US government: "Bad Anthropic! Not patriotic enough. AI is only for American "citizens" (who we are actively trying to reduce/restrict to people we like)."

Anthropic: "Oh... American access only, you say? I'm sorry, we can't promise that (because VPNs and US-local cloud hosting and all that), so we need to turn it off completely."

...probably.

If so, I wonder what turn the political shenanigans will take next?

Based on the actions of the current administration and the short-sighted tech oligarchs who have been consistently pushing towards neo-fascism/neo-feudalism, probably one that further degrades trust all around and gives China even more of a leg up.

Let's see!

I think we need functional visual programming.

It seems to me like referential transparency and pure functional composition would be a much cleaner way to visually compose functions into larger functions (and eventually programs).

People did some work on this : https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Drawing_Programs_The_...

That sounds like an argument that someone with an unusual amount of wealth and power might make to downplay the unusual amount of responsibility that wealth and power confers on them.

In today's economy power and wealth are not even close to evenly distributed.

Claiming that responsibility should be evenly distributed is therefore a highly disingenuous argument.

Or maybe we should question whether structuring society such that the only way to be rewarded is by making rich people even richer was really the best plan?

Seems to me like we should reward people for achieving sustainability rather than only rewarding growth.

Maybe it's time to start substituting a bit of competition with a bit more collaboration and looking out for the needs of everyone? Just a thought.

That's not how that works. That's not how any of that works.

Needs are food, housing, and safety. Anything beyond that is not a need, it is a want. We're not giving everyone everything they need, and an increasingly tiny number of people are grabbing anything and everything they want.

We're about to start discovering that in a dynamical system with lots of other intelligent agents, our need for "safety" at a certain point does depend on others need for food and housing.

Let's try to remember that as we are laying them all off to give their jobs to AI.

That's a very narrow definition of a 'need'. You haven't even mentioned emotional needs and these are widely accepted as must haves to lead a 'happy' life.

The line between a need and a want is fuzzy to say the least. To cavepeople, all our needs are met at this point. But we're anywhere near fulfilled and have come up with more terms that enter the 'need' category. Maslow's hierarchy, pop authors like Tony Robbins (certainty, uncertainty, significance, connection, growth, contribution) and Dan Pink (autonomy, mastery, purpose), trained psycologists/psychiatrists like Gabor Maté and Ted Klontz talk about how our relations during childhood reveal a need for bond/connection to oneself and others.

We're not dealing with exact sciences here, so it's not easy to converge on an objective list of 'needs' that are separated from 'wants'. There are studies like the famous Harvard Hapiness study that may give us more objective notions, but you'd need to run several of these across time to find stuff that has stronger predictive value across generations.

We could go on here - I'd argue universal healthcare is a 'need' in order to live a happy/fulfilled/safe human life in the modern world. Many would disagree with me, but the point is the goal post shifts as we progress.

I'd call it a need if the lack of it is correlated with disfunctional states or objectively lesser outcomes (which outcomes are necessary?). Even if you have this clear cut the question of what's considered necessary is an opinion. The implication of this in the conversation is that AI isn't likely to fulfill our needs: we'll come up with more and shift the goal post just like all our ancestors have done until now.

AIs don't provide food, housing, or safety. They don't farm, build houses, or police the streets

The concept only makes sense for physical objects.

The problem are the definitions of "piracy", "robbery", "theft", etc.

There's two ways you could reasonably define them: by the loss, or by the gain.

From a simple ethical/logical viewpoint it stands to reason that if a gain can occur without a loss, that's good for everyone - so we should define theft to have occurred only when a loss is incurred (and hence intellectual property theft wouldn't be theft, and the very concept of IP makes no sense).

Unfortunately just because it's good for everyone doesn't mean it'll obviously work out that way. Defining theft by the unauthorised gain of something (regardless of whether there was a loss) lets those with the authority to grant rights to those gains profit. That profit can then be used to create incentives for others with authority (through lobbying, for instance), creating a situation where despite the fact that it's in the common interest to define theft solely on the basis of loss, it's in the interest of those with authority to define it as any gain which is not approved by an anointed member of the authority structure (either economically or politically).

Intellectual property is stupid, counter-productive, hurts culture, hurts innovation, and generally doesn't do an ounce of good to the vast majority of people on the planet Earth.

> Intellectual property is stupid, counter-productive, hurts culture, hurts innovation, and generally doesn't do an ounce of good to the vast majority of people on the planet Earth.

Further, and this is the one that really kills me: Countries/Companies that ignore IP have a serious competitive advantage.

It's not only more ethical, it's also more efficient. It's folly to believe that IP laws will protect you against these motivated actors, and playing the game internally is slowing us down and hampering our own performance.

Blockchain refers specifically to a linked-list-like data structure which utilizes cryptographic hashes at each node to store an authentication of the tail of the list on each head (node). If you have a similar structure using trees, it's a merkle tree. Replication + message signing does not imply either (necessarily).

The idea that those who are falling through the cracks in the system is because they aren't working hard enough is crap. Thanks to the "golden age" you correctly say we live in, automation and globalisation have steadily eroded the value of human labor since the 70s (a big part of why real wage growth has been negative). Thanks in part to financialization and in part to anti-competitive regulations that benefit monopolistic incumbents, growth is increasingly driven by financialization and rent-seeking from capital owners. The fact that you are on HN likely means you benefit from your ability to assist the upper class (billionaires) increase their share of the wealth by diligently creating more and more intellectual property capital. The numbers don't lie, and the numbers show the poor are getting poorer (despite working just as hard), and the rich are getting richer (and none more so than the billionaires who own the intellectual property capital that let's them extract ever-increasing rents in exchange for granting ever-decreasing access to the latest innovations - particularly in pharmaceuticals and technology).

There's an enormous difference between a physical object, which has inherent scarcity; and information, which does not. We strongly enforce property rights on physical objects because since they are scarce, theft is possible (if a person acquires a physical object then someone else acquires it, it is necessary that the original acquirer no longer possesses it - therefore either it was a gift, or it was paid for in some manner, or the second acquisition was theft). The notion of theft of information was invented by politicians due to an utter lack of creativity with respect to how to incentivise the creation of a non-scarce resource. While physical property rights are rights in the positive sense (they grant owners of physical objects the right not to have those objects removed from them without due consideration), intellectual property rights are rights only in the negative sense (they grant the owners no inherent abilities they did not already have, instead they only restrict the freedom of others by limiting their rights to acquire something that would otherwise be limitlessly abundant).

Not true! We have no personal need for control over our information, as the utter lack of legal protections for personal privacy and personal information collection make abundantly clear. And works? Are you kidding me? Have you seen a typical corporate IP assignment agreement? This has nothing to do with persons (which the laws are making increasingly clear are irrelevant), and everything to do with corporations and their shareholders.

I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic or attempting a joke here?

The EU, where I live, absolutely does have legal protections for personal privacy and personal information collection, hence GDPR and all the cookie popups[0].

And even if the law was silent, that wouldn’t itself be evidence of a lack of need, as people died from lack of workplace health and safety regulations well before there were laws about that.

And while IP assignments are an interesting suggestion to raise, I counter that I have also seen a forum of users who didn’t read the T&C and suddenly realised $corporation had the eternal right to reproduce whatever they wrote on that forum (kinda necessary but clearly non-obvious to most normal people), which demonstrates that people definitely feel strongly attached to even really dumb and low-value works if they are those works are their own.

[0] that they adhere to the relevant law about as well as all the YouTube videos saying “no copyright intended” adhere to IP laws is an enforcement problem, not a lack of rights