I took the steam deck on my last trip out of country to use on the flight.

There was a monitor, mouse and keyboard at my destination. I worked for several weeks and used the steam deck in desktop mode for me, and used remote desktop on it for work.

So I didn’t have to bring my laptop anymore.

Awesome little device.

By the way theft implies something taken. I responded by saying tech takes away jobs all the time. You suggested that providing services based on publicly available data is some how stealing is absurd. Nothing was taken away. So I tried to relate it to jobs. You said the commons are effected. Yet they are not, as nothing it taken away. You said that coroporations are the bad ones, but local instances are not - so I can run my own instances and do not use the corporate ones, so what was taken?

I just do not understand this as theft. It is absurd.

I stand by what I said. Your first paragraph said it too: AI is not theft. It just is math. The problem is not the technology: it is the corporate interests. So AI itself is not theft.

Buying all the local land in Mexico that previously were surf spots/fishing villages/local hangouts/town squares, and converting them to monoculture farms for export is a similar idea where corporations leverage government to the detriment of people and environment. But we cant blame the technology, its the rampant corportization.

So we are not that far apart, but the issue is not math. It is how it is used.

Yes it is the same. Its always the same. New technology changes how people work. How is the new math any different? Its just a new technology. We are not that far apart, you and I, I don’t think.

I am just saying AI is nothing specifically, or significantly, different than any other technological invention in any other period of time. Nothing was stolen or taken away that hasn’t been the case every time something new is introduced. It all leads back to the beginning when humans fucked over themselves by inventing a solely owned system of agriculture.

My examples are very real, and were very talked about at the time: you ignored the fact that typesetters were displaced by digital layout and printing. Including all of the machine manufactures, the ink chemists, designers, the repair technicians, the photographers, the dark room developers, the plate makers, etc. All of those jobs went away due to technology. Still I do not see that as theft, its just change.

Tell me, what is it called when you take something without compensation or consent and use it to profit to the absolute detriment of the creator, owner or rightsholder? Such as what? What exactly is getting taken away? What should be compensated? What does someone have to consent about? Are you suggesting that if I learn a tune on my guitar then play around with that tune and create a new one based on what I learned I owe somebody something?

Weird that you bring up the commons, yet the sentence above sounds like you want to make sure no one every shares anything with anyone else and kill culture. But I dont think that is what you mean at all, you mean to say you do not want culture sold back to everyone, right?

Yes I was referring to the 40s. Another real world example was the loss of a job as a data entry person when the clerks/order takers/agents were not allowed to actually use a computer. Those jobs went away. I still cannot see this as theft because that word has specific meaning and I do not think it applies. A tragedy of the commons that says people cannot be creative without compensation? So what about the compensation. That is my whole point. The being tied to money for survival I suppose is theft of free will, but that happened long before AI came about.

And that is the issue: AI in corporate hands does not steal anything. It just changes things, and gives us more of the same bullshit we already have.

And saying I have crappy arguments is not helping you case to make up mythical ideas about how AI is somehow stealing.

So you are saying automobiles stole the whip makers jobs. Or movable type stole the scribes job. Or the Word processor stole the secretary’s job. I simply do not buy the argument that changing technology is theft, it just is what it is.

Its like you are conflating two arguments.

I fail to see the theft. I only see change. Livelihoods have changed since forever. What we do from here is a problem, but it is not theft any more than everything else. I mean unless you want to go back to the source of all the problems: agriculture which kicked off the whole damn mess in the first place.

I still do not see that as theft. Or at least no different than theft of labor like a company store.

Corporate dominance, commercialization, exploitation, something along those lines. But that is the same as everything else, AI is not specifically the issue.

Then again I was listening to Knowledge Fight and frankly the fact that people will believe DNA has antennas, or that a team of people on Real World cannot solve “what is 27 divided by 3” does not leave me much hope for us anyways. They tried and ran out of time saying it was unsolvable. Maybe we get what we deserve.

I don’t buy the theft argument. Was reading books to my daughter to help them learn how to read theft? When we were working on parameters in the 60s to help a computer identify a balloon vs. a dog, was that theft? The corpulent (edit: LOL I guess that word works here in the “we have abundunce” sort of way, but I meant copyleft) side of me says if you put something out in public spaces, people are going to learn from it. If you don’t want that, don’t share it.

But even beyond that, parameters of learning are not copying, they are examples to develop data points on. Or in the case of imagery and something like stable diffusion it is math formulas developed in the 40s on how to make noise and then reverse that. Is that copying or theft?

I am willing to have the argument that AI is full of pitfalls. And that corporate control is not a good thing. I am struggling to see this theft.

I have exactly the opposite experience. Google has gone to shit, and duckduckgo gets me there faster 90% of the time. Plus the results are short and concise, or immediately helpful.

The SEO of the internet has really fucked googles algorithm. At least with duckduckgo I can end the search with !g to switch to google if I need a second go, but you cannot !d in google.