Nobody Profits – George Hotz
geohot.github.io
geohot.github.io
What we lack today is a vision that the future doesn't have to be shitty.
It really doesn't.
In the 2000s, we had technical optimism. The change was when the ad-supported model took over. Tech became a force for manipulation.
I don't think the big change can come from simply open source without incentive. I could be wrong.
More traditional business models where the end user is the customer would go a long way against cynicism. As would non-VC models where tech can exist without profiting 100x or dying.
The only change that needs to occur is in culture. We just need to think that these models are worth trying and to talk about our success in them. There are many great examples of small tech businesses that are not cynical.
The end result is a productive 'race to the bottom' that Hotz is talking about. Lots of small companies competing with lower and lower margin and better and better products. A real market aligned with the customers. It's too bad he took VC so he cannot ethically participate.
Still, with a lot of his open software, he is an agent of the change he wants to see in the world. That's definitely worth something.
2. The productive race to the bottom is awesome but it also needs some changes to copyright/patents. Contrary to what Mr. Hotz thinks, they are not stupid, they are a good idea that has been utterly coopted and rebranded to maximize holder value (at the direct cost of total societal value). To fix it we need to change the law to require minimization of harm at a given increase in copyrightable/patentable output with wording directing the error to be on the side of less damage to non copyright/patent holders. Copyright is easier here than patents because copyright terms went full retard. We could cut them down to the patent term and I highly doubt we see more than negligible drop in creative output because most of the value is in those first 20 years for almost all creative works.
I agree with the premise that that comparison between Tiffany's and piracy doesn't hold, but
> It’s a lot more like taking a picture, which Tiffany’s probably encourages. Win-win cooperation.
That doesn't make sense. Pirating something means you gained the whole value of the product. In Tiffany's case that's not remotely the case. In fact, they will pay large sums of money to marketing companies to make sure you get a photo.
If the entire value of a product can be taken, there's no incentive for it to be created in the first place other than intellectual curiosity - as another commentator said: effectively academia.
Our society has never found a way to deal with digital products in a way that doesn't skew incentives
The Tiffany’s example is naive.
1. Tiffany in that case equivalent to a reseller that get stolen activation codes.
2. Pirating is more like stealing something that has infinite stock. But once pirated there’s also similar product (with infinite stock) at 0$ so the value of the product could end up being lower due and result decrease in sales.
I’m all in gain-gain but the example in his post is also incomplete.
But this is not really possible . People switch to identical products made by more ethical or value aligned distributors all the time.
Switching out music streaming services based on artist payouts, or banks based on their climate commitments, buying a game after pirating it to support development. I’m sure someone can think of even better examples.
You are describing mostly services, where the intellectual property of the product is of no interest to the buyer (e.g. the average Spotify user has no desire to access their codebase or recommendation engine).
Buying a game after pirating has no impact on the product you have today, you already own the intellectual property as is.
>... What’s shocking to me is how much everyone still cares about money
Sadly this is easy to say if you have enough of it to be happy - a lot of humans cant say that. (Saying this beeing happy ;))
In our current system, a box full of rocks painted to look like nickel can have the same monetary value as the actual nickel. See:
JPMorgan Had Some Fake Nickel https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-21/jpmorg...
Also the government can just make more money (i.e. to avoid defaulting), devaluing your own money in the process, like some sort of indirect tax.
He is not a moron to think that a boy in a slum has not to worry about money.
Most of us know the 'invisible hand' as the thing that sets optimal prices, but this monetization and extraction of value is also part of its work.
geohot should use language better imho - this idea of his is called a commons. And i do think that AI could be a commons. But as with most commons, there's always a tragedy associated with it.
Unless the gov't makes sure such a commons is kept clean, and available to everyone, this tragedy will always happen.
> Then people figured out how to monetize it. It was a race to extract every tiny bit of value, and now we have today’s Internet. Can this play out differently with AI?
But i think today's internet was better than back in the 2000. Now i have a video platform for which there's next to zero lag, plays high definition, and most importantly, free for me to use (not to mention it became a source of revenue for a lot of creators).
