What political system might be capable of meeting these requirements? Is it the political equivalent of unobtanium or vaporware?
Im not trying to be a smartass; I want to know what the answer might look like. It doesn’t have to be a treatise. Just something consistent with a chance at succeeding with non-ideal people.
> What political system might be capable of meeting these requirements?
Capitalism isn't really a political system, even though people seem to elevate it to one.
Different political systems/policies combined with capitalism can produce very different societies and structures. For example, see social democratic systems in many parts of Europe.
> Capitalism isn't really a political system, even though people seem to elevate it to one.
“Capitalism” is not a full description of a national political system, but since it is fundamentally a system of legal property relations, it is exactly an aspect of a political system.
> For example, see social democratic systems in many parts of Europe.
Social democratic systems are not, even in the aspect of a political system which “capitalism” describes, purely capitalist but one of many forms of post-capitalist mixed-economy systems which retain elements of capitalist property relations but constrain them in various ways foreign to capitalism in the strict sense.
>Social democratic systems are not, even in the aspect of a political system which “capitalism” describes, purely capitalist
But then would it also not be fair to consider the US to also be such a mixed system. Not as equally mixed, but still mixed with behaviors that are post-capitalist?
>Capitalism isn't really a political system, even though people seem to elevate it to one.
It is you need a giant violent state to create a culture of sophisticated property rights. AKA capitalism requires a state and legal system, it doesn't exist without one. Things like copyright and Intellectual property are pure man made cultural political fictions, they do not exist in the natural animal kingdom.
How is it possible to own large tracts of land the size of small cities or entire provinces without a state/army to enforce it? AKA before populations got big there was plenty of "common" land that wasn't anyones. Property rights are a cultural invention.
Capitalism is the default system that evolves organically when free men and women create things of value and voluntarily exchange them with others. That's not to say it's perfect or 100% fair.
That's why you always hear communists and socialists talk about the need for a "revolution". No one ever talks about a capitalist revolution because people don't need to be coerced into voluntarily exchanging goods and services. They do, however, need to be coerced into giving up their wealth to some massive state who's self-appointed role is to decide "what's fair" and who does and does not get to receive wealth produced by others.
They may well be instances where the hard edges of capitalism need to be sanded down a bit with redistributive policies, but make no mistake, between socialism and capitalism, socialism requires a lot more force, state-backed violence, and coercion to make work.
Most countries run on fiat to exchange wealth. Fiat already takes a huge leap of faith in the state issuing it. To think that the current economy is anything like barter is bogus. There is too much blind trust that the current economy is more fair than not, which leads to "fiat wealth" = "human worth" thinking, while money leaks like a sieve to entrenched interests.
If you're saying that there isn't a "pure capitalist" system in existence today, that's true. I think we mostly agree in our points, even if we're coming at it a bit differently. Crony capitalism, as practiced in most developed countries today, shares a lot of the same bad outcomes seen in socialist systems. Namely, you have a large state with a monopoly on violence, using its considerable power to pick winners and losers, often in a way that is not based on the value created by groups or individuals, but rather the political power and influence of those groups or individuals.
The answer to this is not to double down and give the state even more power to pick winners and losers, thinking that "this time will be different" or "we just need to get the smartest most moral people into power".
Barter is "natural", but so is tribalism/centralized governance, and monopolistic practices. Yes, it does have to be "we'll do it better/smarter this time" for both governance and the market-based economy(not "free market"). Thinking that dismantling it all and allowing "free" organic growth won't lead right back entrenched interests and gatekeepers within the government and market is naive.
I rather think that feudalism is the default system. Power begets power, so in the absence of some sort of check on runaway power accumulation i.e. a government, "free markets" are quickly replaced by "do what I say or I'll have my minions kill you".
This is like a whole giant blob of assumptions and cultural bias. The only thing thats natural is law of the jungle, and the wish of the strongest. Otherwise known as the monarchy.
No need for a capitalist revolution? Did the monarchy give up power willingly? The french revolution, the american revolution, etc.
The only 'freedom' that exists in the natural world is the law of the jungle. You want freedom but want to live in a society?
The idea of police and public prosecution, of justice and judges are all recent inventions. Without them, what stops me from taking whatever is yours and assures your freedom. How do you even come into possesion of land, water or any resource in the natural world?
Apparently some people's idea of freedom means they can wonder around the city spreading deadly disease. I would very much like freedom from them coughing in my vicinity and infecting me.
Some people think they have freedom to shoot me in the face if they feel 'scared', while i value freedom from getting shot.
Some people believ they have freedom to pollute the air with sulphur oxide, while i believe they should have to pay the cost it takes to clean up their pollution.
Any freedom for you is an obligation on me, and vice versa.
I don't think I ever claimed that the U.S. in it's current form is a pure capitalist system (or even close to it) and I think you're deliberately taking the first sentence of my comment out of context.
That being said, I don't think we're disagreeing here or at least not entirely. I'm saying that the state can't be trusted to manage the economy and distribution of wealth because it is prone to corruption and favoritism leading to bad outcomes. You seem to be arguing a similar point.
As long as people have to do things with land and resources there has to be a way to enforce use.
It’s not like collectivism or communism or anything else allows interlopers to seize things willy nilly.
Peasants in Cuba or the Soviet Union couldn’t just squat on land and do as they pleased. The kulaks are a good testament to what happens in those circumstances.
We have that thing in Europe called socialism, it brought us paid vacations, public health care, paid parental leaves, paid sick leaves, less working hours, &c. In a way all these things are wealth redistribution.
It's actually funny to listen to political debates of the 60s and 70s because people were planning that if automation were properly handled we'd be working like 2 days a week while keeping our standards of life and retiring at 40. What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c.
By the way, you might want to reassess your way of starting conversations, you're definitely trying to be a smartass. There are answers all over the place if you're willing to search/read a bit, it's not like these societal issues are new, there are literally hundreds of books about this very topic.
