aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
8mo ago
Speaking of work, what is/was your line of work? It may just be an engineers mindset but when I hear a critique of some fundamental part or tool I'm using I have two concerns.
- is this critique true
- if it is true what is the alternative and is it better than the downside being put forward.
Part 2 is pretty important because if no alternative is actually better than the tool itself then it makes step 1 pointless. If there is not an actual alternative to ownership then why should I care about your critique of it? It's like putting forward a critique of how much trouble it causes that humans must excrete waste. You can say tons of bad things about our need to excrete waste, it smells, we must do it at inopportune times and it's processing requires much effort. But as this practice cannot be eliminated we must make peace with it and the infrastructure and sewers must be built, damn the cost.
Ownership means people must be deprived of some things. It's not alone in that downside. The need to breathe oxygen and inability to survive at extreme levels of pressure deprive every human of a safe tour of the Titanic wreckage. As humans being deprived of things is just something we have to accept unless we can find a better alternative. We will probably never overcome deprivation on our ability to walk on the surface of the sun, whatever one might call the surface of a giant nuclear explosion.
I think a lot of the frustration you're seeing in response here is that the ball seems to be in your court on this topic but you refuse to acknowledge that and instead insist that the ball is in our court. You're proposing some pretty radical interpretations of society and then refusing to elaborate in anything but vagueness.
That you and I mean the same thing by "ownership".
I'm perfectly willing to accept your definition of ownership for sake of conversation. It's just a word. If we come to somewhere I don't think you're using it in a consistent way or trying to garner strength from a connotation ownership has that isn't present in your definition I'll let it be known that we differ.
That in a world where ownership has been abolished, there will still be factories and factory workers.
Sure, this is a pretty important thing. If you're proposing we collapse all of society and return to monkey or whatever I'd like to say straight up that I have no interest in giving up modern conveniences. I think society as a whole is pretty great and produces many wonders. If this is what you are proposing it would save us all a lot of time if you came out and said it. Then you could defend that position and maybe say something interesting. But it's pretty unsatisfying to have to guess at what you're even talking about.
You're welcome to list the assumptions I'm making.
I would greatly prefer you to list these. That I don't actually know what assumptions you're making is the problem here. You seem to think it's some kind of virtue that you're minimally engaging. It's not. It makes discussion practically impossible. The totality of what I know about your position is that you believe ownership to be unjust and that now that you also think work is bad.
You should read Bob Black's awesome little book, The Abolition of Work to stretch your mind a bit, if you haven't already read it.
Just read it. just seems like more unworkable fancy. His view on pre-industrial society is rose tinted and his proposal for an alternative, which I'll at least credit him with putting forth, is pure fantasy. I understand it's satisfying to say you don't like having to work for a living and this kind of thing can feel cathartic to imagine, ideally with friends while passing around a joint in your early twenties, but it's just nonsense. No, we are not going to be able to spontaneously organize society such that the waste gets handled joyously by small children by awarding them medals for doing a good job. No, we are not going to leave it up to people's whims to accomplish necessary jobs like providing us with food or maintaining our buildings and infrastructure. No, war will not be abolished because of this slick new idea where we all just chill out, war over resources is older than humanity, the monkeys and apes do it.
if your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.
Beyond even the unfeasibility of his solutions I find something spiritually dismal about them. This yearning for a dead past and uninterest in further progress. I find it frankly pathetic. It is the attitude of a stoner with arrested development. A society of Bob Blacks would never explore the stars, wouldn't not have sent a contingent to the moon, would not have even ever come down from the trees. I welcome him and those who think like him to find their fellows and move into some still remaining stretch of wilderness and live life as they wish.
aqouta
8mo ago
Thanks for your thorough reply!
Yes and no. Clearly, things are better than even three years ago with the original release of ChatGPT. But, the economic and practical impact is unimpressive. If you subtract out the speculative investment parts, it's almost certainly negative economically.
And look - I love all things tech. I have been a raving enthusiastic nutjob about self-driving cars and VR and - yes - AI for a long time. But, for that very reason, I try to see soberly what actual impact it has. How am I living differently? Am I outsourcing much code or personal email or technical design work to AI? No. Are some friends writing nontrivial code with AI? They say so, and I bet it's somewhat true, but they're not earning more, or having more free time off, or learning more, or getting promoted.
