California bill (AB 412) would effectively ban open-source generative AI


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That's the real question! As technology is able to produce more and more, how do we, as a society, ensure that the basic necessities of life (food, clothing, shelter, safety, health care, education) are guaranteed to all.

That's not really a new question. The 19th century social history showed that the industrial revolution increased inequalities (workers wages didn't rise from their comparable agricultural jobs, yet the amount of goods produced substantially increased, with most of the added value flowing to capital-owners). This led to one of the greatest inequality period in history (as evidenced by Dickens, Zola... in litterature). Which could go... less than well, with a lot of civil unrest. In many places the solution was to implement welfare state solutions at various level of intensity, and implementation of income taxes to previously unheard-of levels. In the US for example, at the end of FDR's presidency, the marginal income tax bracket (for revenue over 200,000) was 94%. It tends to curb income inequalities.

I think that is the most important question to be answered in the next 15-20 years. Because the world is changing in a way that will make the industrial revolution look quaint, and I fear that if we continue to think in terms of what worked in the 20th century, we will lose out on the chance to create a world closer to Star Trek than Hunger Games.

The choice is ours.
 
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That's not really a new question. The 19th century social history showed that the industrial revolution increased inequalities (workers wages didn't rise from their comparable agricultural jobs, yet the amount of goods produced substantially increased, with most of the added value flowing to capital-owners). This led to one of the greatest inequality period in history. Which could go... less than well, with a lot of civil unrest. In many places the solution was to implement welfare state solutions at various level of intensity, and implementation of income taxes to previously unheard-of levels. In the US for example, at the end of FDR's presidency, the marginal income tax bracket (for revenu over 200,000) was 94%. It tends to curb income inequalities.



The choice is ours.
Hope we have a bit of wiggle room on forum rules here but if I'm breaking any am happy to back off. This is a difficult subject to discuss without touching on some subjects.

So yeah, at the same time that the 19th century increased inequalities, it also led to the biggest lifting of all boats in human history. Just hope we don't have to suffer through another Great Depression and World War to get things back on track. We need a young leader not afraid to implement a Manhatan Project/Moon Shot level program for commerical Fusion power (the only real solution to the climate crisis) while lying the groundwork for UBI based on AI/Robotic production gains (the only real solution to machine learning job displacement). We could see both starting to change the world as early as '35 and would do way more for the average human being on earth than the fight over AI's use of copyrighted material.
 

Lincoln wrote in the justification for the Emancipation Declaration that people had the right to eat of the fruit of their own labor. Stealing their IP takes this away from them. The companies that scraped people's IP, art, writing, knew they were stealing, and justified it that there was no other way. Now it is fair they suffer indemnification for the crime.
 

Read this article this morning - it's a fascinating perspective on the rise of LLMs from the perspective of natural language processing researchers - basically, all the brilliant scientists who were working on understanding how to give machines language until LLMs broke the field.

 

Lincoln wrote in the justification for the Emancipation Declaration that people had the right to eat of the fruit of their own labor. Stealing their IP takes this away from them. The companies that scraped people's IP, art, writing, knew they were stealing, and justified it that there was no other way. Now it is fair they suffer indemnification for the crime.
Okay, can we not equate LLMs to actual slavery? I assure you, the slaves had it worse, and it's a pretty appalling equivalence to make. Let's have some perspective.
 


Okay, can we not equate LLMs to actual slavery? I assure you, the slaves had it worse, and it's a pretty appalling equivalence to make. Let's have some perspective.
I'm not sure it's fair to characterize that post this way. The comparison was indirect, to the point that if dragoner had said Ecclesiastes instead of Lincoln I'm not sure there would have been any fuss, and limited to the specific aspect of workers not being paid for their labor. That's hardly insisting that artists have it just as bad or worse than slaves.
 

I didn't, wasn't on my mind. What is glaring is their sense of entitlement about adding to the general misery of the world, without repercussion. If the shoe fits, wear it, I guess. Expecting people to work for free is wrong, they don't. Art is a noble endeavor to be defended, it is the soul of a society, where we examine past societies through their archeological remains, what stands out is their art.
 


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