The Private Capture of Public Genius

This was interesting right up until "The fund pays every eligible American the same amount each year. "

I'm in Australia. I've contributed my share of dirt to the delta. Why do I not get a share of this?

I get that the frontier companies are (for the moment) US companies. But that's just corporate ownership, it's not what we're talking about. We're talking about compensating the people who wrote the training data for their contribution. That contribution came from all over the world, so the Corpus Fund needs to be paid all over the world.

Set it up in the UN, get the UN to provide the training data sets as a common good, and have the UN collect the money from all AI companies using the training data sets. And the UN should distribute the money in the most equitable manner globally (so most of it going to alleviate poverty, probably).

I'd happily trade my collected years of shitposts to help folks get out of poverty.

We cannot always want to capture only the (temporary) winners whenever we see a lucrative business and expect to share a free ride. I'd also assume that most of the revenue these AI labs are making is turned into depreciating fixed capital (hardware) and OPEX at this point.

Why don't we capture Meta and Google as they allegedly take advantage of more publicly available information for profit? Let alone the truly valuable knowledge, like mathematics, has nothing to do with the majority of garbage posts that an average person would "contribute" on social media.

If we really want to tax or nationalize some economic activity, then, in my opinion, the target should be what it takes from society, not what it produces for society. By this logic, we should tax all labs, including those lagging ones, that utilize the public knowledge.

However, if everyone can access the public knowledge without rendering it less useful or reducing its available quantity, there should be no reason to tax it.

There’s a quote about how in some articles a switch is quietly flipped in the middle where the article was talking about what is and suddenly the author has everything to say about what should be.

I googled for the quote but all I got is useless web spam and meme style graphics about quotes from writers. But AI told me it was David Hume and provided the full quote.

The real question is when the day will come that AI become the fertile muck that a new thing grows from and clings to and the legal system needs to adjust to. I hope it’s a good thing.