I think you're a little blinkered here. It takes more than a couple years to retool the whole economy with new tech. It was arguably a decade or more after arpanet before the internet started transforming life as we know it. LLMs are actually moving at a break neck pace in comparison. I work at a mega bank and just attended a town hall where every topic of discussion was about how important it is to implement LLM in every process. I'm personally working to integrate it into our department's workflow and every single person I work with now uses it every day. Even at this level of engagement it's going to be months to years cutting through the red tape and setting up pipelines before our analyst workflows can use the tech directly. There is definitely value in it and it's going to be integrated into everything people do going forward even if you can't have it all rolled out instantly. We have dozens of people whose whole job is to go through huge documents and extract information related to risk/taxes/legal/ect, key it in and then do analysis on whether these factors are in line with our other investments. LLMs, even if they don't progress one tiny bit further, will be transformative for this role and there are millions of roles like this throughout the economy.
I think that is the crux of our disagreement: I hear you saying "AI does amazing things people thought it would not be able to do," which I agree with. This is not orthogonal from, but also not super related to my point: claims that AI progress will continue to drastically greater heights (AGI, ASI) are largely (but not entirely) baseless optimism.
Along with these amazing things it comes with a ripple of it getting steadily better at everything else. There's a real sense in which it's just getting better at everything. It started out decent at some areas of code, maybe it could write sql scripts ok but you'd need to double check it. Now it can handle any code snippet you throw at it and reliably solve bugs one shot on files with fewer than a thousand lines. The trajectory is quick and the tooling around it is improving at a rate that soon I expect to be able to just write a jira ticket and reasonably expect the code agent to solve the problem.
Nothing has ever surpassed human level abilities. That gives me a strong prior against anything surpassing human level abilities. Granted, AI is better at SAT problems than many people, but that's not super shocking (Moravec's Paradox).
Certainly this is untrue. Calculators trivially surpass human capabilities in some ways. Nothing has surpassed humans in every single aspect. There is a box of things that AI can currently do better than most humans and a smaller box within that of things it can do better than all humans. These boxes are both steadily growing. Once something is inside that box it's inside it forever, humans will never retake the ground of best pdf scraper per unit of energy. Soon, if it's not already the case, humanity will never retake the ground of best sql script writer. If the scaffolding can be built and the problems made legible this box will expand and expand and expand. And as it expands you get further agglomeration effects. If it can just write sql scripts then it can just write sql scripts. If it's able to manage a server and can write sql scripts now it can create a sql server instance and actually build something. If it gains other capabilities these all compliment each other and bring out other emergent capabilities.
The number of people, in my techphillic and affluent social circle, willing to pay even $1 to use AI remains very low.
If people around you aren't paying for it then they're not getting the really cutting edge impressive features. The free models are way behind the paid versions.
It has been at a level I describe as "cool and impressive, but useless" forever.
AGI maybe not, but useless? You're absolutely wrong here. With zero advancement at all in capabilities or inference cost reductions what we have now, today, is going to change the world as much as the internet and smart phones. Unquestionably.
No, and that's exactly point! AI 2027 says well surely it will plateau many doublings past where it is today. I say that's baseless speculation. Not impossible, just not a sober, well-founded prediction. I'll freely admit p > 0.1% that within a decade I'm saying "wow I sure was super wrong about the big picture. All hail our AI overlords." But at even odds, I'd love to take some bets.
Come up with something testable and I am game.
aqouta
8mo ago
Absolutely not. Deep research is a useful tool for specific tasks, but it cannot produce an actual research paper. Its results are likely worthless to anyone except the person asking the question who has the correct context.
This clears the bar of most Americans.
If you build a bigger rocket and point it at the moon, it will get incrementally closer to the moon. But you will never reach it.
If you have some of the smartest people in the world and a functionally unlimited budget you can actually use the information you gain from launching those rockets to learn what you need to do to get to the moon. That is was actually happened after all so I really don't see how this metaphor is working for you. The AI labs are not just training bigger and bigger models without adjusting their process. We've only even had chain of thought models for 6 months yet and there is surely more juice to squeeze out of optimizing that kind of scaffolding.
This is like claiming moore's law can't get us to the next generation of chips because we don't yet know exactly how to build them. Ok, great but we've been making these advancements at a break neck pace for a while now and the doubters have been proven wrong at basically whatever rate they were willing to lay down claims.
