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The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

sanders.senate.gov

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Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#201

Post by pessimizer »

fny wrote: post #22

> A.I. is built on our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning generations I know many here would scoff at nationalizing a private company, but AI is a usurpation of human knowledge and quite literally at times. (Every AI company was embroiled in copyright lawsuits and lord knows what Qwen et al are up to.) In…

> Should not there be a tax to offset the "frictional" unemployment?

Absolutely not. That's like taxing shovels because people were digging with their hands. The result is just more people having to dig with their hands, the fact that 7/8ths of people who now dig with their hands will starve because shovels have been introduced is a choice that we are making. We are choosing not to feed them.

Creating an unnecessary pretense so that they can suffer before they are fed is psychotic. Pay them to go to school or to show up to healthcare appointments, not to do work that can be automated away.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#202

Post by arjie »

If I'm being entirely honest, I actually do not think that Donald Trump being de-facto CEO of OpenAI and Anthropic is a great idea. In fact, I do not think that Joe Biden being that is a great idea, but I definitely think we would have ruined this technology if we had Trump in charge of it. It's much better this way, where he expresses some power in his role as the government's chief executive and the founders of the AI companies comply in the way they do or resist in the way they do.

In addition, what would the public do with AI companies? They think that AI inference sucks up oceans of water. The same thing would happen here as happened to nuclear reactors after the NRC was made - it would take half a century before the first reactor approved after the NRC was set up to start up.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#203

Post by akramachamarei »

pesus wrote: post #164
fourseventy wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No its full blown communist.

Using "communist" as a pejorative isn't actually an argument for anything.

Neither is using "Nazi" as a pejorative, but these kinds of comparisons can be valuable when they identify commonalities between modern proposal and historical approaches to governance that went horribly wrong. (Obviously)

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#204

Post by pbasista »

fourseventy wrote: post #138

Bernie is a full on communist at this point. Seizing the assets of private companies for the government? WTF.

> full on communist

Please do not use the term communist lightly, i.e. as an umbrella term for people who express ideas that e.g. more government control or regulation is in some circumstances reasonable.

The only forms of communism that have ever actually materialized in society have all been authoritarian regimes or outright dictatorships. Where the only "truth" is dictated by the governing leader or party. Where you cannot express your opinion freely. Where you cannot e.g. go to a university or have a slightly better job unless you are loyal to the party establishment. Where people are afraid to talk to their neighbors about politics because they cannot know who is going to report them for anti-government opinions. Where people are persecuted, imprisoned or even killed for their opinions.

To the best of my knowledge, Bernie Sanders has never expressed such ideas.

One might argue that here we are talking about the purely academic definition of communism. But unfortunately, in the real world, there is no such thing as academic communism. So far it has always come with the dictatorship and with people who abuse it. Always.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#205

Post by _DeadFred_ »

csallen wrote: post #189
jst1fthsdys wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This chain has been using expropriate, not extract. Not sure why you mentioned that. Your story doesn't really relate. I get what you are saying, but your org wasn't copyrighted under you, nor did you expect any monetary returns on it. They stole copyrighted work without permission.

> This chain has been using expropriate, not extract. Not sure why you mentioned that. Sure, my bad. > They stole copyrighted work without permission. While we're nitpicking language, you can't "steal" copyrighted work. Theft/stealing are crimes that apply to situation where property is taken such that its rightful owner no longer has it. Copyright has nothing to do with theft. There is no taking of property involved…

If your product has no value without access by your company/you agents of someone elses work, you are a derivative work. The value of your product has at least in part been derived from other's copyrighted work.

The fact that these companies don't just remove copyrighted work from their product creation chain shows that they feel they are deriving value from the copyrighted works that they wouldn't have if they didn't use copyrighted works.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#206

Post by josefritzishere »

fhdkweig wrote: post #45
feverzsj wrote: post #20

Only if it's AGI, which is astronomically impossible.

I don't think LLMs will be the path to AGI, but anything nature can already build (a human mind) is proven to be possible. After that, it is just a science and engineering problem to replicate. There are those who believe that a human mind is somehow magic and a special exception to the laws of physics, but I am not one of those people.

If we could only agree on what consciousness even is. Engineers can't build things that we can't define. Even the dictionary definition is tautological. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/where-does-consci...

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#207

Post by akramachamarei »

jotux wrote: post #25
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #14

Bernie Sanders. I mean, he's not always wrong, but he's, um, kind of enthusiastic about just taking stuff from those who have it, considerably more than the current understanding of private property (or even taxation) considers acceptable.

>kind of enthusiastic about just taking stuff from those who have it, considerably more than the current understanding of private property (or even taxation) considers acceptable. Funny how you can use that description for how AI companies used everything for training data.

Can you? If the government decides to take another grand, that's money I can't use. If I publish a blog post about why I hate videogames, and an AI company trains a model on it, I still have my article, I still have the same number of people who could find it and care about it a particular amount. Maybe some of them will forgo reading my article because they got the same thing from the LLM, but the description of these two actions is not nearly the same. This is why intellectual "property" is a metaphor. Economists call this a nonrivalrous good. IP law seeks to make such things more rivalrous, FBOFW.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#208

Post by yread »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #69
fny wrote: post #22

> A.I. is built on our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning generations I know many here would scoff at nationalizing a private company, but AI is a usurpation of human knowledge and quite literally at times. (Every AI company was embroiled in copyright lawsuits and lord knows what Qwen et al are up to.) In…

I would rather we have an alternative where you can buy Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, etc stock but it has a few strict requirements: * Investors are committing to keeping their money over a 10 year period, and you pay them dividends * At the end of the 10 years you can withdraw it all, or keep your stock but withdraw the dividends, or keep your stock and reinvest the dividends for the next 10 years. * Companies cannot…

To buy stocks you need savings. 24% of Americans don't have any. Your scheme wouldn't benefit them. Or am I misreading it?

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#209

Post by akramachamarei »

jmyeet wrote: post #37

People on HN generally love municipal broadband. For good reasons. It is almost without exception better than any of the national ISPs. Cheaper too. Municipal broadband is just 100% publicly-owned. That's what that means. When you have a national ISP, you might not get a service at all despite the ISP guaranteeing service in exchange for money from the state they've taken. You get a service that starts at $60 but som…

Besides economic and historical facts, I think one of the biggest reasons to flee municipal broadband is its liability to become a tool of government repression. What we're essentially proposing is that at the dusk of paper and analog media we want the government to be the provider of information and communication infrastructure.

I'm reminded of a quote from Martin Niemöller.... Perhaps our Constitution would protect us against such things. But why risk it?

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#210

Post by akramachamarei »

Hackers should think of slavery reparations when they think of Sanders' proposal. Not as an equivalent, but as a more credible and similarly untenable idea. Sanders' being to take from those who produce to give to those who likely had almost no hand in the production, and with certainly no attempt to discern what contribution that may have been.
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