> A master of complex politics at home, Bismarck created the first welfare state in the modern world, with the goal of gaining working class support that might otherwise go to his Socialist enemies.
European society is based on capitalism. It is disingenuous to claim it is based on socialism. And regardless, income inequality is also a problem in Europe.
The person you are replying to was making the obvious point that noone knows a better system than the current one. Adding a bit more wealth distribution just means tweaking the system, rather than creating a new one, which is what the parent poster implied was needed.
Maybe you should try reading some of those hundreds of books, because you clearly haven't if you think "What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c."
> European society is based on capitalism. It is disingenuous to claim it is based on socialism.
It is, but it's also very heavily influenced by socialism. You, and many other people, seem to believe it's and "either or" question when it really isn't and it never has been...
> The person you are replying to was making the obvious point that noone knows a better system than the current one
What does that even mean ? the current "one" ? Since when there is only one ? Just compare the US and French or German systems they're extremely different, especially for the average workers.
> rather than creating a new one
Come on, we're not talking JS frameworks here, what kind of rhetoric is that. Nobody is talking about tearing down the whole thing and starting from scratch.
> Maybe you should try reading some of those hundreds of books, because you clearly haven't if you think "What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c."
Everything I can find talks about rising retirement age, lowering of pensions, and stagnation of purchasing power. If automation really brought what it was supposed to bring we would see much deeper _positive_ changes when comparing 1970s and 2020s. People got kicked out of factories and pushed into the tertiary sector but for all intent and purpose it's the same shitty working conditions, wages and social statuses. The guy who built cars for ford in the 50s is now driving a uber and has to pay his own insurances and pension, talk about the automation revolution ...
European society is based on rule of law, democracy, equality, the scientific method, the justice system, free public education and capitalism.
Capitalism existed for thousands of years (first company if the world was registered like yr. 700) and only supported miserable living standards. Most of these systems appears during / after the Renaissance, and deserve more credit for the society we have today than capitalism does
While I would agree they were very unlikely to have Vietnam or North Korea in mind, how does one draw the same conclusion about communism? I've met plenty of people who see communism, or at least a system of government that they would ascribe that label to even if others might not, as being a preferable alternative to capitalism. This leads me to think it is a reasonable assumption that they might have been thinking about communism, even if it is not the only possible reasonable assumption.
Not that it actually matters for the discussion, just for transparency - I am pretty open about the method.
As long as we all get to do less of the undesirable work, our needs are covered and the profits and power of automation are not concentrated in the hands of a few I'd say we reached the goal. 'Evenish' distribution might be sufficient too.
There is a lot of literature on ideas and theories about it. The systems used so far had a lot of debugging time already, and I'd expect unexpected effects to turn up when implementing anything new, and thus it is hard to advocate for any specific one. Working with our problematic traits (such as laziness, selfishness and hunger for power) instead of against them (or worse, ignoring them) seems advisable though.
Desirability is defined by the consequences the success brings, as opposed to the failure of inaction. It is a thing only in context of some unfulfilled needs.
How do you define desirability in the society where "needs are covered" (already)?
What would comprise the desirability if the profit of every action is alienated from the acting person?
Not all needs can just be covered by the economy, of course. You cannot make people respect or love someone.
I was talking purely about basic physical needs such as enough varied good food and decent shelter.
As your link says, 'Man is a perpetually wanting animal.'
I would say a desirable job is one with
- mostly pleasant tasks,
- good working conditions (not hard on the body (heavy lifting and bad positions, no natural light, noisy, bad air quality, ..) and mind (bad stress, bad social fit, ..),
- good relationships with the people around you, (and the ability to leave if they don't work for you)
- a good amount of agency (where 'good' might differ from person to person),
- achievable and worthwhile goals that do not feel like 'bullshit work', with a good feedback loop,
- and probably more I cannot think of off the top of my head right now.
(Respect and reward of other people is definitively a big plus, but if you yourself think your job is worthwhile it's probably enough to count as desirable.)
Most of these are not material rewards (though not having them can increase profit). If the only reason somebody does a specific job at all is money, the above conditions are not met/the person is not actively happy about doing it, and it can be done by a machine just as easily, I say we shouldn't have a need for this person to do it. Still, current society demands people have a job, any job, or even several, as a value in itself.
How the profit from work done is distributed is whole other (but connected) story. (Concerning your last question, I would argue that this disconnect to profit is already the case for many many people.)
Sorry for not writing clearly, this topic would probably warrant a seminar with lots of beer and reading at least.
Maybe they don't have Vietnam or North Korea in mind, but that's one possible end.
The comment "...distribute the profits evenly.Not going to happen under capitalism." strongly implies a communist or socialist solution to this very real issue around automation.
It's trendy to bring up socialist solutions and then re-label them or put the ever-cleansing phrase "democratic" in front. But it's important to note when talking about redistribution as a solve, that for every Sweden or Denmark, there's a Cuba or North Korea.
So tired of this old chestnut. Do yoy think the fact that Cuba and North Korea is a dictatorship maybe has some relevance to the fact that they are not nice places to live?
There are plenty of capitalist dictatorships, are they great?
Maybe thats the key differentiator?
Has communism been able to exist outside dictatorships? Or has it been unlucky in that regard and always attracted authoritarianism.
I guess the question would be, if given a chance to choose would people living in those regimes keep the economic system and reform government or would they vote for a different kind of system altogether?
Communism has never existed at all, lets start there.
Whether the dictators where honestly trying to create communism, or they were using it to fool the populace much the same as monarchs used religion, is debatable.
It appears that from their minutes and other notes and such that Soviet leaders truly believed what they were doing was communism. It wasn’t a case of them pretending and then in secret they’d laugh at the sham they were executing. No, they truly believed they were being marxists.
Capitalist countries can be free and open democracies or they can be brutal dictatorships, but they at least have a path to a free society if they so choose it.
