AI is an elite crime spree

ggg011012•about 1 hour ago

I’d separate two questions here: whether the article’s evidence is representative, and whether the conduct it describes would be tolerated from a smaller company or an individual.

puelocesar•2 minutes ago

The article itself answers the second question.

That Aaron Swartz guy was prosecuted so hard for downloading some academic papers, he killed himself.

Meanwhile, AI companies are free to steal literally any content they want and nothing will ever happens with them.

FLeXMurphy•34 minutes ago

Who is Matt Stoller? Is he a known quantity?

lukifer•19 minutes ago

Stoller is an FDR-ish political progressive who focuses primarily on monopolies and antitrust enforcement. He's the author of "Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40538538-goliath

nsmog767•5 minutes ago

Answer above is good, but yes he's a known quantity. I am a political moderate and definitely don't agree with everything he says, but I find his POV (and knowledge of antitrust history) to be a valuable perspective.

doctorpangloss•8 minutes ago

> Let’s get into specifics. By far the most important and successful action the FTC took was in 2021, when the commission blocked the merger between AI chipmaker Nvidia and Arm. That set the stage for the growth of both companies, who could focus on their lines of business instead of a cumbersome set of turf wars that accompany mergers. Today, for better or worse, Nvidia is the biggest company in the world by market capitalization, the engine of the AI revolution.

The FTC has nothing to do with NVIDIA's market capitalization.

Literally nobody cares about antitrust except antitrust lawyers. Why? Not because of some conspiracy. There might be a lot of laws on the books, but antitrust is not one of them. The antitrust act is one paragraph long. It is one of the most toxic examples of insufficiency from Congress. So everything in this article about, this is illegal, that is illegal, whatever... it's a matter of opinion. Sherman Antitrust Act is one paragraph long!

jeffbee•about 1 hour ago

Can we stop acting like selective quoting from discovered materials gives us an unbiased and factual representation of the truth? The plaintiff is always trying to cherry-pick and distort elements from discovered material. And this is exactly why every large corporation without exception tries to train their employees to not draw conclusions of law in discoverable written materials. A computer science professor does not have the requisite knowledge to determine that some act was "theft of labor" nor the knowledge required to contextualize that "in human history".

msabalau•33 minutes ago

Yeah, that some shumck of an executive at Microsoft happens to have had similar sentimental notions as other members of the literati who hate AI is not an "admission" or even a particularly interesting fact.

Given the process by which "meritocratic" elites are usually selected and trained, it would be odd if this wasn't sometimes the case.

ChrisLTD•about 1 hour ago

The law, as practiced in the United States, protects but does not bind elites, whereas the law binds but does not protect the lower classes.

SoftTalker•30 minutes ago

Was there ever a time when this was not the case?

jameskilton•about 1 hour ago

If there is one fundamental problem with our society it is this.

Mercy for the rich. Justice for the poor.

A healthy society does the opposite, those with much should be held to higher standards.

dismalaf•about 1 hour ago

No, a healthy society shows mercy to the innocent, and enacts justice on the guilty.

jameskilton•42 minutes ago

This is a strange statement because by definition the innocent don't need mercy. Mercy is forgiveness for wrongdoing, and refusing to forgive and give mercy to some leads to a society that is cruel. As Thomas Acquinas put it:

> justice without mercy is cruelty; mercy without justice is dissolution.

stvltvs•43 minutes ago

Which is basically Wilhoit's Law, an attempt to define conservatism.

edit: For those who don't want to look it up, Wilhoit's law is usually stated like this: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

psunavy03•24 minutes ago

Life's so much easier when you can just caricature the people you disagree with, innit?

stvltvs•20 minutes ago

FWIW I don't agree with Wilhoit, just explaining where the idea came from.

AI is an elite crime spree

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