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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

We've entered the lawless "Golden Age" phase of generative AI, sort of like sampling in the 80s and early 90s — IP be damned, tech über alles, full speed ahead.

AI has already begun eating the livelihoods of artists and other creators. It starts with defenestrating the defenseless starving kind, but will quickly progress up the value chain until it hits bone in the form of already-mounting legal resistance from apex creators and the corporate owners of the content without which the generative models would be impotent.

Interesting time ahead.

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I commend the likes of Adobe for providing training models that can stand up to legal scrutiny.

The more anarchist parts of the "AI" community (which is to say the majority of it) will very likely be in for a rude reckoning if they don't become civilized. Society can live without "AI", much less "AI" with no respect for peoples' properties.

But suppose the government dropped the hammer and banned any AI. Is it even possible to enforce? It kind of seems like the genie is out of the bottle here.

We enforce copyright law, even though the actual act of copying is technologically trivially easy these days.

>> But suppose the government dropped the hammer and banned any AI. Is it even possible to enforce? It kind of seems like the genie is out of the bottle here.

> We enforce copyright law, even though the actual act of copying is technologically trivially easy these days.

Exactly. Many software engineers have this weird misunderstanding of law that seems to come from misapplying mathematical standards to the legal system. A law isn't a fucking proof, it doesn't have to be 100% airtight, completely preventing all cases of the undesired behavior to work and be valuable.

>We enforce copyright law

Eh... "enforce-ish"

I'll make up an analogy on how we enforce it. Imagine that you're watching a bunch of unruly kids on a playground and you have a strict 'no violence' set of rules. The problem is all these children are straight out of hell and just love hitting each other as much as possible. You'd be physically worn out trying to cover lessor acts of violence your actual rule is "If there is bloodshed there is punishment"

That is more how enforcement of copyright actually works. You really, really have to screw up pretty big time for it to be enforced.

Now imagine the "Copyright Absurdism Universe". This is a place where any copyright infringement is immediately detectable by magic the moment it occurs. Do you think this universe would have anything even close to the laws we have? I do not believe so at all. Effectively it would cause society to fall apart very quickly since society and civilization are built on the sharing of all kinds of ideas including language and imagery where any form of copyright maximalism would cause people to be afraid to use any new ideas for fear of being fined by the owner of said ideas.

It's very possible to enforce when you realize most AI stems from a very select bunch of platforms, and even "rogue" AI makers rely on these choke points. In the current stage, enforcing a ban against current AI tools would be quite devastating.

For clarity, I'm not in favor of banning, just that we're still a very long way away from the genie being out of the bottle here. Maybe within the next 5 years if pace keeps up.

government could force nvidia/amd to add circuitry to their products to detect the linear algebra operations and slow down

in the same way it was done for crypto on gamers cards

of course this doesn't fix china but they don't have the technology anyway due to sanctions

> they don't have the technology anyway due to sanctions

that won't be true for long

The same way it was done for crypto and then cracked not long after?

> they don't have the technology anyway due to sanctions

As if they don't use shell buyers.

theres like 3 EUV machines made over a 3 year period

made by one company (ASML)

if you aren't Intel, TSMC or Samsung you aint getting one

I think the parent is implying that someone in Vietnam or Kazakhstan could just buy the finished product and drive across the border.

So the restriction is effectively an inconvenient tax.

how does that help if the finished product has been made to detect LLM workloads in hardware and slow down?

Assuming the detection is perfectly implemented, it wouldn't.

> Is it even possible to enforce?

Not a chance. But it can be added to the list of laws that everybody breaks all the time, that can come in handy when law enforcement wants to get you for other reasons.

You can't even draw a clean line between AI and optimization, so I don't think it is possible to enforce.

It’s next to impossible to ban outcomes. That’s why the idiotic war on drugs is all about banning ingredients for drugs, and still doesn’t work.

The only practical way to ban AI is to ban the hardware that makes it possible. Maybe ban silicon with more than X transistors, or ban clusters with more than Y total transistors.

