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Comment by pnut | Hacker News Reader

Possibly controversial opinion, but this'll have to be revisited within 10 years. It seems inevitable (to me) that the near future looks like a heterogeneous mixture of natural and artificial intelligences interacting on a level footing, enforced by legal protections.

LLMs as an interface subcomponent of a larger system are surely already being prototyped, and it's a matter of time before agency emerges. In any case, most of our systems, and definitely how we manage intellectual property, are basically obsolete and require wholesale revisitation, so this is our institutions still protecting status quo until forced.

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Please explain how agency is "just a matter of time". This is a pretty big statement you're just assuming to be true. I have seen no indication that current autonomous systems could achieve agency, or that anybody even considers that a development goal.

Also, I think it seems clear that LLMs and other generative models are poised to strengthen the moat of status quo beneficiaries. I'm not sure if this decision weakens that impact, but generative models are not the tools of the "little guys".

Obviously I am speculating and have not personally solved the problem of agency, but it's a common feature of basically all life forms, so probably boils down to survival pressure or something similar.

If it was easy we would have solved it a long time ago. Most lifeforms doesn't have language so language isn't a part of agency. People have tried to make game bots that have the intelligence of ants but they can't since it is hard. Ants solve many very hard problems with their tiny brains, there has to be something relatively simple we are missing there, but finding such a simple thing is often hard.

> he near future looks like a heterogeneous mixture of natural and artificial intelligences interacting on a level footing, enforced by legal protections.

using LLMs as tools already covers this.

But to your wider point, now that google have licensed most things, or have arranged some sort of deal with large IP creators, the whole "boo hiss copyright" movement has died down. This means that unless its in the interest of google, or some other exceptionally rich corp to water down IP laws, nothing much will change.

I suspect that the only thing will change is how data is licensed for LLM creation.

> In any case, most of our systems, and definitely how we manage intellectual property, are basically obsolete and require wholesale revisitation

I completely agree, but don't underestimate the power of the ones who own most of it to lobby in their favour for the decades to come.

That combined to a trend towards relocation of supply chains, more expensive energy, resources etc. makes me think that we will see the value of physical capital increase in proportion.

As someone who believes that patents and copyrights should be abolished, this is a great first step. If AI can do to innovation what it did to Chess where it made even centaur matches pointless, within a short time a significant amount of inventions will be unpatentable and public. In 10 years we can work to abolish the minority created before AI took over.

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