Disney is not just selling tickets to movies to make their money. They are selling licenses that provide the rights to watch, store, and use those movies (or aspects of them) in certain ways. One thing that that Anthropic didn't do is pay the publishers and authors for the right to train their models on the intellectual property. And that's why they have no place pointing fingers at Alibaba saying that they stole their IP.

I don't disagree that it's revolutionary in many ways, but I am seeing lots of companies make very costly mistakes by relying too heavily on AI without fully understanding the code it writes and without fact checking its outputs by a human.

Outside of some endangered species laws those limits on fishing are to support commerce around fishing.

My kids grew up with rats as pets, and in many ways rats are proven to be more intelligent than dogs. But rats and cockroaches are notorious for upsetting commerce. Would you go back to a restaurant you saw had cockroaches? Consequentially, they are less protected because they are seen as a nuisance.

And if you have ever seen an industrial scale pig or chicken farm, those animals are most definitely tortured -- all legally. Why? To support commerce and big industry.

It's complex because government contorts ethics to accommodate capital and industry. Morality also changes over time. These days many people who eat pork would not want to kill a pig unless it was absolutely necessary to their survival.

And prioritizing Consequentialism in AI, especially with weapons, is a dangerous bargain. "How do you make decisions when the consequences are unclear?" Since when are the full consequences _ever_ clear?

The same priority on property rights applies to trees. I can't cut down a tree on your property, but I can cut down a tree on my property. The town in the article made a assertion that is no weirder than corporations being considered "persons" with "rights", yet that is widely accepted in our society.

In fact, corporate "personhood" is even weirder: This town did not make a law to enforce trees rights. However, applying "personhood" status to corporations is written into law all over the place even though corporations are a human construct, not sentient beings. So, again, the only way the current laws are logical is to see that they are all about enforcing property rights, not out of concern for trees, animals, and -- at one time -- humans.

I am getting downvoted because it's hard to admit that AI only reinforces the culture that it is trained on. It is the perfect technology to keep systemic racism in place, all while being the perfect scapegoat for lack of personal or corporate accountability.

[0] https://research.google/pubs/the-role-of-visual-complexity-a...

I have to say, to your first point, that exploitation (of humans, labor, resources, consumers, etc.) has always been the primary driver of accumulating large wealth under capitalism. Sure, "innovation" sometimes has a role in softening the blow, but let's be real.

That was true in our grandparents' time... and their grandparents' time... and their grandparents' time. While their economies looked very different, the same structural incentives were in place and certainly did not curb unethical behavior one bit.

It has taken a long time for the piper to come for his full payment, but we can all see now that the world is burning, poisoned, and suffering as a result. We can no longer eat freshwater fish due to the massive amounts of PFAS in our lakes and rivers. The billionaires are trying to pretend they can escape the disaster by building their bunkers on remote islands or trying to colonize Mars.

I want to have some optimism in the newer generations to create positive change here, but I can't help but look at what happened to the idealism of the 1960s. The counter culture was right about the societal benefits of renewable energy, organic food, vegetarian diets, ecology, egalitarianism, civil rights, and more. But somewhere around Reagan many in that generation sold out and those great ideas were simply appropriated and fed back into the profit-machine that rewards exploitation. Today we have "certified organic" labels on food products, but that term has been watered down to almost nothing by the marketing departments, politicians, and lobbyists.

Anyhow, I obviously need to keep my pessimism at bay. LOL You have convinced me to give it a read!