It would be dumb and would not work (you can still AI on a one CPU, just very slowly). But that would be the angle prohibitionists would have to take.

Maybe this actually a good idea, then "AI" companies will say things like "It's not AI, it's Machine Learning" instead of everyone claiming everything they do is AI.

>Society can live without "AI", much less "AI" with no respect for peoples' properties

IP is not real property; it's fundamentally different in an economic sense. If you have an apple and I steal it from you, you can no longer consume that apple. If you have poem and I make a copy of it, you still can consume (read) the poem. The notion of IP is fundamentally incompatible with a free society, because it necessitates a huge apparatus for violence and surveillance such that if Bob memorises your poem and tells it to his friend without your permission you're able to notice this and punish Bob for doing so.

This is fundamentally incorrect. I'd also wager that more than 50% of the commenters on here benefit from robust IP protection.

While this is true, 100% of the commenters here also give up a "natural" right to copy certain information for robust IP protection. At the extreme end, this can result in absurdities like the attempt to ban dissemination of the DeCSS key for DVDs.

> give up a "natural" right to copy certain information

Practical as it may be, that's not a natural right but merely a physical possibility. More generally, the concept of natural rights - except for a very narrow niche of special subjects closely centered on the individual's own life and bodily autonomy - is a shortcut to total subjectivity at best. And even for that very narrow niche, the "rights" part is a normative civilizational convention/construct, whereas nature conspicuously ignores such "rights" (as do humans for the most part when it comes to other species)

Many here benefit from the industry and economy associated with IP, only a very small few actually benefit from ownership of IP.

Without ownership of IP, industry and economy don’t exist. You can’t sell or rent something you don’t own.

You haven't illustrated how they're fundamentally different, especially not in the context of "necessitating a huge apparatus for violence and surveillance", because guess what's happening when I can no longer consume that apple?

X has an apple, Y takes it from X (steal), X no longer has an apple. Economic scarcity is inherent in the apple.

X has an mp3 file, Y copies it from X (copy), X still has an mp3 file. Economic scarcity is not inherent in the mp3 file, it has to be artificially enforced.

Don't know how it can be any clearer than that.

Economic scarcity may be inherent in the service of creating the mp3 file, because it consumes time and other physical inputs. The "correct" and most straightforward way to sell services is commissioning - 1 performance, 1 payment.

Intellectual property tries to make the output of a service subject to the same attributes as a physical salable object, and the artifice in American law has a specific Constitutional purpose: to "promote the progress of science and useful arts."

Consider this: Let's say you needed a repair on your house - this is basically a "I want this, let me pay you to do it" commission arrangement. Imagine if you had to continue to pay daily for the "rights" of using the repair. Honestly this is promoting the progress of "useful arts" more than suing kids for downloading mp3 files that they wouldn't pay for anyway.

X has an orchard. Y walks through the orchard. X still has an orchard, but says "you have to pay me to walk there, it's my orchard". Economic scarcity is not inherent in access to the orchard, but X still argues for the artificial enforcement of exclusive rights over it, and must initiate force against Y in order to extract payment for walking on the land.

If you are arguing that there is something inherently wrong with using legal systems and implied threat of violence to extract fees for the use of services you have made available to the public, you are basically arguing for the abolition of nearly all of the modern day concept of property, not just IP.

> Economic scarcity is not inherent in access to the orchard

Interesting, but I'll counter and say it is, because there is only so much land. It doesn't matter any way because land cannot be copied like an mp3. Also I cannot trespass upon your mp3 and deprive you of a portion of its use.

The only way I can see a parallel to stealing is this:

- X pays Y to make you an mp3 in the future. - X makes the mp3. - Y is your friend and shows you the mp3 before it gives it to Y. - You copy it, and sell it to X before Y did at a lower price, or simply give it to X. - Now X doesn't want to pay Y any more.

but that's why contracts exist, so that X would have to pay Y anyway.

Of course the notion of property itself is an artifice, what makes an apple yours other than the fact you are holding it and no one is actively trying to take it from you--but physical property cannot be copied in the same way "imaginary" property can.