Speaking of claims you've decided not to answer my questions, that's fine, continue with whatever discussion format you like but I'd be really interested in you actually making a prediction about where exactly you think ai progress will stall out. what is the capability level you think it will get to and then not surpass?
aqouta
8mo ago
Simply scaling existing methods, while potentially achieving impressive results, cannot achieve AGI.
Why do you believe this? Is it an article of faith?
It seems like we absolutely do know what lies ahead on the path to AGI and it's incrementally getting better at accomplishing cognitive tasks. We have proof that it's possible too because humans have general intelligence and accomplish this with far fewer units of energy. You can, at this very moment, if you're willing to pay for the extremely premium version, go on chat gpt and have it produce a better research paper on most topics than, being extremely generous to humanity here, 50% of Americans could given three months and it'll do it before you're back from getting coffee. A few years ago it could barely maintain a conversation and a few years before that it was letter better than text completion.
This is rather like having that LW conversation after we'd already put men into orbit. Like you understand that we did actually eventually land on the moon right? I know it's taking the metaphor perhaps to seriously but that story ends up with Alfonso being right in the end. We can, in fact, build spaceships that land on the moon and even return. We in fact did so.
Now we have some of the greatest minds on earth dedicated to building AGI, many of them seem to think we're actually going to be able to accomplish it and people with skin in the game are putting world historical amounts of wealth behind accomplishing this goal.
aqouta
8mo ago
AI is a question of fundamental possibility: by contrast, with AI, there is no good reason to think we can create AI sufficient to replace OpenAI-grade researchers with forseeable timelines/tech. Junior SWEs, maybe, but it's not even clear they're on average positive-value beyond the investment in their future
You're just asserting this without providing reasoning despite it being the entire crux of your post. I know it's not reasonable to expect you to prove a negative but you could have at least demonstrated some engagement with the arguments those of us who think it's very possible near term have put forward. You can at least put into some words why you think AI capabilities will plateau somewhere before openAI-grade researcher. How about we find out where we are relative to each other on some concrete claims and we can see where we disagree on them.
Do you agree that capabilities have progressed a lot in the last few years at a relatively stable and high pace?
Do you agree that it's blown past most of the predictions by skeptics, often repeatedly and shortly after the predictions have been made?
Are there even in principle reasons to believe it will plateau before surpassing human level abilities in most non-physical tasks?
Are there convincing signs that it's plateauing at all?
If it does plateau is there reason to believe at what ability level it will plateau?
I think if we agree on all of these then we should agree on whether to expect AI in the nearish term, I'm not committed to 2027 but I'd be surprised if things weren't already very strange by 2030.
I don't understand how anyone can in good faith believe that even with an arbitrary amount of effort and funding, AGI, let alone ASI, is coming in the next few years. Any projection out decades is almost definitionally in the realm of speculative science-fiction here.
Then it's good the 2027 claim isn't projecting out decades.
aqouta
8mo ago
Alright, no one else is so I'll defend inheritance. It's not about the rights of the heir, it's about the rights of the deceased to decide where their fruits go. Defending meritocracy, especially from a libertarian angle, doesn't commit you to preventing a person from doing with their earthly possession whatever they want in the last moments of their lives any more than it commits you to finding the person who would be the best CEO of amazon and installing him against their will and the will of the board.
Is the act of giving your wealth to someone who hasn't earned it meritocracy maxing? Probably not. Is having a system of ownership that incentivizes those with the most merit to earn as much as they can because they love their kid and want to pass on wealth to them merit maxing? Maybe, arguably. But it's also the pro liberty thing to do and libertarians are perfectly reasonable in coming down on the side of allowing inheritance.
aqouta
8mo ago
It sounds like grazing rights are exclusive, just the ownership is held commonly by the townsfolk and the excluded members are non-townsfolk. A passing cowboy would be deprived.
aqouta
8mo ago
Circling back around because I do enjoy a little bit of what are essentially economic thought experiments. In your world where we do away with ownership what is the model of production for semi-complex goods? Presumably we'd still have like pencils and paper in the world you envision. Who is working in the pencil factory and why? Who is working with sanitation and ensuring human waste is properly processed, the hands on parts of the job in particular?
My point at this point, which I think is quite clear, is that ownership is essentially and definitionally the right to deprive others.
This is why proposing an alternative is important. Because I really don't think you can have a system free of deprivation. For any finite item, say my nail gun, its use necessitates depriving someone else of its use at least for the duration of my use. You can certainly create systems that minimize deprivation but its existence is a brute fact of the universe. And I'd go so far as to argue that our systems of free exchange and property rights actually does a pretty good job of minimizing deprivation in practice through enabling growth.
