a deeper moat.

Executives large and small mostly have one thing in common though.. they have nothing but contempt for both their customers and their employees, and would much rather play the mergers and acquisitions type of games than do any real work in their industry (which is how we end up in a world where the doors are flying off airplanes mid flight). Either they consolidate power by getting bigger or they get a cushy exit, so.. who cares about any other kind of collateral damage?

Building things IS a contribution to society, but the people who build things typically aren't the ultimate owners. And even in cases where the builders and owners are the same, entitling the builders and all of their future heirs to rent seek for the rest of eternity is an inordinate reward.

This goes both ways. Let's say there is something you want but you're having trouble obtaining it. You'd need to give something in exchange.

But the seller of what you want doesn't need the things you can easily acquire, because they can get those things just as easily themselves.

The economy collapses back into self sufficiency. That's why most Minecraft economy servers start stagnating and die.

They would use some of the goods/services produced themselves, and also trade with other owners to live happy lives with everything they need, no workers involved.

Non-owners may let the jobless working class inhabit unwanted land, until they change their minds.

This economic relationship can be collectively[1] described as "feudalism". This is a system in which:

- The vast majority of people are obligated to perform menial labor, i.e. peasant farmers.

- Class mobility is forbidden by law and ownership predominantly stays within families.

- The vast majority of wealth in the economy is in the form of rents paid to owners.

We often use the word "capitalist" to describe all businesses, but that's a modern simplification. Businesses can absolutely engage in feudalist economies just as well, or better, than they can engage in capitalist ones. The key difference is that, under capitalism, businesses have to provide goods or services that people are willing to pay for. Feudalism makes no such demand; your business is just renting out a thing you own.

Assuming AI does what it says on the tin (which isn't at all obvious), the endgame of AI automation is an economy of roughly fifty elite oligarchs who own the software to make the robots that do all work. They will be in a constant state of cold war, having to pay their competitors for access to the work they need done, with periodic wars (kinetic, cyber, legal, whatever) being fought whenever a company intrudes upon another's labor-enclave.

The question of "well, who pays for the robots" misunderstands what money is ultimately for. Money is a token that tracks tax payments for coercive states. It is minted specifically to fund wars of conquest; you pay your soldiers in tax tokens so the people they conquer will have to barter for money to pay the tax collector with[2]. But this logic assumes your soldiers are engaging in a voluntary exchange. If your 'soldiers' are killer robots that won't say no and only demand payment in energy and ammunition, then you don't need money. You just need to seize critical energy and mineral reserves that can be harvested to make more robots.

So far, AI companies have been talking of first-order effects like mass unemployment and hand-waving about UBI to fix it. On a surface level, UBI sounds a lot like the law necessary to make all this AI nonsense palatable. Sam Altman even paid to have a study done on UBI, and the results were... not great. Everyone who got money saw real declines in their net worth. Capital-c Conservative types will get a big stiffy from the finding that UBI did lead people to work less, but that's only part of the story. UBI as promoted by AI companies is bribing the peasants. In the world where the AI companies win, what is the economic or political restraining bolt stopping the AI companies from just dialing the UBI back and keeping more of the resources for themselves once traditional employment is scaled back? Like, at that point, they already own all the resources and the means of production. What makes them share?

[0] Depending on your definition of institutional continuity - i.e. whether or not Istanbul is still Constantinople - you could argue the Roman Empire survived until WWI.

[1] Insamuch as the complicated and ideosyncratic economic relationships of medieval Europe could even be summed up in one word.

[2] Ransomware vendors accidentally did this, establishing Bitcoin (and a few other cryptos) as money by demanding it as payment for a data ransom.

It can be better or worse depending on what those with power choose to do. Probably worse. There has been conquest and domination for a long time, but ordinary people have also lived in relative peace gathering and growing food in large parts of the world in the past, some for entire generations. But now the world is rapidly becoming unable to support much of that as abundance and carrying capacity are deleted through human activity. And eventually the robot armies controlled by a few people will probably extract and hoard everything that's left. Hopefully in some corners some people and animals can survive, probably by being seen as useful to the owners.

Yeas, I completely don't understand this and don't understand comparing this with ddos attacks. There's no difference with what search engines are doing, and in some way it's worse? How? It's simply scraping data, what significant problems may it cause? Cache pollution? And thats'it? I mean even when we talking about ignoring robots.txt (which search engines are often doing too) and calling costly endpoints - what is the problem to add to those endpoints some captcha or rate limiters?

https://furry.engineer/@niko/113728467796605323

Depending on the number of simultaneous requesting connections, you may be able to do this without a significant change to your infrastructure. There are ways to do it that don't exhaust your number of (IP, port) available too, if that is an issue.

Then the hard part is deciding which connections to slow, but you can start with a proportional delay based on the number of bytes per source IP block or do it based on certain user agents. Might turn into a small arms race but it's a start.