> If you are arguing that there is something inherently wrong with using legal systems and implied threat of violence to extract fees for the use of services you have made available to the public

Not arguing that. I am arguing that using the legal system to punish X for downloading an mp3 might be wrong, because that action has not harmed nor deprived the creator of the mp3 of anything e0xcept vague "might-happen" things that aren't based on explicit contract-like agreements.

Frankly, the sense in which a trespasser deprives landowners of the benefit of land is far less tangible and significant than the sense in which a counterfeiting ring deprives an IP owner of part of an income stream, except in the rare case the trespasser is blockading the entrance or deliberately aggravating guests

The point is that property law is based around enforceable exclusivity of rights, not around deprivation of use (and making a copy available for free does deprive copyright owners of some portion of their ability to use it as a revenue stream) and contrary to the suggestion up front both intellectual and physical property involve surveillance and [implied] use of violence in order to turn commons into a scarce resource which can be charged for.

the concept of physical property ownership is as artificial as intellectual property ownership

plenty of societies have existed without it

Possession is 9/10 of the law

Neither of these statements is true.

Physical property is zero sum. If you take something from me, I no longer have it. IP has zero marginal cost of duplication; if you take something from me, we both have it.

Physical property ownership is nearly universal, and is probably related to the way humans are more loss averse than gain seeking (losing $100 is more bad than gaining $100 is good).

There have been some societies with leased, or even no concept of physical property ownership, but those are exceptionally rare and can hardly be held up as equally aligned with human nature.

IP ownership, however, is recent and very artificial. The idea that any random person is prohibited from singing a song they heard or copying a painting is new to the past couple of hundred years, to the best of my knowledge.

It’s fine to be opposed to both physical property and IP, but let’s not equate the two as far as the history of the concepts goes. They’re very different.

For a long time whoever was stronger 'owned' the physical property. I assume you don't want to go back to that time, so now we have laws defining ownership. It's been decided to have these same laws apply to IP. You may disagree with that last statement, but I think it's incorrect to use recency or artificial as the argument when current laws are also the only thing letting many people own their physical property today.

> For a long time whoever was stronger 'owned' the physical property.

This is both still the case today and probably was never the case in the way that I think a lot of people would read that sentence.

Property rights have always been maintained, to some extent, through force. This is the case today. The state maintains a monopoly on violence and uses it to enforce property rights.

It's also true that humans, generally, hold some innate concept of fairness which leads to us generally respecting each others property. The use of violence was only ever to handle the edge cases as a last resort.

And "stronger" doesn't imply that the single physically strongest individual maintained ownership. Humans are social creatures who have always banded together and lended resources and support to individuals they trusted to be the most fair when making decisions. This only extremely rarely was the single physically strongest individual.

Great points. Thank you for expanding on that concept.

> It's also true that humans, generally, hold some innate concept of fairness which leads to us generally respecting each others property. The use of violence was only ever to handle the edge cases as a last resort.

You have the argument backwards. Even in the old times one would not go and occupy house in a village or milk others' cows not because of some innate concept of fairness, but rather because of genuine fear of backlash resulting in violence of other villagers banding together.

You can see the same thing in animal kingdom. Territorial animals do not cross into rival territories not because of innate concept of fairness (new leaders happily massacre offspring of previous leader), but rather threat of violence and resulting negative expected value of hunting in rival grounds.

Property rights exist primarily because of force. To some extent states exist in order to apply force on ownership rights

Control of streams of income from selling reproductions of something is clearly also zero-sum, and much physical property is non-rival. If I don't pay a toll on your bridge, you still have a bridge (of course you may not build the bridge if you are unable to extract tolls from it, but the same arguments justified intellectual property laws). If I stay in your apartment when you're on holiday, you still have uninterrupted enjoyment of your apartment on your return: the only thing you have lost is a possible income stream from selling it to others. A freeholder isn't even allowed to enter apartments whose freehold he owns without permission of the leaseholder; and yet he has the property right to extract ground rent and maintenance fees from leaseholders.