In fact, the alternative is sticking us in the nose, which makes the fact that most people act clueless about it (whether they are or not) all the more ironic. One minute (not 10, JarJarJedi) is all it would take for a relatively intelligent person doing nothing more than looking for the logical compliment to deprivation to realize what a very familiar alternative is.
I'm afraid it is not sticking me in particular in the nose and would appreciate a more explicit spelling it out. If you want to say communism or whatever you can just come out and say it. We entertain much more fringe positions here from time to time even if there are those who jeer rightly or wrongly you'll usually find some interlocutors willing to approach in good faith so long as you're clear and not too unpleasant about it.
I really don't care how thousands of years of use has convinced us that ownership is useful or what "problems" it "solves" -- problems conceived of in the same paradigm where ownership was conceived, characterized by thousands of years of staunch neglect and refusal that it's all about deprivation. "Usefulness" is beside the point. War is universally considered useful, too. How is that relevant to the fact that it's obscene, horrific, and destructive?
This is a really unsatisfying answer to people who have to actually live in any of these proposed worlds. It actually matters quite a bit if you don't have an alternative because we rely on ownership as a foundation to this very complex world full of wonders that we have built.
Have you ever considered the fact that ownership is the right to deprive? You might spend a little time ruminating on that.
Yes, I have thought quite a bit about this kind of thing. My conclusion is that the ability to deprive is probably necessary for any social system that scales past around the Dunbar number and depending on how you operationalize "deprive" maybe far below that number.
Oh, really? No, not at all. How does the fact that there aren't enough lifeboats on the Titanic we're sailing, or the fact that I can't tell you where there's one with room for you, have any bearing on the fact that the ship is going under? No one owes you a solution. Are you just going to stand there until someone gives you directions or leads you by the hand? It's up to you if you want to use that as an excuse to refuse considering facts that are right all our faces.
I don't see us to be sinking in any meaningful way. Society is more prosperous than any time in history. So yes, I will need some kind of assurance that your plan to meddle with these fundamental axioms of society isn't going to be really really terrible before I sign on. It could be like slavery where we really are better off without it. Or it could be like the need to consume calories and expel waste that we really just need to make peace with.
What could possibly be an alternative to predicating entire societies on the principle of deprivation? No idea?
Genuinely just coming up with childish noble savage myths about how native Americans live in 90s era cartoons. Why are you so resistant to actually describing what you're after?
aqouta
8mo ago
[1] https://www.umass.edu/political-science/about/reports/2025-8
[4] https://www.umass.edu/political-science/about/reports/january-16-2024
> Be me
> Load entire thread into a text to speech app
> Surely no one would just dump incredibly long naked links into the motte dot org.
> go upstairs to fold laundry
> oh a naked link, that's fine, how long can it be
> literal minutes later go downstairs to make this comment.
Can you put a little more effort into formulating your point here? This really just seems like a bunch of Russel conjugations. You take issue with the concept of ownership and then go on to describe consequences of this concept in unflattering terms. Ownership is a useful concept for many reasons, principally because it solves tragedy of the commons problems once society scales up enough that free riding becomes a problem. You really need to propose an alternative to ownership as a concept and not just leave it hanging out there if you want this to go anywhere. It's very difficult to actually build any organization without the concept of ownership without it being incredibly brittle. Not just in the case of physical goods but ownership in decision making.
aqouta
8mo ago
It's a curious problem I think. I am against most of that stuff being taught in school but the whole "teach the controversy" thing must have some limits. What would my enemies do with this veto? I'm not so sure the opt out is the correct thing to demand, the battlefield should surely be the curriculum itself.
aqouta
8mo ago
Yeah, almost certainly a resolution problem, models are trained to work with pretty specific width/height ratios and if you throw them off things get ugly.
They're per capita gdp is still much lowe, it's not chips to notice that it's catch up effects. China didn't even contain the most productive Chinese people. Do you think deepseek is still ahead?
aqouta
9mo ago
I'm going to need a source for China out innovating us. Certainty they benefit from igniting or copyright and I'm not of the camp that thinks they don't innovate at all. But out innovate us? And China does have IP law.
aqouta
9mo ago
As someone with a lot of networth in Nvidia I'm happy about this and if it were put up to a vote of the shareholders I'd vote to not sell these chips to China. We absolutely don't need to hand them the rope that the intend to hang us with.
aqouta
9mo ago
I've seen plenty of Nuking Three Gorges Dam posting, “China is the welfare queen of nations” posting, “we built up those chinks with our toil and look at how they repay us” posting, “Ways That Are Dark” posting, “only steals and poorly copies” posting and all other sorts of unhinged, entitled and dismissive posting that receives applause lately that I feel secure in saying that there is an undertone of stereotype-driven racial animus and condescension/cope, and it goes way back to the Chinese exclusion act.
