> what economics told me the free market was all about.
Don't complain when US starts to play by the same rules China has been using for decades.
How do you think the major AI companies trained there model? Pirated books and anything that could be torrented and scraped of the web.
America industries used to play by the same rules. Look up Samuel Slater.
A credit system that determine your upward mobility?
What is the implication here? Are you warning that US corporations might start doing something shady, like scraping the internet at large scale for training data? Or mass-dowloading pirated copies of books, completely ignoring copyright?
I find it hard to imagine a future where US corporations have degraded to such a point.