The old internet still exists, if one chooses to visit them. It's just like the wild west still exists, if one chooses to live that way. Except nobody _wants_ to.
So for the AI to be a commons, like the implied commons that the internet could've been, another entity would need to be solely responsible for, and regulate it.
For example, sunlight. Sunlight delivers huge value to society but profit to no one. According to your claims that is a “commons”. And according to your theory unless a government manages sunlight it will always result in a “tragedy of commons”.
But we can even extend this to human created stuff. Especially scientific and mathematical knowledge. Lots of knowledge has been created that benefits everyone but does not deliver profit to anyone. For example calculating the area of a rectangle or a triangle.
These things still fit your definition of a “commons” being things that “deliver huge value to society but no profit to anyone”.
or perhaps the tragedy hasn't happened yet. And in any case, humans barely harvest the sunlight at the moment. So it might yet happen in the future. What if by building a dyson swarm, the sunlight becomes owned? Would that not be a tragedy then?
> These things still fit your definition of a “commons” being things that “deliver huge value to society but no profit to anyone”.
And we get increasingly fewer and fewer of these knowledge today imho, thanks to a tragedy called IP law.
So i do claim that my definition of commons is inline with the idea of commons, and that tragedy of the commons can (and probably will) still happen.
There is little evidence that commons always have a tragedy associated with them. The term itself was coined in order to facilitate a transfer of commons from the communities which looked after them to the crown and the gentry. This process was called the 'enclosure'.
The degradation of the land was not due to the self regulating commons, it was and is due to the commercial imperative for continuous and rising returns on the capital investment. The commons version of the internet was great early on because there was no commercial imperative. Though the commercial imperative creates more throughout (just like with farmland), it also destroys the landscape and the communities which supported it.
This comparison is absolutely wrong. It's more like having a 3d scanner / printer that replicates the Tiffany merchandise to the atomic level at cost 0. Something that Tiffany will fight to death, if it existed.
This saying is just money motivated people assuming how the world works (when in fact all the worker bee's making the world work don't operate this way, just look how many at a factory put in extra effort to do their step right/better when there is no financial motivation, only satisfaction of doing things right).
Having a picture of jewelry is not even remotely close to having actual jewelry. When you pirate something you destroy its value, that's basic supply and demand. Sure, everyone has the stuff, but it's now worthless. Great for the consumer obviously but terrible for the producer.
It seems obvious to me that the value of a book teaching me something is not its price, and if that book was free it wouldn't be a worthless book.
insisting on monetary value as the only benchmark of worthiness looks to me as a kind of misguided religion of Capital.
"The neocommies still think in terms of dollars and paranoia. Manfred is so angry that he wants to make someone rich, just to thumb his nose at the would-be defector" - https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
I'm not certain trying to immanentize the eschaton is the wisest maneuver, but welcome to the agalmic future I guess.
The answer is that it is common sense. A worker created that thing, imparting value onto it, and they deserve to be compensated. Common sense to most people.
Except, I guess this is unknown to most, but this is the exact opposite of the stated theoretical underpinnings of the capitalist economy we live in. Which is that the value of a good is determined by what people will pay for it, as subjective theory of value. The idea that someone worked to put value into a commodity and deserves compensation is actually the foundation of Marxism. Most arguments about why "piracy", to use their PR phrase, is supposed to be wrong are at the bottom of things, Marxist ones.
This is why you are seeing lots of AI startups running up the application layer instead of the foundational layer which that has been reduced to $0 thanks to open source and free AI models.
Only a matter of time to see that as AI models get better, the so-called AI startups building on top of third-party AI model APIs will be easily copyable and not many of these startups will survive.
> Every loser and grifter will be gone from technology because there’s nothing to be gained there. They can play golf all day or something.
On top of that, the increase in so-called "AI startups" in the application layer are a mere survival of the fittest testbed for larger companies like OpenAI to see who is worth copying.
It is another scam.