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Okay straight out of the gate, if you were talking about the 40s then why did you bring up the word processor? That technology wasn’t developed until the 50s and didn’t enter the business world in a form we could talk about in the modern parlance until the 70s. Heck, I think even then you’d have a very long time to go till there was any displacement of secretarial jobs and you’d have to contend with the transition to administrative assistant as both a name, job description and workload for that particular work force.
I’ll query the bls later to figure out about clerks and data entry but my thought at first blush is that you’re making stuff up there, considering americas transition to a service based economy and data entry in particular spending the first two decades of the century on the rise but imma hold off for now.
I never mentioned the tragedy of the commons, it’s a fallacy used to justify the theft of the commons through enclosure (I know this is confusing, here I’m not talking about just the period called the enclosures, but the technique of taking control of commonly held resources).
I wanna restate the thing we’re talking about:
When you say that AI in corporate hands just changes things, what specifically does it change? Does it use a resource held in common to create products that replace the people who developed that resource? Does it do so without compensation or consent?
Tell me, what is it called when you take something without compensation or consent and use it to profit to the absolute detriment of the creator, owner or rightsholder?
There’s a bunch of legal terminology for the different types of theft, but for the person trying to simply make the public aware that they’re being screwed: it’s theft.
The language around copyright started as theft. The language around theft of labor is still theft. The language around patents started as theft. It’s theft.
We need a new word to specifically refer to this process of digital enclosure, but I hope you can see how this particular process isn’t the same as any of the examples of labor saving technologies you brought up and is fundamentally the same as a process of taking the commons that we’ve seen in the past.
Yes it is the same. Its always the same. New technology changes how people work. How is the new math any different? Its just a new technology. We are not that far apart, you and I, I don’t think.
I am just saying AI is nothing specifically, or significantly, different than any other technological invention in any other period of time. Nothing was stolen or taken away that hasn’t been the case every time something new is introduced. It all leads back to the beginning when humans fucked over themselves by inventing a solely owned system of agriculture.
My examples are very real, and were very talked about at the time: you ignored the fact that typesetters were displaced by digital layout and printing. Including all of the machine manufactures, the ink chemists, designers, the repair technicians, the photographers, the dark room developers, the plate makers, etc. All of those jobs went away due to technology. Still I do not see that as theft, its just change.
Weird that you bring up the commons, yet the sentence above sounds like you want to make sure no one every shares anything with anyone else and kill culture. But I dont think that is what you mean at all, you mean to say you do not want culture sold back to everyone, right?
there’s a lot in this comment and i don’t want to engage with every little thing in there so lets focus in on what we are actually talking about: is AI theft?
the argument i’ve made multiple times is not that the technology as a concept can only be used to steal, but that the people developing, using and monetizing it are stealing.
I made sure to exclude individual users from this framing because the understanding that allows us to consider AI (not as a kind of matrix math, but as a technology primarily mobilized by huge incredibly wealthy companies with monetary interest in its deployment and use) as theft is unconcerned with individual users changing their relationship to creative technology and its output.
to restate that argument and get us back on track: AI (once again, not the matrix math, but the set of interconnected technologies built around a proprietary form of it that are being mobilized for profit by enormous incredibly powerful companies) is theft because the people in control of it steal. the closed technology of AI is predicated on open and free access to data for training without any pretense of compensation made to the creators of that data, the maintainers of resources like apis, servers and databases used to access that data or any expectation that the end model will ever be made public. the technology of AI is intended to be used to generate profit, and as such those in control of it have every motive to avoid compensating the people who created, hosted, cataloged and made available the training data or releasing the model to the public. it represents a leverage of public goods for private gain in very explicit terms and this understanding is even part of the pitch to investors.
Now lets look at the effects that AI (once again, the interlocking set of technologies used by google et al. not the concept of matrix mathematics) has had just in the past year because of this relationship to public data. hosts of historic information acting as public goods have incurred significant costs, sources of information once kept open have beed gated to prevent crawling and access to “content” previously viewed as simply fodder for ad draws has been restricted because of it’s new status as training data.
That last one should have particular resonance given that reddit planned to monetize peoples posts and comments as training data to sweeten their IPO.
now we need to talk about the word theft because we both recognize that its’ particular legal meaning isn’t really applicable to this situation and that western legal verbiage has actually avoided enclosure in general. it would be very easy to simply take a pedantic reading of the word theft and then say “it’s not theft for that reason!”, but neither you nor I will do that because we are interested in discussing this new technology and the developments around it. in lieu of saying “monetizing the commons and taking actions that lead to their restriction” every time we need to talk about whats happening, we need a word that means roughly that.
historically, we can see many examples of the word “theft” used in that way, all the way back to the enclosures but even farther if we like. so because of it’s historical use and broad meaning in the vernacular we can choose theft as the word to mean “monetizing the commons and taking actions that lead to their restriction”.
Now that i’ve restated the argument and defined the terms, lets take a look at your claim that AI is no different than any other technology using your own examples:
The printing press did not monetize the commons or restrict them. an argument could be made that its widespread use lowered the barrier to entry for massive amounts of human knowledge and literacy in general, so it actually had the opposite effect. The automobile did act as an enabler for the monetization and enclosure of the commons through the development of the highway system and jaywalking laws, restricting roadways to those who could afford cars. so that could be a good example, but you don’t invoke it, choosing instead to reference its effect on leather-working industries. word processors, either as physical machines or software programs do not monetize or enclose the commons on their own, however a person could make the (i think weak) argument that proprietary file formats are a form of enclosure. You don’t though instead claiming that the word processor put secretaries out of work.
so, it seems like AI (hopefully for the last time: as a set of technologies leveraged to control and monetize public goods, not matrix mathematics) is significantly different than past technological advances but very similar to some events.
I stand by what I said. Your first paragraph said it too: AI is not theft. It just is math. The problem is not the technology: it is the corporate interests. So AI itself is not theft.
Buying all the local land in Mexico that previously were surf spots/fishing villages/local hangouts/town squares, and converting them to monoculture farms for export is a similar idea where corporations leverage government to the detriment of people and environment. But we cant blame the technology, its the rampant corportization.
So we are not that far apart, but the issue is not math. It is how it is used.
By the way theft implies something taken. I responded by saying tech takes away jobs all the time. You suggested that providing services based on publicly available data is some how stealing is absurd. Nothing was taken away. So I tried to relate it to jobs. You said the commons are effected. Yet they are not, as nothing it taken away. You said that coroporations are the bad ones, but local instances are not - so I can run my own instances and do not use the corporate ones, so what was taken?
I just do not understand this as theft. It is absurd.