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Working on AI for a company he doesn't own is the stupidest thing a smart person can do. The goal is his work is to literally reduce the value of his work. He

Working on AI for a company he doesn't own is the stupidest thing a smart person can do. The goal is his work is to literally reduce the value of his work. He gets finite reward (even if above market average), then is fired, while owners continue extracting value from the work indefinitely. I think we need to come up with a third alternative to communism and capitalism. I'd like to see a system which attempts to reward people for the full transitive value of their work as long as the work remains valuable.

krasin 9mo ago
> I'd like to see a system which attempts to reward people for the full transitive value of their work as long as the work remains valuable. To a degree, this is what copyright was supposed to do.
- martin-t 9mo ago
  Whenever I say this, I am told the goal of copyright is to incentivize innovation, not protect creators. So it doesn't matter if every particular person is truly rewarded for their work or if the rewarded person is the one doing the actual work (employers own copyright even though employees do the work). What matters is the impression and the aggregate effect. And of course if humans not necessary for innovation, it loses its meaning. Copyright is already pretty much dead since many people and organizations get away with running copyrighted work through ANNs and claiming it's not derivative work. --- But the bigger issue is copyright is only about creativity, not about the human time and effort put in. It doesn't protect most normal work. Ultimately, every person has a limited time to be alive and that's one area where we're all roughly equal. Even taking skill differences into account, the difference in productivity between people is not that high. Take a passenger jet and all the work, skill and knowledge that goes into building one. There's no way a single person could do all of that, even ignoring study time as if he magically started with the required knowledge at birth. Yet there are people rich enough to own one. That makes no sense.
  - fc417fc802 9mo ago
    > reward people for the full transitive value of their work > the goal of copyright is to incentivize innovation, not protect creators. Both statements can be true. IP law attempts to incentivize innovation by instituting a system that is hoped to (very approximately) award creators in proportion to the transitive value of their work. This is much easier to see with patents, where each use of the idea itself requires an explicit license. In the case of copyright it is assumed that both buyer and seller are able to accurately assess the value, that the market is efficient, etc. Generally a bunch of stuff that's only approximately true in the most hand-wavey sense. > There's no way a single person could do all of that ... Yet there are people rich enough to own one. That makes no sense. Presumably you own a smartphone. Presumably it was relatively cheap in comparison to your total yearly income. Yet I am quite certain that you could not manufacture an equivalent device from scratch on your own. A modern CPU is hundreds of man years of work just for the blueprint; you still need to figure out fabrication. And then there's the rest of the SoC, the RAM, the display, the radio, ...
    - martin-t 9mo ago
      > Both statements can be true. Sure. I mentioned it because some people have been pretty hostile to the idea that IP should protect people. They argued as if a technology that makes human innovation obsolete should automatically invalidate copyright because it's would be no longer needed either. And screw the people whose work that innovation was built upon - licenses, consent, etc. > Presumably you own a smartphone Maybe the plane was a bad example, I used it because it was one of the first things which made me realize how many orders of magnitude individual wealth spans. There are everyday items which you could make on your own (e.g. furniture) and on the other end there are massive projects which require their own specialized supply chains (e.g. planes). Smartphones fall somewhere in the middle, probably. They benefit immensely from economies of scale and that the same infrastructure (fabs) can make parts for smartphones, computers and make other device types - both unlike planes. A more telling comparison perhaps would be how many people you need to get together to make 1) one of the item, 2) how many to make enough to serve that group, and 3) how many so each person in the group has one. A plane can, after all, serve many people at once. Having one for yourself is, in part, where the extravagance of owning one as a singular person comes from.

krasin 9mo ago

> I'd like to see a system which attempts to reward people for the full transitive value of their work as long as the work remains valuable. To a degree, this is what copyright was supposed to do.

martin-t 9mo ago
Whenever I say this, I am told the goal of copyright is to incentivize innovation, not protect creators. So it doesn't matter if every particular person is truly rewarded for their work or if the rewarded person is the one doing the actual work (employers own copyright even though employees do the work). What matters is the impression and the aggregate effect. And of course if humans not necessary for innovation, it loses its meaning. Copyright is already pretty much dead since many people and organizations get away with running copyrighted work through ANNs and claiming it's not derivative work. --- But the bigger issue is copyright is only about creativity, not about the human time and effort put in. It doesn't protect most normal work. Ultimately, every person has a limited time to be alive and that's one area where we're all roughly equal. Even taking skill differences into account, the difference in productivity between people is not that high. Take a passenger jet and all the work, skill and knowledge that goes into building one. There's no way a single person could do all of that, even ignoring study time as if he magically started with the required knowledge at birth. Yet there are people rich enough to own one. That makes no sense.
- fc417fc802 9mo ago
  > reward people for the full transitive value of their work > the goal of copyright is to incentivize innovation, not protect creators. Both statements can be true. IP law attempts to incentivize innovation by instituting a system that is hoped to (very approximately) award creators in proportion to the transitive value of their work. This is much easier to see with patents, where each use of the idea itself requires an explicit license. In the case of copyright it is assumed that both buyer and seller are able to accurately assess the value, that the market is efficient, etc. Generally a bunch of stuff that's only approximately true in the most hand-wavey sense. > There's no way a single person could do all of that ... Yet there are people rich enough to own one. That makes no sense. Presumably you own a smartphone. Presumably it was relatively cheap in comparison to your total yearly income. Yet I am quite certain that you could not manufacture an equivalent device from scratch on your own. A modern CPU is hundreds of man years of work just for the blueprint; you still need to figure out fabrication. And then there's the rest of the SoC, the RAM, the display, the radio, ...
  - martin-t 9mo ago
    > Both statements can be true. Sure. I mentioned it because some people have been pretty hostile to the idea that IP should protect people. They argued as if a technology that makes human innovation obsolete should automatically invalidate copyright because it's would be no longer needed either. And screw the people whose work that innovation was built upon - licenses, consent, etc. > Presumably you own a smartphone Maybe the plane was a bad example, I used it because it was one of the first things which made me realize how many orders of magnitude individual wealth spans. There are everyday items which you could make on your own (e.g. furniture) and on the other end there are massive projects which require their own specialized supply chains (e.g. planes). Smartphones fall somewhere in the middle, probably. They benefit immensely from economies of scale and that the same infrastructure (fabs) can make parts for smartphones, computers and make other device types - both unlike planes. A more telling comparison perhaps would be how many people you need to get together to make 1) one of the item, 2) how many to make enough to serve that group, and 3) how many so each person in the group has one. A plane can, after all, serve many people at once. Having one for yourself is, in part, where the extravagance of owning one as a singular person comes from.