Marx's Theory of the "Commons" Explains the AI Crisis | Hacker News Reader

Marx's Theory of the "Commons" Explains the AI Crisis

gpt3experiments.substack.com

5 pointsnutanc3 comments

Marxism doesn’t even explain how human civilizations have thought about property rights, let alone anything else. I am deeply afraid of the fact that so many move about as learned scholars and academics, but fail to discuss a comprehensive view of societal evolution up to modernity.

Consider that property rights have been a concept since Ancient Mesopotamia, and were definitely not something the English cooked up during Industrialization. People have entrusted resource protection and allocation to sovereigns or collectives for as long as people have moved around as groups.

Why is there an underlying assumption that there were any “commons” to being with? Everything belonged to somebody at some point, whether or not there was a legal contract which mitigated bloodshed or confusion is another thing. But people would fight to the death to make their claims over land and other natural resources, and that’s how things went till codes were developed to bypass that, and resolve disputes via exchange instead. I’ve never understood why Marxist start out with this underlying assumption, it’s a very self-serving narrative.

As far as AI is concerned, if it does turn out that AI can replace 50 workers with 10, then that just means that you can do that too, and the cost of production is lowered by such a tool. Isn’t then AI shifting the means of production to many except to the few? There are other work modes out there than just being someone’s worker, and maybe AI will enable those. I don’t know, it remains to be determined, but we’re better off making those kinds of work modes easier as opposed to wishing about turning back the clock.

Some reading for the curious, https://babylonian.mythologyworldwide.com/hammurabis-code-a-...

You can disagree with the commons definition, and thats fine. But the point I wanted to make was about the exploitation. The open Internet was built with a code of sharing. Now they are trying to put walled gardens around all that knowledge. Lets remove Marx from the equation if that becomes a bone of contention. But we as a society need to come up with better dialogues to decide how we will treat our creators and how we will deal with the AI copy machine. We cannot expect that profit mongers will do the right thing.

I understand your point, and despite what my (hastily-typed) critique shows, I find there are valuable kernels of truth in all types of ideas. The walled-gardens for AI are more to do with recouping the cost of model training, and there are currently no incentives for open sourcing some types of models. The new tool has knowledge of more than one type of domain, so its content is different from its source material, more or less. So while creators have a point, they lose it when it turns out the tool is capable of multi-faceted information synthesis. But what’s interesting to me is that creators are not precluded from using AI tools to develop more content, and that makes all the difference.

That said, I think it would be better if more models were open sourced, or if FOSS non-profits would buy GPUs and start their own model training program based on the currently released open source models. The commons argument doesn’t apply here if there are multiple open source models which contain information from hundreds of hours of GPU training which someone else has already done, and thus can be picked up by any open source organization to train on additional content for whatever is of interest. Some orgs have tried that already, but didn’t gain traction due to poor marketing and lack of funding, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EleutherAI. Maybe if there were government subsidies to encourage open source model release, or non-profit funding for setting up and paying for GPU farms for training models which could be used by everyone, then this type of organizational behavior would become more productive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com