Modern world physical property rights - centred around permanent or fixed term tradable exclusive rights of economic exploitation - bear more resemblance to intellectual property rights than the relatively universal notion that people shouldn't have the stuff they're using taken away from them, as do the practical and moral arguments about people deserving fruits of their labour and being more productive when given exclusivity over them.

You’ve conflated ownership and rent. Once we’re into second- and third-derivatives (like A paying B for the exclusive right to rent property owned by C), it’s all more complex and blurs the line between real property and IP.

But at its heart, the concept of physical property ownership is fundamentally different from IP. The fact that there are hybrids doesn’t change that.

Most of "ownership" is the right to extract rent or deny others from using something. Arguments that the original owner now has the ability to use the thing and always did have no validity as a defence whatsoever against any sort of property crime, because modern ownership is defined by rules artificially enforcing exclusivity claims, not whether the original owner has the use of a thing.

If property actually pertained to owners not being prevented from using things, property law would be a very short set of guidelines entirely approved by the author of Property is Theft.

The fact that modern physical property law is - like IP - almost entirely about creating artificial restrictions on other people's use of stuff and the right to charge for its use obviously changes the concept that actually it's fundamentally different.

Send me your laptop then

I don't think you'd want it, it's pretty old

(I also didn't state I disagree with the concept of private property)

Ok but it’s only an imaginary concept until somebody wants to take your stuff.

"Intellectual property" is a fiction not bound by any sane laws of reality.

Meanwhile physical property is bound by the fact that you can't create new matter.

I think that's a little broad, IP should be divided further into:

- is there value in keeping it secret / not public? (e.g. commercial software, etc.)

- content, things that can be freely distributed without diluting the inherent value of the property

In the first case, I think it's analogous to not being able to create new matter. Once the secret is out, you can't put it back in.

In the case of content, I'm a lot more open about this but it does bring up all of the tricky questions of ensuring that content creators get paid for their work, etc. (another endless debate)

Societies had property ownership far more and far longer than "intellectual ownership".

One can argue "intellectual ownership" doesn't actually _mean_ anything; it's a sum of unrelated laws - copyright, patents, trademarks, all doing a different thing and protecting different customers

> because it necessitates a huge apparatus for violence and surveillance

What prevents Mallory from taking three friends, coming to your house and beating you with a $5 wrench until you give up the property?

The law.

The same thing that treats IP as property.

The law is is incapable of enforcement. It's the same "huge apparatus for violence" that backs enforcement of laws.

That's a little reductive is it not?

I'd like to propose a thought experiment. Suppose you own a house. One day you decide to go on a vacation for a week and like most people you don't do anything with your house during that time. You just pack your stuff and leave. During that week somebody else sees that your house is empty and comes in to live in it. They go through your stuff, watches your TV, maybe even wears your clothes. They're careful to leave before you get back home, and they leave it exactly as it was. In fact you can't even notice they were there. Has that hypothetical person violated your property rights?

In your model I'd argue they haven't. You haven't incurred any costs, and you didn't lose anything. Yet I'd argue that most people have some intuitive sense that your property right has indeed been violated.

If there is literally no evidence whatsoever - none, not even microscopic evidence - then no, it hasn't, and I'd argue that this has happened to your house every time you've ever left it. In fact, right now, there are people doing wildly inappropriate things in every room of your house you're not in, who disappear if you go look. Prove me wrong.

"If it walks like a duck"

Now, with physical items 'personal' entropy is an unavoidable outcome of the universe we live in.

Even more so, if physics behaved like your example, why would we have ever evolved to give a shit if someone came into our house and used it if we couldn't tell. In this universe society would have evolved to share much more freely because it would have been a massive benefit for everyone.

This is what humanity has a problem with now. We still have the ancient lines of thought that we live in a world filled with shortages and if we don't acquire as much as possible as quickly as possible we're going to die. Meanwhile technology has and is progressing to a point that everyone on the planet could have a perfectly nice life except for the fact a few of us want to own everything all for themselves.