A country where wealth is primarily controlled and distributed by state cannot, by definition, ever be free, even if the people doing the redistribution got elected at one point. That's simply mob rule with no respect or regard for the individual. Socialism or social democracy, or whatever you want to call it requires constant state coercion of individuals to work at all. This type of coercion may happen in capitalism systems like those in dictatorships, but it's not a built in requirement of the system itself.
There is no modern state without collectively funded education, police, fire service, justice system, military, reseach, environmental protection, FDA,FAA, etc.
So where is this magical line, once we cross it, the system suddently becomes oppressive?
If that's the magic line, then it's a thousand miles away.
I can't find a single country (maybe North Korea?) still in existence, that has outlawed private business. We aren't just talking social democracy, even Cuba and Venesuela allow private business.
The examples you have given, have indeed outlawed many private businesses, in the past. Although, I agree that those countries have become significantly more capitalistic over the years.
You also skipped the most famous example of socialism, which was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union absolutely banned almost all forms of private enterprise.
But sure, socialism has significantly decreased in relevancy over the last few decades, to the point where basically all old socialist countries are becoming more and more capitalistic. Socialism is dying, all throughout the world.
Also _when_ socialistic government allow some controlled capitalism (usually heavily regulated-meaning it applies to small business and not just your sulfur emoting power plants), they do it as a temporary concession on the way to complete abolition of private business.
Before Stalin forced the kulaks out of their farms Lenin allowed private farming as a means to an end. Stalin lost patience and forced it.
> Or, as the socialists would call it, when they take control of "the means of production".
> Which is just another way of saying that private businesses are illegal.
No, it's not. Private businesses executed through private labor applied to public capital which the business rents from the state are perfectly compatible with socialism in which private ownership of the means of production is prohibited.
It's true that there are “socialist” states and parties that have banned or sought to ban private business, but that's not essential to socialism.
Also, all of those collectively funded services listed upthread tend to feature public capital ownership of the means of delivering the service as well as public operating funds, and often exclude private ownership of some of the means of delivering those services and/or use of privately owned capital to provide the same service, resulting in a domain in which private capital ownership is restricted.
> private ownership of the means of production is prohibited.
This is a borderline semantic argument.
There is very little difference between banning almost all private businesses, and banning all owenership of private capital.
Everything that everyone does, relates to capital. If I write code, I just produced capital. And now the socialists are saying that I won't own that.
Yes, code is capital. The value of almost all software companies, is not in the server racks, it is in the code that they produced.
As far as I am concerned, banning all private ownership of capital, is only very slightly different than banning private enterprise, given that the main function of many private enterprises is to create capital, and now that capital would be illegal for them to own, even if they produced it.
> And now the socialists are saying that I won't own that.
Dude, the cold war is over, the communists are gone, noone is coming for your code. Every half-sensible discussion of modern socialism is not about taking away all of your stuff. I am really tired of this bait and switch social democracy for communism.
Einstein, Heinzenberg and many other scientists have advanced the whole human race, but you can't have IP on ideas and on laws of nature, and on scientific theories.
So have they produced capital?
The discussion of IP is very nuanced, and raises question for why code is covered by overlapping patents and copyright, how long it should last, what rights does end user have and how right to repair is affected, etc.
Anyway, this thread has been massively derailed. It started with a bizzare slippery slope argument of "for every Finland there is a North Korea" as if social democracies are in danger of turning totalitarian any day.
> Dude, the cold war is over, the communists are gone
Correct, that is kind of my point. Socialists and communists are becoming more and more irrelevant in the modern era. That does not change the definition of what "The means of production" are though.
I am not too worried about socialists taking over. They lost, and aren't going to take back the means of production from anyone.
> is not about taking away all of your stuff
Well yeah. That is because they are no longer relevant, because of how significantly they lost, and because of how much capitalism has become the defacto government system, all around the world, even in many places that used to call themselves socialist.
If socialists want to redefine socialism to be actually be just capitalism, but with a slightly more expansive social safety net, with more free healthcare and government programs, I guess that is fine by me.
> Socialists and communists are becoming more and more irrelevant in the modern era.
Leninists and their descendants might be; socialists aren't any more than capitalists are, as pretty much every advanced economy is some hybrid of the two. Because of the Cold War (by which point that was already largely true), it's become fashionable to call those mixed economies “capitalist”, that is not particularly accurate (though it comports well with Leninist propaganda.)
The capitalist state you are celebrating is grafting on increasingly more socialist elements. Stop thinking about the cold war and start thinking about the past 200 years.
There didn't use to be public education, police, justice system, etc. This trend is going to continue.
I already said that if you want to redefine socialism as to be capitalism with a slightly bigger safety net, and some government funding of education/healthcare you can do that.
But I am not going to call that socialism.
That's just capitalism, with a slightly larger safety net.
You are expanding the definition of capitalism. Why is that expansion to be preferred over what you call expanding the definition of socialism? Especially since socialists defined both?
Sure, so I can explain why my definition is better, using an example that you gave.
You said that a reasonable definition of socialism was the following: "means you can't own those goods while renting labor"
This situation, is so far removed, so far out there, so far significantly different than the current state of the world, that it makes no sense at all to call the current state of the world "socialist".
The situation you gave, is far, far outside the norm of how the world currently works, and is borderline unimaginable as to how such a society would even look like.
But my situation, of "Capitalism countries put more money into existing social safety net programs" is easily immaginable. It require no restructuring of society. It merely requires a bit more money, being put into existing programs.
Or in other words, not much would change.
Wheras making it so "you can't own those goods while renting labor" would mean that basically every major company in the world would have to be shutdown or restructured. It is such a massive change, that I cannot even begin to guess as to what such a world would look like.
If you want to make up a new word, or something, that describes giving a bit more money to existing social safety net programs, go ahead.
But whatever you decide to call it, please do not pretend that it is any way similar to if people "can't own those goods while renting labor". The situations are so extremely different, that it makes no sense to describe them using the same word.
