alt Hacker NewsAI and the Enclosure of the Scientific Commons
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" an intangible resource that "no one owns and is shared by everyone."" ... but if you try to share this "un-owned" intangible resource with others you will have police all over the globe harassing and maybe even imprisoning you (see: Anna's Archive).
So ... "no one owns" is doing some pretty heavy lifting there ... and it's kind of the foundation of the entire article.
> The scientific literature can be viewed as an "information commons:" an intangible resource that "no one owns
Springer would like a word
Don't let whiners pollute your mindset. Not even ones who package their insights in a nice scientific artifice like a white paper.
"all knowledge so far" (ie. the data needed for LLM training) is only a grain of sand on a beach compared to the return on making it all regurgitatable on demand.
We are at the bottom of a science, knowledge & art hockey stick chart, we're staring up at it and the steep bit is labeled "the future".
When you can equally reasonably make the opposite argument - that AI is going to open up scientific exploration and contribution to a wider range of participants than ever before - then I think it’s a sign that nobody has any idea what’s going to happen and spending time making either claim is probably pointless until we have more data.
We need to create a new scientific regime in the spirit of open source where scientific papers are not permitted to be used to train closed models. If you want to use the output of human ingenuity, you need to give something back.
I don't really understand the rationale behind accepting change and knowing change is inevitable, but wanting any such change to be fully controlled every step of the way?
One simple way to understand how this is currently manifesting is the administration's severe, and really unprecedented, defunding of basic science at NSF (likely in unconstitutional defiance of Congress' appropriations to specific NSF directorates). Instead the way the funding has been redirected (by the White House OSTP) is based on the assumption that future knowledge will be exclusively AI (sorry SI) generated, so humans not needed.
China, on the other hand, seems to be doubling down on fundamental research, including announcing these changes:
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202609/1371583.shtml
and this: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3368750/chin...
Admin, maybe merge with submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187248
> the English agricultural commons no longer meaningfully exist.
UK has strong inheritance tax, so common angricultural land is very strong and doing quite well!
Also shit tons of stuff you can not do on your "private" agricultural land, like producing too many cow farts!
This is not that difficult. It's just like what happened to physical fitness/obesity after the invention of the car. Go look at countries that do it reasonably well (ie not the US). Copy exactly what they do, wholesale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPUlgSRn6e0 [Not Just Bikes]
It's hard to imagine what kind of contortions someone would have to go through to come to this conclusion.
Not one word of copyright length, which is now effectively over a century long. Not one word of some of the most successful AI models being open source.
Commons encirclement, as the author is describing, has been happening since source code was labelled art instead of engineering and since lobbying efforts have been extending copyright terms. My view is that AI technology are trampling over the encirclement, which is why so many people are upset.