All of my worries in your scenario come from cases where the premises of your hypothetical are violated: they break my stuff, they don't leave, they take things, etc.

(The more a hypothetical requires you to assume things operating very differently from how they would in real life, the less useful the intuitions it generates are.)

There are indeed plenty of problems with my hypothetical situation. The point wasn't to reason from the metaphor, it was rather to question the concept a little deeper.

The cases you propose all seem to relate to some "fear" or "risk" that your property degrades in value. I agree that those are real attributes of property, I wasn't arguing they aren't.

In reality my view of property rights is way more utilitarian and post-modern than i express in the hypothetical. I see property rights as a useful thing we made up to systematize and compartmentalize the messy universe we live in. In that system IP rights make perfect sense because it's useful to society that you can reap some benefit from dispersing good ideas.

> IP is not real property

Most Physical property is not real property either. It's all just legal voodoo to protect people's interest. The only real property is the one you can protect on your own with your own hands, everything else is protected by the law.

> If you have an apple and I steal it from you, you can no longer consume that apple.

The apple is usually the result of work, time, resources...

> If you have poem and I make a copy of it, you still can consume (read) the poem.

...and the poem is also the result of work, time, and maybe resources. IP exists, because the creators invests into them and need an return for this investment to make a living, and maybe next time can create something even better.

> The notion of IP is fundamentally incompatible with a free society

The general notion of property and laws is fundamentally incompatible with a free society. But we still need it because Humans are little greedy monsters, and somehow we all need to make a living.

I think one thing that is missed is that we do live in a free society and so when you disincentivize something there is less reason to invest in it professionally. If there is no IP and we have a free for all, why should I invest time and effort in creating non-physical creative goods as work? (principally: "a laborer deserves his wages")

It is magical thinking to think 'the government' can stop a truly revolutionary technology. No, the technology will change the government, not the other way around. AI is not the internet, not the mobile phone, not social media, it is the printing press, it is the horse.

The roman empire and its legions were replaced by feudal kingdoms and knights. The knights, armed with massive improvements in horse-breeding, saddles and horseshoes, became massively more powerful than previous types of soldiers. 500 knights, plus 10000 peasants, would have demolished a roman legion of 10000 expert and well paid soldiers.

Thus knights became their own social class, trained in warfare since childhood. Civilian based militaries absolutely could not compete, so societies moved away from imperial bureaucracies, into aristocratic courts.

AI will be the same. People who use AI intensely, will be far more productive than those who don't, and don't think politicians will be able to stop this. Trump merely mastered social media, and it made him the president, you have no idea how powerful a politician who fully exploits AI will be.

AI should be regulated, and people's livelihoods should be compensated to an extent. But if you think 'society can live without AI', then you'll soon find a changed society that can live without you. The rude reckoning will come for the people who think they can just regulate or ignore AI away, the wise know there's no turning back, and its time to surf the tsunami, for good or bad.

My issue with these projections is that they're so wildly ambitious yet so vague.

What does "mastering AI" look like to you? Do you mean "mastering the generative language/image/video models we have today?" Are you expecting further massive leaps in capabilities and mean to refer specifically to people who master those? You compare it to knights and horses, yet "hard power" technologies like that have obvious aspects that today's "AI mastery" doesn't. (As an aside, I lose track of your telling of history, it seems like you're saying knights replaced Roman Legions but also that they made civilian militaries obsolete, but you also say those legions were "expert and well paid soldiers" already?)

I'd also expect a lot of things to be more "reinforcing" effects vs "generating" effects. Trump, for instance, was already famous as both a big businessman and a television personality; lots of other people "merely" mastered social media and "only" got a bunch of money for it. Could Trump have become President before Twitter? Reagan did it... it took a slightly different path back then, but being famous is a REALLY BIG starting point.

I do not know what mastering AI looks like, revolutionary technologies like these can't be predicted that far into the future. But it definitely does not look like 'banning AI'.