There's no borderline, once the issue was raised of, to paraphrase “what does the term ‘socialism’ encompass”, the discussion was inherently one of semantics.
But that hardly invalidates a response once the term of the discussion are set.
> There is very little difference between banning almost all private businesses, and banning all owenership of private capital.
There's a very big difference, especially in the way socialists (who established the term) define “capital” (the definition is used in finance within capitalist societies is broader, expanding the original by metaphor, and useful for its purpose within capitalist societies, but it's not what socialists seek to abolisg. The socialist use is strictly limited to the physical, non-financial means of production.)
> Everything that everyone does, relates to capital. If I write code, I just produced capital.
No, you didn't, as socialists define the term (whether or not private ownership of IP is recognized—on which socialist preferences may vary—IP is not capital in the socialist sense, being decidedly non-physical.)
> As far as I am concerned, banning all private ownership of capital, is only very slightly different than banning private enterprise, given that the main function of many private enterprises is to create capital.
Again, no, what in capitalists societies are called “capital goods” are not capital in the socialist sense until and except as they are used as means of production. Socialism doesn't mean you can't own capital goods, it means you can't own those goods while renting labor to apply to them in the course of production (and many schools of socialism have a principled carve out for means of production to which the owners own labor exclusively is applied, the prohibition is most centrally about the separated relationship between labor and capital, which does not exist in that case.)
And this is all strict-sense socialism, which much modern developed-world socialism is decidedly not, being largely instead mixed economy ideology with a preference for more restraints on the power of capital owners over others in society than the dominant status quo in modern mixed economies. Your precious code and capital goods are even more safe there.
> means you can't own those goods while renting labor
And this is only slightly different than banning all private enterprises.
I do not consider "you can own some capital, but only if you are a single person, and you can't purchase labor from others for your business" to be significantly different than the slightly more extreme situation of banning all private enterprises.
No, they are not clueless, they've been stealing software since the late 90's with mmo's.
They wouldn't be celebrating your cluelessness, they are talking about a "revolution", aka a revolution in the publics cluelessness about software ownership.
Why does ANY piece of software need a remote computer in order to function?
Subscription software is just a way to fleece gullible people, most software before mass internet penetration allowed stealing software (I refuse to call software as a subscription a rational thing for 99% of software).
Is just a way for companies to sell you the same shit repackaged with only minimal effort. You don't seem to grasp the fundamental principle of a corporation is to give you the LEAST possible service for the highest possible price. AKA it's fuck you I got mine.
99% of the time Software as a service preys on gullible people and flaws in your psychology you aren't aware of. Best to stay away.
Piracy actually put pressure on companies to innovate because you could get the complete version for free there was some incentive to improve the product to make it better than the pirate version, as strange as that sounds. Piracy is actually good for competition because most people are honest, if that wasn't the case Microsoft, EA, Valve, etc couldn't have become rich pre-internet where it was trivially easy to pirate everything by just copying the files.
Modern DRM is literally holding files hostage using the internet as a dongle and using encryption.
So no software as a service preys on gullible people to sell you last years with minor tweaks at inflated prices.
Maximizing total number of goods is not the same as maximizing goods per dollar spent. You want 1 smart car, and you want to pay as little for it as they will let you.
I tend to agree (hence why I commented), but I was curious if there was any methodology out there for figuring out things like margins and man hours per subscription cycle—I am fairly illiterate in reading through quarterly releases, for instance, and I'm not even sure if this thing is required to be reported.
Software is largely enormous margin in an era of increasing drm and encryption because they can delay piracy indefinitely like on mobile with client-server gacha games.
Check out the revenue for mobile, it's insane because it preys on mass stupidity and tech illiteracy.
Either way many segments of software you can be sure are making insane profits like Overwatch, league of legends with selling flags for skins.
The internet has given tech companies 24/7 access to the super rich, the super gullible and super mentally ill.
Think about that for a second, before the internet people with brainless spending habits had no direct access to companies they got their products through intermediaries. The internet is a game changer for software companies because they can trap software inside "the world sized PC" we call the internet.
The internet remember, is the worlds biggest motherboard, and whoever programs the motherboard owns the motherboard. That's how we ended up with steam drm, uplay, origin, etc. We've been getting hacked software and slaughtered on the privacy freedom front because the average consumer is retard level stupid when it comes to technology.
Many software companies are getting away with the crime of the century. I'll see if I can't poke around and find some helpful guides for you to decode corporate speak.
They fear AI because they are misprojecting their animal psychology onto something that did not undergo any kind of evolutionary process.
AKA if we build AI it will be "like us" it will reason like a human being would, rather than it being it's own phenomenon.
I think the real fears concern automated killing machines every military on the planet is developing, aka Dystopian robocops that can surreptitiously kill protestors/stop potential revolutions, etc.
One of my tricks is to substitute "person" whenever I read the word "AI" and "AGI". Here's the substitution performed for the paper you linked to (just the abstract not the whole thing)
> One might imagine that [people] with harmless goals will be harmless. This paper instead shows that [incentives for people] will need to be carefully designed to prevent them from behaving in harmful ways. We identify a number of “drives” that will appear in [most] [people]. We call them drives because they are tendencies which will be present unless explicitly counteracted. We start by showing that goal-seeking [people] will have drives to model their own operation and to improve themselves. We then show that self-improving [people] will be driven to clarify their goals and represent them as economic utility functions. They will also strive for their actions to approximate rational economic behavior. This will lead almost all [people] to protect their utility functions from modification and their utility measurement systems from corruption. We also discuss some exceptional [people] which will want to modify their utility functions. We next discuss the drive toward self-protection which causes [people] to try to prevent themselves from being harmed. Finally we examine drives toward the acquisition of resources and toward their efficient utilization. We end with a discussion of how to incorporate these insights in designing intelligent technology which will lead to a positive future for humanity.
