Comment by brink
4 days ago
Can't help but feel that AI is the killing of the golden goose. We thought it would kill jobs, but it may just end up killing entire industries.
Intellectual property incentivized many and laid many golden eggs, but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
But who knows, maybe imploding the software industry is a good thing. I may lose my house in the process, but I think we could all get back to touching a little more grass.
> but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
same reason I spent my entire career so far writing open-source code that anyone can copy ? (it's GPL, but imagine 100% companies actually caring about that). Ideas can't be owned.
Intellectual property is terrible for society on the whole.
You could just as easily argue "why are 200 companies burning through people and natural resources to come up with the exact same thing and then marketing it as different" as you can say "why would anyone create anything without the ability to making oodles of money by restricting imitation".
Just stop this nonsense. Intellectual property is good. Free open source is not good. Anything that is free while take a lot of effort is essentially killing potential jobs. Wake up.
In a society rich enough to be able to provide for everyone (which it is) and where food and housing are abundant (which they should be), then things being free isn't bad because you aren't worried about making money to live.
You are the one who needs to wake up from the assumption that the only way to live is to hoard your intellectual products instead of imagining a society where you can stop having to compete on that level.
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Are you from 1995? FLOSS won long ago. Services give companies far more money than software. Closed software it's dead. Custom services and in-place programming (adding features, interop...) for small non-IT companies gives far more money for IT companies.
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> but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
The same reason I have open sourced every line of code I have written in the last several years, even new inventions. Because it is good for society, and good for my reputation to show what I am capable of which has been very good for my career.
Better to be the one to open source it before someone else does.
The only business model left is convenience tax. Save people time and they give you money.
> The only business model left is convenience tax. Save people time and they give you money.
Which is why LLMs are going to kill most of the software industry. Software products and services operate on this assumption - package some functionality into an opinionated UI that makes some kind of work marginally more convenient, slap a brand on top, and you now have a captive audience and the perfect upsale/ad delivery vector, i.e. the user interface.
LLMs flip that around, because suddenly, your UI is an obstacle sitting between the user and the problem they want to solve.
> LLMs are going to kill most of the software industry.
I sure hope so! Greedy bastard corpos trying to gatekeep access to software and information have been holding human progress back for far too long.
This has been debated about for quite a while, where people give donations in support or the "pay what you can" model.
Unfortunately, many have argued that it (donations or PWYC) doesn't work and people usually pay only when forced to. There is also the claimed psychological issue, where when something is made free or people can pay minimum amounts, that it is devalued or thought as near worthless. On the flip, various people and organizations have claimed that it's possible to use alternate models, depending on how it's done.
Hackers with time on their hands will never pay for anything on a computer they can do themselves, but those with more money than time will pay even if it is open source.
> Because it is good for society, and good for my reputation to show what I am capable of which has been very good for my career.
I feel that LLMs are destroying the reputation building benefits as well. It used to be that most people's published code was a result of their personal effort and thought process. This is no longer the case. Not only are many new contributions written by machine, but the very process of understanding and reasoning about code has been devalued.
Yes, and this is a net positive. The only reputation points that will matter will be building novel things to solve problems no one has ever solved before. Incentives are much better aligned for progress instead of everyone wasting time building yet another todo list app as a resume booster.
>and good for my reputation
Do you think this will still apply for future generations? It seems like many people now are grabbing code either directly from model training or using agents to blindly scrape the web, finding code and customizing it without ever considering the author. Do you think individual contributors of open source code will have the same reputational incentive?
> Do you think this will still apply for future generations?
Not in the same way. Like today if you see a programmer with a bunch of punch cards of assembly they hand coded, that is impressive, but if that is all they have I would question if they can provide value in a modern software org.
The reputation that matters moving forward will be the 100x engineer that is digitally sovereign and built all the software they use from firmware to kernel to UX. The one who automates everything, has a history of making things people want, and understands a system down to the metal. That is the only person I could be convinced to hire at this point, and the person I am striving to become.
Everyone else will be unemployable in tech.
it will also help with the environment by stopping a lot of forced obsolescence for no reason (apple rolls out a new OS every year, then magically wacom stops supporting perfectly working tablets in their new driver versions)
Somewhat related, but I sicced an LLM at my wacom's BT and USB packets to connect it to an unsupported system and the dang thing got everything decoded in 15 minutes. Can't wait to resurrect some old hardware I've got laying around.
> why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours
When that happens it shouldn't be forgotten that people (broadly speaking) chose this. AI proponents lit intellectual property on fire out of self-interest.
The technology is powerful enough that it was bound to happen regardless. If it didn't happen here in the US, it would have happened somewhere that IP laws aren't respected.
That's an age-old rationalization for everything.
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> but why would someone toil to create a new algorithm to solve a problem if someone else is just going to steal it in hours?