There are more groups than the normies and the kind of people who are engaging in the China vs US threads on X. I'll note that when I have the misfortune of making the algorithm think I'm interested in China related politics I am fed some truly outrageous sludge both from anti-china hawks and mao apologists all slinging the hottest takes they can think up. There's a dynamic there and I fear you may be being misled about what smart Americans actually think on this subject. Things like the three gorges dam posting strike me more like apes pounding their chests at a rival than the thoughts of serious people.
Again, this is also visible in the smug confidence with which Trump's team initiated a trade war, assured that Xi will fold due to his sweatshop of a nation being existentially dependent on exporting cheap junk to the US.
I would hesitate to draw much inference from what the guy who clearly doesn't understand trade deficits thinks about the ability to win a trade war. Yes yes, to my great shame this idiot was elected to the highest office of the nation. I understand that this is what might be called a bad look. I'm just saying that him in particular being smuggly confident and wrong about some subject shouldn't really be taken as the opinion of thinking Americans. Thinking Americans, when they want to speculate on an Achilles heel on China are more likely to come up with the birthrate issue, the inflated housing market or the general issues of having a state substantially run by the kind of guy who can make people who bring him bad news disappear. These are all arguable points but they're not "these people are racially incapable of defeating us".
I'll also say that I've definitely seen some Americans liken Ruskies to Orcs, but generally it's a European (or even specifically Baltic) thing, I will grant that Americans do not imagine themselves Elves, they're happy enough being citizens of a real great nation.
Most of what I've noticed when the topic of Russia comes up, and it's really fallen quite a distance out of focus, is that people are mostly talking about Putin in particular and not Russians in general. It's described as "Putin's war" and if people are feeling spicy they might bring up the oligarchs. Maybe it's a hold over from narratives of us spreading freedom but usually if we believe a country to be headed by a dictator we mostly feel bad for the citizens and pour most of our animus into the dictator. Deep in our cultural outlook we still believe if we got rid of the corrupt leadership that either the people would immediately thank us or the scales would fall from their eyes and they'd embrace us as friends.
Scooters on sidewalks, however annoying, are a far cry from human feces on sidewalks - a matter of lacking civic virtue or manners, but not decay of civilization. I don't see scooters on sidewalks here in Buenos Aires, but I do have to look where I'm stepping. Was the other way around in Moscow, would that it were the same way here.
The scooters on sidewalks was more noting that things tended to be trending in the improvement direction as far as orderliness goes.
aqouta
9mo ago
Depends on where you draw the line at for poor really. Wealth is a lot swingier than weight, you can't in a single evening consume enough calories to be the equivalent of gambling away your life savings. If by poor you just mean they are low wage earners with minimal skills for upward mobility then it is not their "fault" that they're poor. Although maybe having minimal skills could be thought of as a fault in some sense, usually we use fault to mean a problem with conscious decisions but it could also mean just having a unfortunate qualities. If someone is poor because they gamble away 20% of their paycheck and carry credit card balances then yes it's their fault.
aqouta
9mo ago
There is a kind of motte and bailey going on. The motte criticism of CICO is that it's actually very difficult to calculate exactly how many calories are exhausted per second of exercise given how many variables go into such a thing and it's also difficult to calculate how much food is able to to be absorbed by an individual's digestive system therefore we can't calculate out the exact to the calorie differential. The bailey is therefore it's impossible to just consume less calories each day until you find the equilibrium where you're losing weight. You absolutely don't need to have an exact measure of Calories in and calories out to make sure the sign of the difference is negative and the broad tools of calorie restriction will easily allow you to flip that sign to negative. We can't make sure it's -500 and not -485. But this swing aren't even that large as things average out.
aqouta
9mo ago
Regardless, @aqouta's recent trip and comments paint a picture not very matching yours.