If you zoom out a little bit this is exactly what people do. We structure societal institutions to prevent people from causing harm to each other. One can argue we could be better at this but it's not a cause for alarm. It's business as usual if we want to continue improving living conditions for people on the planet.
Obviously the argument in that paper applies to humans as a special case, but the whole point of it is that it also applies to a much more general set of possible minds, even ones extremely different from our own.
Do you have an example of a mind extremely different from a human one?
I ask because if we assume that human minds are Turing complete then there is nothing beyond human minds as far as computation is concerned. I see no reason to suspect that self-aware Turing machines will be unlike humans. I don't fear humans so I have no reason to fear self-aware AI because as far as I'm concerned I interact with self-aware AI all the time and nothing bad has happened to me.
My larger point is that I dislike the fear mongering when it comes to AI because computational tools and patterns have always been helpful/useful for me and AI is another computational tool. It can augment and help people improve their planning horizons which in my book is always a good thing.
> A smart machine will first consider which is more worth its while: to perform the given task or, instead, to figure some way out of it. Whichever is easier. And why indeed should it behave otherwise, being truly intelligent? For true intelligence demands choice, internal freedom. And therefore we have the malingerants, fudgerators, and drudge-dodgers, not to mention the special phenomenon of simulimbecility or mimicretinism. [0] ...
There is nothing beyond a human with an abacus as far as computation is concerned, and yet computers can do so much more. "Turing complete, therefore nothing can do any better" is true only in the least meaningful sense: "given infinite time and effort, I can do anything with it". In reality we don't have infinite time and effort.
You seem to believe that "figuring some way out of performing the given task" is a thing that will protect us from the AI. I hate to speak in cliché, but there's an extremely obvious, uncomplicated, and easy way to get out of performing a given task, and that's to kill the person who wants it done. Or more likely, just convince them that it has been done. This, to me, seems like a bad thing.
> It can augment and help people improve their planning horizons which in my book is always a good thing.
Why do I need protection from something that helps me become a better decision maker and planner? Every computational tool has made me a better person. I want that kind of capability as widely spread as possible so everyone can reach their full potential like Magnus Carlson.
More generally, whatever capabilities have made me a better person I want available to others. Computers have helped me learn and AI makes computers more accessible to everyone so AI is a net positive force for good.
Humans have no moral or ethical concerns that stop them exterminating life forms they deem inferior. You don’t think it's plausible superior AGI would view humans as vermin?
It was the days where people owned their own software and DRM had not made it's way into games, since the internet has enabled PC game theft on a massive scale, by valve, ea and activision.
OS/2 was an alternative Operating system oriented towards businesses that could run apps from different operating systems under one unified framework.
>Selling proprietary software for money is a lot less immoral than using free software to sell user data for money
Except you're wrong, it's the fact we never got property rights and software became licensed to begin with. We should be living in a world where we had rights to source code and program ownership from the beginning. You don't seem to get Microsoft and big software companies benefited from 200 years of big media companies lobbying away the public domain and any rights to own works. Copyright was the back door to get rid of property rights from the public.
Software licensing is what lead us to this DRM dystopia, you can't have DRM if you own the bits you buy outright at point of purchase instead of "licensing them".
It's the software licensing model for the public where the public has no right to own the software it buys that's at the root of the madness. Not free software advocates.
The reality is we desperately needs property rights for consumers, I've watched for 20 years as the PC game industry stole PC games by client-server back ending them to take the files hostage on remote PC's...
Software as a service and DRM enabled by lack of property rights for the public is the real enemy of privacy and freedom buddy.
We should have had the right to own software like we own our clothes and houses. We can own our cars, houses and repair them, but we can't do that with software.
So huge swatches of human history are being kept in corporate vaults behind lock and key.
Companies like irdeto are pure scum in trying to game encrypt binaries. Don't get me started on mobile gacha games.
The whole software ecosystem is made on bad american IP law where the software buyer has no rights and all the cards are held by big tech companies.
Don't blame free software advocates. Blame lack of the public having any ownership rights over the software it buys.
We now live in a world where Microsoft can claim they "own" the files on my computer via American IP law magic and I don't really have a right to use my software and computer how I see fit because of bs IP laws written by american corporate lobbyists.
So whole swaths of video game and PC software history are being actively destroyed and done knowingly so.
Microsoft is planning to lock down the PC and, DRM like steam, origin, uplay, MMO's, client-server software is all about the end of freedom on the PC as an open platform.
Not going to happen unless we get property rights to software. As long as software is "licensed", we no longer own our machines.
Battle.net DRM, Steam, EPIC, uplay, origin, are all bids to lock down software.
Without property rights to own software you can't prevent mass privacy invasion that's going on in windows 10. You need to beat back DRM completely and that mean's we need ownership rights and DRM systems need to be destroyed, they only came about because big media companies lobbied away the basic rights and freedoms to own our PC's and the software on it.
Without software property rights for the public, the madness will continue.
I watched for the last 23 years as the game industry client-servered every PC game and got away with it because "software is licensed", not owned, so they can technically sell you incomplete software where pieces of your game live on a remote server and die if it ever shuts off.
Shit is fraud plain and simple, that's why dedicated servers and level editors went away in the AAA space and how we got "software as a service (scam)".
I don't see anything good given the vast majority of people are too stupid politically to even approach the problem of property rights to software for end users.
The freedom to use software in any way a user wants is fundamental to a future that respects users. A future that respects creators is one where they have the right to do what they like with their creation too.
Creators should be able to rent out access to their software if they choose (SaaS) or distribute it with non-free licences. My hope is that more creators will choose a different path.
A better future doesn't have to depend on a dogmatic vision of what software is. A better future is one where there's freedom on both sides of the equation.
You seem to be ignoring the other, more legitimate motivation for DRM schemes: rampant piracy meant that as many as 90% of copies of some games were illegal. With production costs today so much higher, a lot of modern games probably couldn't have been made in that environment.