I think it goes deeper than that, in that the AI era will eventually force us to rethink how we value each other. It used to be economic scarcity: I provide a service that very few people can provide, therefore I make a lot of money (supply and demand.) Now we're moving to a place where most anybody can do anything, so our value system needs to evolve, as well. Instead of valuing scarcity, perhaps we should value personal creativity and self-expression. Kind of like paying money for a concert, or for someone's personal painting, even though you can listen online, or you can just have AI generate the same painting. It comes more from wanting to support people than to supply scarcity-based demand.
I think this idea makes many peoples' eyes roll, but IMO that's a testament to where we are today as a society. Most interactions get reduced to just business transactions without the humanity in it, and that's where our problems come from.
That's a nice vision but if AI and robots end up replacing most jobs then we're first going to suffer a total collapse in living standards across the world, until we replace capitalism at least. When the economy no longer relies on labour people won't have anything to trade in exchange for basic necessities.
> if AI and robots end up replacing most jobs
The only way AI and robots end up replacing most jobs is if they can do them for less money than people can. Which in turn means that those things become less expensive, since that's the thing causing suppliers to do it.
So there are really three possibilities here. First, we get robots that can e.g. build houses and housing scarcity goes down, so now you don't need to make much money to afford rent. Second, robots still can't build housing, so then you get a job building housing and have a job. Or third, robots still can't build housing but we have a bunch of rent-seeking incumbents that won't allow you to get a job doing that either, because they're trying to keep rents high or artificially limit the supply of trade labor.
It's the third one that really screws you and is the one that we need to prevent.
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You only have to look at the current situation in China to see that the problem is not capitalism, or communism, at least not by itself:
https://www.wsj.com/world/china-economy-gen-z-f9058941
https://www.economist.com/china/2019/11/14/homelessness-has-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si2zT-wCs3c
We all know that "real" communist societies like North Korea are worse, much, much worse. In fact within China how bad this is varies enormously. If you're in a "rope village" somewhere deep inland, having the finest house in the entire city is arguably worse than homelessness in Beijing, but the party won't let you leave except as homeless, because you're allocated a "Household" (Hukou) and you aren't allowed to leave.
And, of course, half the problem is the very structure of the communist party itself: local officials hide the problem, because if they don't, they'll be purged or at the very least won't see promotions, ever. Which means that the police will be using violence to hide the problem rather than fix it.
AI can provide incredible wealth, or immeasurable misery, in both capitalist and communist societies. That is not what makes the difference, that is just how political parties like to frame themselves and so the argument why you should choose "left" or "right".
Capitalism and private home ownership can certainly provide housing, but if you go too far or not far enough in private ownership and "protecting capital" they won't. And communism can certainly fix homelessness (the Soviets did, for example), except nowadays they just won't.
AI will provide more tools for people with capital, which primarily will be the government. Whether that solves, say, homelessness is a choice, in either system.
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Oh, think it will/can be worse than that. The collapse of the present system can mean all out genocidal wars, either by eugenic and deranged humans doing it to themselves or true AGI and its robots removing human interference with its goals and Earth's resources.
As for the AGI and robot part, various oligarchs are talking about manufacturing millions to even billions of robots. Combine that with billions of AI agents in massive data centers all over the world. Bringing forth a new self-sustaining artificial life form that can do what humans do (if not vastly better) and at comparable numbers or mass.
Intellectual property has rarely ever been "the golden goose", despite the anecdotes of the few Henry Fords that exist.
Throughout history, the golden goose has typically been owning capital, and having market reach (see: advertising, the silk road).
No matter how amazing your IP is, if you can't produce it at economically viable scales, and if you can't put it in front of people who will buy it, then you have nothing. So venture capital comes along, buys you out, and takes all your future profits in exchange for the "risk".
On the other side of the coin, there's open source software developers, PhD's publishing papers for free, and your local musicians that like to play at events just for funsies.
I mean, imagine the kind of world we'd live in if medicine were focused strictly on profitable moats instead of open research, and... oh. Right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin
Your question presupposes new algorithms must come from someone toiling. But AI will be just as capable at developing new algorithms as ripping off the existing ones, surely?
This was a huge problem before AI due to Amazon and global internet marketplaces. Why spend R&D dollars developing an amazing product when Chinese knockoffs will show up 6 months later? I wonder how many great consumer products don't exist because there's no way to recoup your R&D costs and develop a healthy market.
Imagine if there were no intellectual protections for pharmaceuticals. The government would have to take over R&D.
> but it may just end up killing entire industries.
as did the internet before it
> but it may just end up killing entire industries.
how many record companies have been put out of business by piracy?
people keep talking about AI killing this or that, but I feel they will create new industries. 50 years ago new tech can shift industries over decade or so, but AI will shift it in 1/5 or in a year, 2 even 1/10 of the time.
Or you do as OpenAI & Co. do and just rent out a service
IDK about the grass, bro, I've mostly just seen a lot of pavement since I lost my SWE job
Patents will become the norm with AI. Of course the average joe will not be able to afford it.
Patents are essentially unenforceable. Plus to enforce them in court it takes.. years? International cases can take even longer.
With the advent of AI, everything will be faster.