In the age of AI, human super-intelligence, is extremely valuable. But yeah, just being intelligent? Not so much.
Just to illustrate, many have complained that big AI labs "buy" startups only because they want to acqui-hire the Stanford/CalTech/MIT PhDs who started it. Then they pretty much $#!t-can the rest of the people who were, to be fair, mostly just run of the mill UTexas/Umichigan/UofwhateverState TF/PyTorch monkeys. But the point is that in the old days, the second tier guys would have made out like bandits as well.
I think that was, kind of, the start of human intelligence becoming a winner take all game. The AI's only need to learn the latest and greatest from one person before they can leverage that value everywhere. And business is not likely to care too much about who that person is. They will care even less about the people who are not that person.
>companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever, before torrenting every book in existence themselves
No, but why should we accept they get away with it? Also Microsoft has definitely sued people for pirating windows and now collaborates with OpenAI and uses their ai trained on stolen materials.
Well, it's kinda converging, because Napster and Microsoft have teamed up to build a multimodal interactive video agent through a simple proxy API (this is a direct quote from Napster's blog post)
Morally speaking, one of the issues of modern society is the idea that knowledge should be free which was partially started by the file sharing movement, which didn't really move society in the right direction imo.
Free means the same as worthless, which inherently isn't true - since information takes time to consume in some form, and your time isn't worthless. Therefore even if you could listen to all songs theoretically for free, you would need to spend an inordinate time doing that.
When I was a kid, getting a CD from your favourite band was a major expense, getting a video game even more so. But it formed a sort of emotional attachment (and not even just for me), my friends talked about how 'band X''s new album was amazing or a stinker. Since there were multiple bands making similar kinds of music, choosing to be a fan of one but not the other carried real monetary weight.
Nowadays you just fish out a song you think you would like out of the endless sea of Spotify, no different from prompting an LLM. No, Spotify didn't make me enjoy music more.
Same applies for Steam & videogames.
Therefore I think the ritualistic act of paying money to get access to something does have a purpose. It inherently establishes the value of information to you, makes it an investment that you need to recoup by using it. I'm sure most musicians would trade a million fans who might check them out if they're in town, to ones who think their music changed their perspective in life.
Also the process of creating a song that vaguely appeals to millions is different from making one that speaks to a thousand.
This is a fundamental issue of modern capitalistic society, similar to the Marxist idea of 'alienation' - once something is cheap to get, you don't appreciate the effort that went into making it. And if your customers don't care about the thing they get, producers won't make an effor to make it good either.
And once nobody cares, people even forget what a quality product is like.
Interesting argument. At first sight it looks like an argument for scarcity, but I think it's more an argument for relationship - the value of art isn't in the capitalist concept of 'a for-profit content object in a corporate inventory' but in the social relationships and shared experiences it creates.
Without that, everything gets atomised into lonely individualism. You sit there with your headphones on listening to [Interesting band]. Not only do you not really care because you don't feel personally connected to the music - it's one of literally more than a hundred million content items on Spotify - but you're not sharing the experience.
This seems like the loss of a valuable thing which capitalist economics can't put a price on because it has no concept of value-created-by-shared-experience.
Superficially it's the same as 'sell-content-consumption-item-to-the-mass-market' but it's fundamentally not the same kind of thing.
The value is relationally both fleeting and persistent in ways that content consumption experiences - including live and recorded media of all kinds - aren't.
> Therefore I think the ritualistic act of paying money to get access to something does have a purpose. It inherently establishes the value of information to you, makes it an investment that you need to recoup by using it.
The same can be said for time. You said yourself it was an investment. There's no need for money to be involved since how much time you spend on a thing will establish the value of that information to you. If you must have a ritualistic act to form a connection to music, let it be the act of listening instead of paying.
Music discovery also takes in investment in time. Having near instant access to so much music also makes discovering a new song or artist you love very rewarding. I can easily listen to hundreds of songs before even one makes it into rotation in my current playlist.
> Nowadays you just fish out a song ... Spotify didn't make me enjoy music more.
Maybe change your perspective? Treat Spotify like a valuable audio lexicon. You read about an artist, a song, a time and immediately you can hear what is it about. Incredible!
If Spotify is only treated as a lazy background feelgood provider (while reading Marx;)), no wonder you feel that way. But it's your power/choice to appreciate it (or not), regardless of money.
Yes, I think this is the main issue. I don't care what policies the AI labs have or enforce, but they need to stop acting like ToS violations are an international crisis demanding intervention instead of a boring civil dispute at most.
How can it be "far-" when they have such a large voter block? What central point is being used as the mark that they are far to the right of, if not the average voter's views?
By that semantic argument, we needn't worry about the far right gaining power because any party that wins an election cannot possibly be far right. Genius!
It wasn't a semantic argument; it was a question, or two questions.
It's possible, in fact likely, that the Budesamt für Verfassungsschutz has a clear idea of what rechtsextrem (I'm guessing that's the term they use) means but I certainly don't!
Yes, that is the argument I'm making. If a party wins an election they aren't far-right; they are just right. 'Far/extreme/fringe right' would be the ideology that is too far right to have much acceptance. Maybe you could call it the new right, if it's much different from the right you're used to, but it's looking like AfD is no longer far right.
A man from the past might consider the current mainstream democratic party "far/extreme left" but that doesn't make much sense to say in present day.
>A man from the past might consider the current mainstream democratic party "far/extreme left"
Surely not. "Far left" would mean public ownership of the means of production and the abolition of the capitalist economic system. The Democratic party has never supported anything like that. It's centre-right party for the most part.
More generally, you're presupposing that the only way to measure the extremity of an idea is by the number of people who hold it in a particular country at a particular moment in time. We can also bring to bear a global historical perspective and analysis of the content of the ideas themselves. Far right parties want to bring about the end of the very liberal democratic order in which ordinary left/right political debate can sensibly take place.
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