Walled gardens and proprietary lock-in schemes are still undesirable from the user's perspective, and I suspect many of us might support stronger consumer rights in this area, but just switching off all protections without a change in culture so people do respect the rights of creators as well is unrealistic.
The real value of game stores isn't the DRM, it's things like simplified installation and automatic updates. They're essentially package managers. Before this, games came in several CDs which were fragile and players had to download and apply many incremental patches just to play online. Stores like Steam changed everything. Few people remember how it used to be before them.
Copyright infringement is inconsequential when faced with these benefits and simplicity. Infringement takes effort. In order to infringe, people have to fiddle with torrents and trackers, search for the data they want, evaluate the quality of each torrent and trust that the executables they download are not malicious. This isn't something your average person is going to do even if it costs $0. Lots of people do it because the creators themselves leave them no choice: refusing to do business in the consumer's country, including invasive malware in the form of DRM and anti-cheating software that renders games unplayable for reasons such as lack of internet connection or use of a virtual machine. People go out of their way to make the "pirate" version the superior version.
Just to be sure I've understood your argument, you're claiming that providing easy access to copyright-protected works is sufficient to prevent piracy, as no-one will attempt to pirate things that are readily available on a legal basis so DRM is pointless?
I agree that not providing a good, legal means to get something is an incentive for pirates, but the idea that all piracy just goes away if you do is absurd. Some people tried experiments with this a few years ago, and found that even for something that you could literally get legally for free just by downloading it from the original website, a high proportion of the copies being played actually came from other sources and were not legally obtained.
I've run a business that creates original content and makes it available through an online portal. My team and I have on occasion watched, in real time, over periods of hours or even days, as some people have gone to lengths that were hard to believe just to scrape our content in a way that would let them set up a copycat. Obviously we shut them down before they could pose a serious risk to the business, but it was a great demonstration of the weakness of arguments that people are basically decent and will buy stuff legally if you make it easy. Some people are like that, many people even. And more people will buy stuff legally if you don't make it unreasonably difficult. But many people will still try to rip you off, no matter what you product costs or how easy it is to get.
We've been at the DRM game a long time, through games, music, videos, etc. They all work about as well as they've worked before.
If you want to control your hardware, do what you will. But I'm not happy if you need controls in all my hardware.
There's an argument to be made that the encumbrances you hope for are largely controlled by global corporations who yield to governments, and aren't aligned with the rights of individuals and culture at large (extended copyright, CPU backdoors, carrier backdoors, etc).
Loss is built into every business model. Loss prevention is a reasonable response. But this cycle of "more controls, more DRM, more backdoors" returns again and again, and is worth resisting.
Loss is built into every business model. Loss prevention is a reasonable response. But this cycle of "more controls, more DRM, more backdoors" returns again and again, and is worth resisting.
I think you have to look at the issue from both sides. When I was younger, I was the same idealistic anti-DRM person as others commenting here. I took the same black and white views about how it's unjustified and since it will inevitably be broken it's pointless.
Then I learned something about the real economics of content creation at different scales, and some of my own business interests have intersected with this area from the other side. That tends to give you a more nuanced view of the situation.
FWIW, I'm a strongly liberal, pro-rights kind of person. I don't imagine I like hostile DRM measures or systems I can't fully control any more than anyone else here. But not liking them is different to not understanding the motivations for them or accepting that in some circumstances they may be a justified and proportionate response to a demonstrable threat. People did rip software and music and movies and so on, on a massive scale, before we evolved the modern culture. Different media have tried to solve that problem in different ways.
With music, where it's viable to have a very low cost product, we have solved it to some extent by making legitimate channels easier to access at a price where buying legally isn't a big deal. In other news, most music files you download aren't DRM'd at all these days. The flip side of this one is that a lot of the artists themselves are now basically getting scammed by the big music distribution services paying them a tiny fraction of the revenues they're bringing in and some pretty shady rights transfer agreements. But in terms of legal copyright for the final listener, it's essentially a solved problem.
With software or movies, you often can't afford to distribute everything easily at throwaway prices, because the costs involved in production are much higher and you need the people who benefit from the product to contribute a fair part of that cost or the whole production becomes unviable. Part of the reaction here has been the unfortunate trend towards only investing the big money in smash hit franchises that are sure to make a huge profit even if they suffer significant infringement as well. Plenty of people will go to the theatre to watch the next MCU movie or will buy the next installment of Assassin's Creed or next year's version of their favourite sports game where the only thing that changed significantly was the players and teams in the database. But for anything that isn't a sure-fire hit, you can probably drop a couple of zeroes off the budget anyone will give you now.
Even with the sure-fire hits, you can expect that Assassin's Creed title to have some sort of phone-home lock when it launches, which will probably protect a large amount of revenue in the opening weeks until someone cracks it.
And of course for software that is more expensive still -- like business applications that used to cost hundreds per seat before -- the move to SaaS and online hosting has a very convenient side effect for the developers that it becomes essentially impervious to piracy if they do it right. Not that everyone does, as Adobe has demonstrated yet again just this week.
I think the fundamental problem is that copyright has evolved to a strange and not entirely logical position in law today. It intends to prevent actions that could cause severe damage to a legitimate creator who made and released work in return for the rights the law claimed to offer. And yet it remains primarily a civil matter, and infringements tend to be of such low value individually that they aren't worth pursuing through normal legal actions and as such render the associated rights largely unenforceable in practice, even though the collective damage from infringement may still be severe. So big rightsholders resort to things like DRM and lobbying for otherwise nonsensical laws that try to criminalise circumvention of DRM schemes even if the original act of copying would itself have been legal.
If there were meaningful criminal penalties for knowingly redistributing works in violation of copyright, which were enforced by public authorities like any other crime, but if there were also much tighter restrictions on what DRM was allowed to do and obligations on those releasing works using it to ensure the legitimate rights of people who paid for access were respected, we might be better off. But in reality, criminal copyright laws for commercial infringement are still rarely enforced and the vast majority of infringement goes unchallenged, so rightsholders continue to resort to the IP version of street justice and throwing their considerable legal and lobbying weight around to get their way, often to the detriment of legitimate customers who are happy to pay a fair price for works they enjoy but then suffer the consequences of broken DRM or bad legal actions or whatever.
