Comment by Lerc

(This is a bit ranty, but due to a sincere desire for a better world, and being the recipient of personal attacks for believing a better world is achievable by a different path to others)

I feel like this point of view is an ideal not shared by one of the main branches of anti-AI sentiment.

The idea of intellectual property works against this. Rather than contributing to humanity directly, ownership of information is accumulated by individuals and then rented to humanity.

At the same time I agree that people should be able to have a livelihood that affords them the ability to create new intellectual contributions.

The service Karpathy is providing is also being provided by thousands of YouTube creators in a huge variety of topics. It's a little sad that so many must support their efforts with support their efforts with sponsorships from sources with varying degrees of ethical behaviour. Patreon is better but still not ideal. I sincerely believe this _is_ one of the best ways to contribute to society.

A recent Daily Show had Jon Stewart describe training AI as strip mining human knowledge. Training AI is regularly described as theft as if this position is a given without any counter argument possible. It is opinion masquerading as fact. This saddens me because it suggests to me that the war to control the narrative is being won by people who want to entrench a hypercapitalistic vision of ownership where not only is a particular expression of an idea ownable but also stakes a claim to own some of any ideas that come from viewing that expression.

I cannot see any way that this viewpoint would aid humanity as a whole, but instead assign benefits to a collection of individuals. The ability to trade intellectual property means that ownership inevitably gets passed to a smaller and smaller pool of individuals over time.

I think we really do need a new way to consider these issues in light of the modern world. When mentioning these thoughts to others a common refrain is that it doesn't matter because the powers that be (and their lobbyists) will prevent any fix from happening. I have never been fond of that particular fatalism, especially when it inhibits discussion of what would be better.