Hacker News Reader

Comment by gustavus | Hacker News Reader

Intellectual property isn't.

The problem is that our society has no other viable widespread mechanism to support the many millions of people who do intellectual work, and lots of intellectual work is really important for our society-- far more important than would make sense to relegate to hobbyists and volunteers. And this is coming from someone who's contributed well over 10k coding hours to FOSS software.

> The problem is that our society has no other viable widespread mechanism to support

Except, of course, UBI.

We don't have that. Maybe we should, but we don't.

Yep. Order of operations matters. This isn’t a theoretical “future problem” for a lot of people.

Yup. It accounts for some 41% of the US' GDP, and a minimum of 47 million jobs. It's also growing at a fairly fast rate.

That's too much money for anybody in charge to let die. They're much more likely to nuke AI.

> minimum of 47 million jobs

What would you propose the US workforce did with some 47 million knowledge workers with suddenly useless skills if you removed the only widespread economic mechanism our society has to support them?

In my Star Trek-esque ideal world, post-scarcity sharing of the resources required to live.

Realistically, it's a part of the reason IP is "too big to fail". The fallout would effectively destroy the US.

Yeah but we need the Star Trek society first. In principle, I absolutely agree that IP is bullshit. The problem that many people in the “smash IP” camp tend to ignore is that people needing to eat, have a place to live, not having a stage 1 cancer diagnosis be an instant death sentence, and things like that aren’t merely “regrettable collateral damage” on the road to freeing data.

I’ve encountered many people over the years that hardline shit like that—they’re almost exclusively middle to upper middle class suburbanites that are edge lording that stuff to subconsciously quiet their deep-seated insecurities about how incredibly soft their comparatively unchallenged existence has made them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com