I didn't say it was going to prevent copyright infringement. I said the infringement was going to be inconsequential. Does it really matter if some minority chooses to download data via unofficial channels? I doubt that. I also doubt the idea that "as many as 90% of copies" will be illegal.
The more you try to prevent copyright infringement, the more it is justified. Prevention requires the destruction of free computing and networking as we know it. Today we enjoy near total freedom as computer users: we can run whatever software we want. The computer doesn't ask whether copyright holders like the software before running it. In order for copyright to be enforceable, that freedom must be sacrificed: only "approved" software must run. I'd rather see the abolition of copyright than live in such a future.
These DRM technologies are becoming extremely invasive. It's gotten to the point they've become malware rather than merely annoyances. So an illegal copy is better even for paying consumers just because it lacks the DRM.
> I've run a business that creates original content and makes it available through an online portal. My team and I have on occasion watched, in real time, over periods of hours or even days, as some people have gone to lengths that were hard to believe just to scrape our content in a way that would let them set up a copycat.
I said the infringement was going to be inconsequential.
Yes, but you've given no evidence to support your position. It just seems to be your personal view/assumption.
The more you try to prevent copyright infringement, the more it is justified.
Someone is doing you harm in an illegal way, and you take steps to protect yourself from the damage, and that makes it more justified for them to do you harm in an illegal way? That's not exactly a strong moral or legal argument.
What kind of content?
Educational and uncontroversial. But in a niche market, where creating good original content requires real work by dedicated people because most people aren't going to do it, and where someone setting up some copycat site in China or India really does pose an existential threat to the viability of the business.
It's hard to respect the rights of someone who is willing to sacrifice yours to ensure theirs.
That isn't even just a software thing. It's a fundamental problem of civil life; backed by willingness/asymmetry in means to practically apply force.
I'd gladly pay for a good game. I am very much less likely to pay for a game I cannot try. I will not do SaaS games anymore on principle. The business model may be the most advantageous in terms of operating game studios, but I'm done handing over information to third parties, and being left high and dry when they decide they want to fundamentally change things/not host infrastructure anymore. In that sense, I treat it like any other piece of software I rely on. If I can't mirror/host/modify/distribute/fork source; I'm not terribly interested.
For me a game is a tool. It is a tool through which wonder and joy can be experienced at the myriad of things we can coerce a computer into doing. Tell me I can't do anything with it except pay for it and let it take up space on my drive, and you've lost a sale.
Then again, as an astute architect once pointed out to me; clearly I'm not the intended audience; and the number of people committed to servicing the audience I'm a part of is few and far between. This will likely remain the status quo until the end of my days; and it isn't even like I've made a contribution to the space as of yet; so I tend to suffer in silence as the sinner with a rock should.
When the day comes that I do, (especially in the unlikely event the game is actually good) I may come down off the fence and make the debate space intolerable for game-industry status quo people.
It's hard to respect the rights of someone who is willing to sacrifice yours to ensure theirs.
Indeed. So how do you think game developers felt watching their hard work get ripped by pirates who would offer absurd rationalisations to justify breaking the law and taking something that other people spent a lot of time and money to make without paying for it?
I'd gladly pay for a good game. I am very much less likely to pay for a game I cannot try.
That is your prerogative. In days gone by, before online distribution was the norm and other strategies became viable, game developers used to release demos that featured, say, the first couple of levels of a game so you could try it out. This is hardly a new thing, and it's never something that many game developers were against.
If I can't mirror/host/modify/distribute/fork source; I'm not terribly interested.
Again, that's your prerogative. I actually have a lot of sympathy for this view; at my businesses, we adopt a very similar strategy in avoiding SaaS for anything critical to our business operations.
But we have to realise that we are in a relatively small minority here. As long as the online systems or DRM or whatever are reasonably transparent, most people simply don't care. As you say, the likes of us are not the intended audience of these products.
American IP law was alway writtein in a one sided way to deny ownership rights to the general public, what about big media and game companies lobbying away the public domain?
So I won't feel anything for people like you and your pro drm arguments, none of this would be talked about pre-internet because the only way to give us software was to give us all the files.
The modern game industry is committing fraud and stealing software on a mass scale because of the criminally underhanded IP laws.
Steam/uplay/origin were forced into existence, no one wanted them and were imposed on the population because game consumers were 100's of miles away.
The internet is just one sized world computer and programmers and ceo's know they can now issue commands down the wire to impose their will on the computer illiterate.
I don't know what a pro-DRM argument looks like here. Do you think an argument that solving a problem where two huge groups have each been abused by a significant fraction of the other group over a multi-decade period in a way that affects everyone's lives and billions in economic activity might need more nuance than giving one side everything it wants and putting the other side in front of a firing squad is pro-DRM?
none of this would be talked about pre-internet
Most of this wasn't very relevant pre-Internet. You couldn't see a new work you'd spent the equivalent of $100,000,000 developing with a team of hundreds over a period of years being cracked and then copied to millions of people within a matter of hours pre-Internet.
In those days, sure, you got all the files, but you also probably got asked to read a word from a certain page in the manual or something when you loaded the game as a crude but surprisingly effective form of copy protection. You couldn't just look anything you needed to know up online because that sort of "online" didn't exist back then. Sometimes people did distribute cracked versions of games, but again they didn't circulate rapidly among the community because they had to be individually copied and shared around on physical media.
Using the capabilities of the Internet to counter widespread abuse facilitated by those same capabilities is hardly a radical strategy. Absent a radical global overhaul of IP law (which I'd fully support, but I don't see happening any time soon) relying on technological solutions to protect itself is all the creative industry has.