The advantage of the knight, over the legionnaire. Was that one knight could crush 20 legionnaires (with support from peasants), yet supporting one knight costed far far less than 20 legionnaires. That's a military productivity advantage. The expertise and training of the legions were nothing in front of the full might of the warhorse.

Legions were 'trained', but its an on-the-job training, rather than something you aim for since 5 years old. Legions are recruited from civilians, knights usually inherited. All these social changes, because of the horse.

The printing press and the gun combined, cause the inverse effect. Bureaucracies became radically more efficient with cheap printed paper, and guns meant that a soldier trained for one year, could fight against knights trained for decades. Which lead to centralized empires, decline of the knights, and eventually the mass civilian movements and wars (French revolution, democracies, nazism and communism etc)

How AI's effects on society will turn out, no one knows, not even Sam Altman knows. But better to start using it and understanding it, rather than hoping it'll be something you can close your eyes and it'll go away.

Thanks for expanding on the horse stuff!

I also don't know what AI's effects will be, but ... that's why I'm not convinced it will be a "horse" vs a "printing press" vs an "internet" vs a "word processor/photoshop".

From my usage of GPT4 so far, that particular tool is most like "word processor/power tool," but I certainly wouldn't confidently claim that future developments wouldn't be more transformative. But I'm also not convinced they will be.

If we get a 'general AI' any time soon, I do not see how it could not be transformative.

Already LLMs seem really damned good at intent modeling and summarization. That alone is going to have huge ripples in society as we have systems that attempt to classify based on heuristics everywhere, and many of them break easily. It gets a little more worrisome when it comes human monitoring systems because now an AI system can take your audio/visual/textual data and easily (as compared to the past) figure out what your beliefs are.

When we reach general intelligence, that is human level reasoning, the person that can buy the most processors and connect to the most data has a significant advantage over any individual without said computing power.

Knights were a sign of decline, not progress. They dominated West European battlefields for a few centuries, because professional infantry did not exist. States did not have the financial and administrative capacity to have standing armies. They had to rely on local warlords and their unreliable webs of mutual support.

The Byzantine Empire continued to have professional infantry, because they were still wealthy enough and capable enough to support a standing army. They also had horse archers, which had been a key component of the army in the late Western Roman Empire but had almost disappeared in the West afterwards. And before their decline, their heavy cavalry also consisted of professional soldiers instead of individual warriors.

Professional infantry reappeared in the West in the late middle ages in the form of mercenaries. Then it turned out that pikemen were generally more effective than knights. While a charging horse is big and scary, it's not actually large enough to crash through infantry lines. If the infantry doesn't chicken out, the charging knight has to.

Pikemen alone are not good enough against knights. Pepper pikemen with skirmishers (bows + thrown spears), and they'll eventually break. The pikemen cannot charge the cavalry in open terrain, or they'll lose formation and get annihalated. If pikes worked well, the byzantine empire would have never needed cataphracts, just follow their Macedonian ancestors and revive the greek sarissas. Its pike and shot that pushed knights out. Only then did civilian armies have effective ranged options that could threaten knights.

Also the byzantine empire got eventually destroyed by the turks The byzantine government which relied on tax collector->emperor->soldier was less efficient than the simplicity of the knight->king structure of the turks. The more aristocratic Franks and Spaniards had no problems pushing back the moors, because turns out the motley crew of vagrant crusaders were more effective than an easily corruptable bureaucracy.

Pikemen dominated European battlefields after advances in infantry tactics made them effective. Pike and shot was a later development that replaced pure pike squares long after pikemen had ended the dominance of heavy cavalry.

The key development in the pike square was mobility. Earlier infantry forces using similar weapons had more rigid formations, with a single direction that was supposed to point towards the enemy. That made them vulnerable to outflanking by cavalry / skirmishers / archers. Pike squares drilled rapid turns, which made outflanking them much more difficult.