I'm not sure if my travels could cut cleanly in one way or the other on this honestly. If someone's vision of China is of cities openly falling apart then that's at least definitely not true of Shanghai or Nanjing. It may have been due to the older, mostly to my experience solved, problem of smog but I do remember the buildings browning more than I've noticed in American big cities. I certainly didn't stay long enough or speak enough of the language to get a sense of any kind of society wide duplicity. My wife reported that obeying traffic rules had improved since her last visit and you did still see pretty frequent incidents of scooters riding on the walking area. I was in the familial ingroup for most of the people I spoke to, someone living and breathing the culture would have a better idea.
I'll recount the story of a friend of the guy I met in Osaka who is hopefully getting out of Chinese prison soon, call him Andrew. I do trust this Osaka friend but am less sure how much I trust Andrew. Supposedly Andrew moved to Beijing on a business visa partnered with some local to start an American BBQ business that took off pretty well, growing to a couple locations. Fast forward to covid and Andrew needed to go home for some reason, can't remember if it was family or Chinese policy. When he returns he finds that his previous partner has opened a competing chain and claims that Andrew lied on his original work visa, landing him in Chinese prison while the previous partner took possession of all of his restaurant assets. This is of course an anecdote and perhaps a dubious one, Osaka friend vouches that Andrew isn't the type to falsify business documents but you have no reason to believe that and I give it maybe a 20% chance he's at fault. My wife found it plausible if that means anything. I like almost all the Chinese people I met, but I don't think I'd want to try and live in China full time.
I think Americans might well compete with North Koreans, Israelis and Arabs in the degree of being brainwashed about their national and racial superiority (a much easier task when you are a real superpower, to be fair), to the point I am now inclined to dismiss your first hand accounts as fanciful interpretations of reality if not outright hallucinations. Your national business model has become chutzpah and gaslighting, culminating in Miran's attempt to sell the national debt as «global public goods». You don't have a leg to stand on when accusing China of fraud. Sorry, that era is over, I'll go back to reading papers.
I've noticed a trend of our Russian posters being very obsessed with framing American views on geopolitics in a racial angle. I haven't seen a single American call Russians orcs but seen many Russians accusing Americans of thinking in those terms. If Americans have a racial view of Chinese people it's as nerdy math kids, hardly the kind of people you'd be prejudiced against when it comes to ML research. Among the researchers I've known there has definitely been some sneering at the research paper output of the mainland, Wife and Mother in law both say that in the past it was a problem where China produced a lot of not very good papers but supposedly this has gotten better. Americans certainly have some neurosis around race but not in the way you should be merging it with American Exceptionalism to form American Racial Exceptionalism. Much ink has been spilt on how Americans deal with being a very multi-racial society and how that experiment is going. American's views on China has much more to do with their communist government than with their racial character.
aqouta
9mo ago
You can't even fathom why people would be ideologically committed to their country not being consumed by Russia?
aqouta
9mo ago
The Dissident Right picked it up recently, and I've seen it around, but it's usage isn't terribly common.
Interesting, maybe it's just the examples being used but it screams leftist to me.
aqouta
9mo ago
Do you seriously believe there are no possible financial instruments that could result in complex projects being completed without IP law?
I think they won't be anarchism. Plausibly trade secrets if the field lends itself to them. It's not just the complexity, it's also the risk element. Anarchists would do well to remember that the basis of private property to begin with is guaranteed by the state, intellectual property is special case of private property which can be deconstructed in much the same way. Can you build some things without a state protected right to own your tools? Sure. Can you build large scale projects? Maybe, but it'll be much harder than if you can rely on the police to prevent people from riding away with your tractors.
Patreon is an an object lessons of how the market adapts to scenarios where IP law stops being relevant
Patreon exists within a context where IP law exists. Most large scale projects for media are completed outside of patreon, in fact the vast majority of media spending operates under traditional IP law frameworks.
Kickstarter proves that complex engineering products can be pre-funded directly by consumers, without need for investors. It's true that we don't currently have Biotech Patreon, for example-- but I'm arguing that that's a consequence not of the boundary conditions of capitalism, but of the specific market distortions introduced by government enforcement of IP law.
I'm not saying you wouldn't be able to produce some small scale projects. I'm saying you're going to have orders of magnitude less resources deployed. much fewer life saving drugs.
I'd love for there to be a realistic alternative to IP law, and as an improvement I think IP should have a much much shorter life span. But replacing it with nothing will cost us a whole lot and you're just hand waving that loss away.
Sounds like this should be easy then as we have seen some people who are smarter than others.
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