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> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there - nor are the people involved selling it back in any form.

But there's a real [1] transgression there, and attempting to lawyer it away is disingenuous. This isn't a perfect analogy, but it's sort of like if you blocked off the sun, and a farmer complained you stole his land, and then you retort "your land has not been stolen, you still have title and can occupy it." Your actions damaged him. Again, not a perfect analogy, but I think our efforts should go to recognizing the transgression instead of trying to deny it.

> And let's not forget what we got back for this: reified intelligence on a chip almost too cheap to meter, available to everyone across the world - not just rich West, inference is so dirt cheap that whole world uses it. It exploded in popularity organically, because of how many real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits, it addresses.

We don't have a society where "we got back" anything, and if you weren't aware, this "intelligence" is definitely getting metered. If anything "we" got undercut, and "our" assets lost a lot of their value, while others will get very rich from that loss. Come back with communism, and then maybe you'll have a point.

[1] Fuck you, Claude, for making me wince at that.



What's the transgression here, though?

For your example to be trivially valid, the farmer would need to be entitled to the sun, but the sun is not property of aynone as of yet. There might be an argument to this (especially if more context is given), but, in this general case, I find it unlikely.

Still, even we accept your example as valid, what would be the equivalent to "sunlight"? Labor, maybe? But labor isn't something that is owned nor it's a persistent property of material resources, it's human-derived transformation. It's inconcrete by itself, even more so than light, more akin to work (in the technical physics sense). It just so happens that it "produces" a material outcome.




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