The Byzantine Empire remained capable and strong until around 1200, when a series of incompetent emperors destroyed it. In particular, one of them had the clever idea of using the Fourth Crusade in a power struggle against another. That resulted in the loss of Constantinople. While the empire eventually got its capital back, it never recovered. The empire that the Ottomans later defeated was only a shadow of its former self.

As for the supposed effectiveness of the Franks and Spaniards: the Reconquista was a series of wars from 718 or 722 until 1492.

The Byzantines where shocked when they first encountered knights in southern Italy in the 1000s. They where crushed by the Normans. Cavalry charging full speed ahead with crouched lances was a huge innovation. The norm since forever was for cavalry to approach orderly at walking pace to stay in formation. Horses really don't want to trample anything. The whole knight charge became kind of lost art later as we can tell from something like Waterloo where the cavalry faced the squares of infantry and the horses just started circling around them refusing to engage as they got shot down.

Military tactics don't necessarily scale. Knights where probably optimal at the 10k-20k army size range, but there wouldn't be able to scale to the size of say Alexandrian battle (47k vs 120k).

I assume you are referring to the Battle of Dyrrhachium. The new thing was not the cavalry charge with lances (which was a standard practice for the Byzantines as well) but charging with couched lances. That, when combined with specific changes in equipment, made the charge more effective.

In the bigger picture, the Byzantine Empire lost the battle but ultimately won the war. That marked the end of decline for the empire and started the Komnenian restoration, making the Byzantine Empire a major military power for the next century.

The cavalry charge became a lost art, because people learned how to counter it. Even during its heyday, heavy cavalry was vulnerable to feigned retreat tactics, possibly for psychological reasons. Byzantines used it to defeat Normans at Larissa a year after Dyrrhachium, and Mongols later used it effectively in their invasions of Poland and Hungary. And around the time of the Hundred Years' War, infantry had learned how to hold its ground against cavalry charges.

As I said, the innovation of the Medieval Knight was "charging full speed ahead with crouched lances". "Charging" cavalry, in that sense, was not a thing before. Byzantine Cataphracts fought like all known cavalry of antiquity: they didn't crash into enemy formations, they slowed down and attacked like infantry trying to maintain formation.

  The cavalry charge became a lost art, because people learned how to counter it

I don't know, mounted knights charging where dominant from the mid 1000s until around Agincourt (1415), that's a long time to find a specific counter. What happened imho, is that armies got big again to the point where the charges wouldn't scale anymore. Armies started resembling more the classical period: the landschneckts, and specially the Spanish Tercios resemble Alexander's armies a lot.

And as for being a lost art, the art was really in the breeding and teaching horses to trample through a formation. I imagine it would have been a useful resource in later periods, it's not as there where no <8k unit battles anymore. It's just that since that wasn't the META for the important battles nobody could justify maintaining such an expensive skill.

Crashing into enemy formations was not a thing, because it was not survivable for the horses. Because horses are not large enough to crash through 10 or 16 ranks of infantry, their momentum works against them. Elephants could do that, but not horses. Crashing through a loose formation was possible, as was making a dense formation panic and flee.

As I mentioned, the immediate counter to a cavalry charge was feigned retreat. It worked, because it looked very much like a successful charge. You charge, the enemy breaks formation and flees. You give chase, but you are a bit too eager and proceed a bit too far. Then you find yourself in a trap, exhausted and surrounded.

You mentioned Agincourt, but the Battle of Crécy (1346) was similar but larger.

"Society" cannot, because capitalism. If you want to stay in business internationally that is. Curious to see how we are going to compete without AI.

> Society can live without "AI"

Much in the same way society could live without electricity or the personal computer.

Electricity and computers are now deeply embedded into our society. AI isn't. Yet, anyway. So yes -- right now, if all AI vanished overnight, we'd be just fine.

Even if electricity and computers vanished overnight, humans won't just keel over tomorrow.

Humans won't go extinct -- but a lot of people would certainly suffer and die, at least in the nations that have become dependent on them.

For instance, if electricity and/or computers vanished tonight, store shelves would be empty of food in just a handful of days.

