Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates
ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee 2 months agoMaking a copy is free. Making the original is not. I don’t expect a professional photographer to hand out their work for free because making copies of it costs nothing.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Yes, exactly. Do you see who that is different from the world of physical objects and energy? That is not the case for a physical object. Even once you design something and build a factory to produce it, the first item off the line takes the same amount of resources as the last one.
Capitalism is based on the idea that things are scarce. If I have something, you can’t have it, and if you want it, then I have to give up my thing, so we end up trading. Information does not work that way. We can freely copy a piece of information as much as we want. Which is why monopolies and capitalism are a bad system of rewarding creators. They inherently cause us to impose scarcity where there is no need for it, because in capitalism things that are abundant do not have value. Capitalism fundamentally fails to function when there is abundance of resources.