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

That's fine, you can be nervous.

Seems like a slippery slope argument to forestall any practical positive change which doesn't directly immediately benefit you.

What's actually going to happen though, is every principled parasite at the top will fight tooth and nail to protect every principled right they have while for example the health care, infrastructure, and institutions decline, and they will happily support a fascist demagogue rather than give up those rights (on principles of course! Not on pesky reality).

This is not the first time around. Wealth concentrating policies rely on appealing to the middle class' fear that someone, somewhere will get a benefit that I won't. So principled!

And it works.

C.f. the discussion in Australia right now over whether increasing capital gains tax is 'fair'... The right is talking on principles, conveniently ignoring the massive tax breaks and regulatory capture that have resulted in huge measurable increases in wealth concentration, and justifying those spuriously as overall productivity increases. Principles for thee, pragmatism for me.

I wouldn't block any 401k plans from purchasing these stocks which would open those up to those safer dividend returns. The maintenance cost would be drastically lowered too since you're not buying and selling these so frequently.

Copyright is literally the granting of monopolies. That's the whole point of it.

Copyright benefits huge corporations way more than "the little guy." The biggest holders of copyrights and patents are huge corporations, many of which are often bought explicitly for the purpose of warding off competition from new upstarts.

These huge companies (e.g. Disney) also use their massive war chests to lobby the government into extending copyright terms. What used to just be 14 years of a limited monopoly has now been extended to hundreds of years. They're quite literally capturing and monopolizing the value.

When you look at what the average person does, generally speaking, it has little to do with patents and copyrights. The massive amount of creation and creativity we've seen online, with people riffing on art, music, video, code, etc., has largely involved infringing on copyrights held by the rich and powerful, and hoping to god we don't get sued.

Meaning:

(1) Copyright is in no way necessary for encouraging creativity, which was its original mandate. The evidence is in, and people create and innovate a ton without needing to have some sort of monopoly on everything they do.

(2) Far from protecting the little guy from the big guy, copyright has done the exact opposite, given the big guys huge legal recourse to sue little guys into oblivion, block innovation, block competition, and profit forever.

"The means of production" is an antiquated idea. Look at the reality on the ground. Producing and distributing has never been easier, never been more available to the masses, never been more popular. Big companies do not have a monopoly on the means. This whole copyright nonsense is an idea from the days when the printing press was a new invention, and the average person couldn't print. That's no longer true today.

Also, just from a theory perspective, we never made it so that you can copyright and patent recipes, no matter how creative they are. And yet, mom and pop restaurants have always flourished. Copyrights aren't enforced heavily in the software industry. In fact, just the opposite: we have open source. And yet, individual developers can thrive. This idea that without copyright, big companies are just going to steal everything from the little guy and the little guy will have no chance is just not true. The places where you see that happening the most are the places that have the strongest copyright protections, e.g. the music industry, the publishing industry, etc.

Better idea, mandate 4 days work week and 30 days PTO, the labor squeeze such law would cause will bring wages up and offsets AI productivity boost impact and pays people back in lifetime.

I see the comparison--like AI companies are mining value out of public corpora, somewhat like how an oil or mining company extracts resources from the earth. An important difference being that when minerals are extracted they are removed from common use, unlike when a model is trained, which does not subtract from the commons (at least not directly, or substantially?)