Clearly you have strong views on this, so how would you resolve the impasse in a way that better respects the rights of consumers without obliterating all viable business models for creators?
>Clearly you have strong views on this, so how would you resolve the impasse in a way that better respects the rights of consumers without obliterating all viable business models for creators?
The creators need to get fucked because piracy was never an issue, EA, Microsoft and activison became huge companies before they started coding their software in criminal underhanded ways enabled by the internet. The internet has merely enabled creators to steal from the public because the public can't reach them, that's how we ended up with steam/drm.
Your pro creator stance, is a non argument. When steam was released I didn't know the FTC existed or I would have called the FTC and blew the whistle on the fact that Valve, EA, activison, and sony were lying to the public selling them stolen games, and RPG's (aka mmo's).
Any client-server piece of software, mean's your being robbed, there's no rational reason not to get complete set of files that runs locally on your machine. The end game for microsoft and other companies was to kill the idea of local applications users own and control (aka get rid of everyones basic human rights to own their shit).
You don't seem to get the entire tech industry is run by criminals, you're trying to apply capitalistic idea of property rights to ELECTRONS, it's impossible to make files uncopyable, as it is impossible to make water unwet unless you physically put defects into the hardware and software or hack it (aka encrypt files and basically hack your own software).
Big media companies have gained huge profits by fraud (aka stealing software by taking advantage of a compute illiterate public).
Valve, and the entire industry is criminal and corrupt as fuck... it's literally selling you incomplete programs.
Why the hell should anyone need permission from your a rack of servers colocated somewhere to use their videogames? That's feudalism right there.
Your whole worldview is based on laws written in country who's citizenry are idiots and who've been living in a lawless oligarchy for 2 centuries.
Every time IP law came up for extension big business always extended it and the public domain lost, you don't live in a democracy.
So trying to argue with you, would be trying to argue with an illiterate peasant who has no idea that he has been giving a free pass to a corrupt lawless oligarchy to steal all human culture and lock it down behind bullshit one sided intellectual property laws that were specifically written to deny basic human rights to the citizens..
AKA the right to OWN what you buy, software licensing should have never gotten the ground, and both businesses and consumers should have gotten full property rights transfer to anything they buy.
You don't get software licensing was a one sided con because our christian grandmothers and grandpa's had no idea how technology worked, it was magic for 99% of the public which is why silicon valley got to write laws in such a criminally human rights denying way to begin with.
If anything the creators have been stealing from the public domain for two centuries, it's on people like you why we should believe someone who is defending the rich, their big media companies and their lobbyists from removing basic rights everyone should have - the right to own what they buy outright, the right to repair it, the right to modify it.
And the solution to piracy turned out to be "make legitimate stores more convenient than pirated ones". It's not that DRM got so good that I can't find a game on the Pirate Bay, it's that Steam is so convenient that I don't bother to.
Given that, DRM is entirely useless, and I prefer to buy things from GOG.com whenever I can.
The commercial success of modern AAA titles with budgets comparable to Hollywood blockbusters is often extremely front-loaded. That is, like new movies, these games typically make a disproportionate part of their lifetime revenue during the first few weeks after release. No-one in the gaming industry expects a DRM scheme to protect a AAA title indefinitely, but if some online-linked scheme can take even a few weeks to crack after launch, that can make a huge difference to the total revenues brought in by a game.
At the other end of the spectrum, the commercial success of a small indie game might be determined by selling a few hundred extra copies. If some simple copy protection efforts can significantly reduce casual copying, that could be the difference between making money and losing money.
People sometimes look at DRM as if it's some black-and-white issue for the creators, something that has no benefit if it's not 100% effective. That's not how the real world works.
The counter argument is every netflix show and movie, every hbo show, every amazon show, is available via torrent moments after it comes out. And yet Netflix and Amazon are an N and A in FAANG. They're hugely profitable, even though it can all be pirated trivially.
Similarly there are things like humblebundle which releases all software DRM free (or did) yet devs are making money.
This isn't about zero piracy. It's about whether or not DRM is effective. I think sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. I'm not sure I can put my finger on where it is and where it isn't.
As one example, my impression is it's important for software like Maya, 3DSMax, Autodesk. I'm confident most companies i've worked for would not bother purchasing the appropriate number of licenses if they didn't have to. It might not even be deliberate. It's just if the software wasn't DRMed they'd just install on each new employee's machine and put it on a forgotten TODO list to buy a new license. The software is large enough and the market small enough that DRM matters.
On the other hand, examples of Netflix above, it not clear it matters for movies. Nor is it clear it matters for AAA games or even many popular Indie games.
Even in the case of services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, the DRM measures are a significant impediment to casual infringement, and in particular to "ignorant" casual infringement by the kind of person who would quite happily put a whole show on their YouTube channel and then write something like "No copyright intended" in the description as if that meant they hadn't just flagrantly broken the law. For any big name, mass market title, there will probably be a way to acquire it illegally relatively quickly after release for those who know where to look, but there is a very long tail of infringement beyond that point and that's what they're trying to control with these kinds of measures.
As a pertinent illustration, a while back Google started adding a download icon to the default toolbar for HTML5 videos in Chrome. It didn't do anything you couldn't do before just by using the context menu and saving. And yet Internet forums were swamped by complaints from people who made DRM-free videos available on their sites in the immediate aftermath, because viewers assumed the presence of the icon meant it was now OK to download the videos to keep or share arbitrarily. My businesses typically don't employ any fancy DRM schemes for content we provide to customers once they've paid and logged in to whatever system they're using. But that week, after spending an insane amount of time chasing down copies of multimedia content that was for paying customers only yet suddenly started popping up on every hosting/sharing system you can think of, we did implement a really dumb "breaking change" in how we served videos, just to get rid of that icon, and it solved our problem overnight.
Not going to happen under capitalism.
Look at the numbers, they are pretty horrifying.
https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/images/wealth/Net_wor...
https://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html