Surely, consequences of copying will hit china any day now.

And when the streaming industry collapses, the music labels will recover. This lawless local optimum for the masses, that is the market, will give way to a guild free monopoly.

Any day now.

Whose society and properties? Corporations ?

I'm asking because many corporations push copyright extension when it benefits (Disney) and then fight patents when it helps them too.

A famous supreme court case Alice Corp. v CLS Bank nternational should be looked at. https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2019/04/article_0006.h... Major tech companies like Google and Amazon wrote amicus briefs that were AGAINST patents because they had the money and power to stomp on the little guys.

"Civilized" really has no meaning when laws are bent constantly by corporations.

That's why it's important for lawless AI to be freely distributed. It may be legally banned, but it'll still be used widely.

Our current copyright laws are too aggressive already so why should I stop doing things that are legal just because some copyright activist demands me to?

They impose a century long copyright terms on me, and then have the audacity to demand me to stop training the AI to imitate the style of their movies - which is legal to do.

Do you think this will stop China from producing AI? The choice we have isn't to live with or without AI, it is to build AI or be crushed by it.

> Interesting time ahead.

I’m waiting for when The Mouse thinks some fractional percentage of generative AI-produced art infringes their copyrights sufficiently to take to court. With this generation of AI, “fair use” can be sliced and diced quite fine.

I thought the mouse already came after someone that was producing copyright infringing T-Shirts and selling them?

My suspicion is that they are currently staying silent and observing the field because they are interested in using the tech themselves. It would be kinda dumb to create a precidence which might paint yourself into a corner later on.

You don't need an AI for that.

> AI has already begun eating the livelihoods of artists and other creators.

Corporations have been sucking artists dry for more than a hundred years. I think artists are better situated than ever to make a livelihood from their efforts, and would be much more so if not for the entire live performance industry being sucked dry by ticketmaster.

I'm not quite sure of the impact of AI on any particular industry. Generative AI reduces costs and increases efficiency and means that I use a lot more art than I used to.

I can develop better software systems faster too. Does this mean fewer jobs, or more / better systems get built, where the bank teller has something as smooth as an Apple consumer app?

It all depends on a bunch of economics curves I have no idea the shape of.

One concern I have is capital costs: Up to now, a lot of these industries were a pathway to socioeconomic mobility. If jobs require a $1M farm of GPUs, they will become a lot more exclusive, and move value from labor to capital.

> If jobs require a $1M farm of GPUs, they will become a lot more exclusive, and move value from labor to capital.

Isn't hat move going to happen regardless of how much or little the hardware costs?

Up to this point, anyone anywhere in the world could buy a $100 notebook computer (~1/3 years' income for much of the world), take a few courses in Python or JavaScript, and find work for ~$10k.

Although this impacted a small minority, it gave nearly 100% of the people in the world a pathway to socioeconomic mobility. Although only a tiny portion of people will do that, this has a disproportionate impact; many of these pathways expand exponentially once started for a whole slew of reasons.

In other words, moving from mainframes to cheap PCs was democratizing.

This is potentially a major reversion.

A major difference now is that USA imperial power is on the decline. It will no longer be able to bully other countries into accepting its copyright laws.

History doesn't repeat but it sure rhymes.

I'm sorry, but who's there to challenge USA hegemony? China which is facing a massive economy crisis on the verge of recession/depression. EU just lost UK. Russia is... well, they officially made it legal to pirate western content, guess you got me there.

The USA has an economic crisis on its hands as well.

Also USA Hegemony starts with the Dollar. That is already starting to crumble amid developing economies' shift to other currencies for settlements.

Russia, India, China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia etc are all ditching the dollar for trade. They all keep dollars in reserve for trading,but now that they are ditching it, Those dollars aren't needed and will return to America causing inflation or some other crisis. https://www.barrons.com/news/china-brazil-strike-deal-to-dit...

Then you have follow on effects such Saudi's decision to cut oil. https://www.npr.org/2023/04/03/1167824124/saudi-arabia-oil-p...

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