There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution.

Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woods and yet there is still game to be found, then there's no compelling reason to define and litigate who "owns" those woods.

But with the help of machines, a small number of people were able to completely deplete parts of the earth. We had to invent giant legal systems in order to determine who has the right to do that and who doesn't.

We are truly in the Information Age now, and I suspect a similar thing will play out for the digital realm. We have copyright and intellecual property law already, of course, but those were designed presuming a human might try to profit from the intellectual labor of others. With AI, we're in the industrial era of the digital world. Now a single corporation can train an AI using someone's copyrighted work and in return profit off the knowledge over and over again at industrial scale.

This completely unpends the tenuous balance between creators and consumers. Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? Who will contribute to the digital common when rapacious AI companies are constantly harvesting it? Why would anyone plant seeds on someone else's farm?

It really feels like we're in the soot-covered child-coal-miner Dickensian London era of the Information Revolution and shit is gonna get real rocky before our social and legal institutions catch up.

Our only hope is that AI in the long run is both powerful and benevolent enough to be its own "whistleblower" in cases of misuse.

"but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution"

You're not the only one.

The current Pope Leo XIV explicitly named himself after the the previous Leo, Pope Leo XIII, who was pope during the Industrial Revolution (1878-1903) and issued the influential Encyclical Rerum novarum (Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor) in response to the upheaval.

“Pope Leo XIII, with the historic Encyclical Rerum novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution,” Pope Leo recalled. “Today, the Church offers to all her treasure of social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and the developments of artificial intelligence.” A name, then, not only rooted in tradition, but one that looks firmly ahead to the challenges of a rapidly changing world and the perennial call to protect those most vulnerable within it.”

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/docum...

https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-05/pope-leo-xiv...

As you know, I deeply respect you. Not trying to argue here, just provide my own perspective:

> Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article?

I write things for two main reasons: I feel like I have to. I need to create things. On some level, I would write stuff down even if nobody reads it (and I do do that already, with private things.) But secondly, to get my ideas out there and try to change the world. To improve our collective understanding of things.

A lot of people read things, it changes their life, and their life is better. They may not even remember where they read these things. They don't produce citations all of the time. That's totally fine, and normal. I don't see LLMs as being any different. If I write an article about making code better, and ChatGPT trains on it, and someone, somewhere, needs help, and ChatGPT helps them? Win, as far as I'm concerned. Even if I never know that it's happened. I already do not hear from every single person who reads my writing.

I don't mean that thinks that everyone has to share my perspective. It's just my own.

At what point do we look at 'Industrial Society and its Future' and go from "yeah that'll never happen", "ok some parts of it are happening", to ...? I swear tech folks are the most obtuse people on the planet.

If I'm being honest, I've never related to that notion of remuneration and credit being the primary reason to write something. I don't claim to be some great writer or anything, but I do have a blog I write quite often on (though I'm traveling in my wife's Taiwan now and haven't updated it in a while). But for me, I write because it feels good to do so. Sometimes there's a group utility in things like I edit a Google Maps listing to be correct even though "a faceless corporation is going to hoover up my work and profit off it without paying me for my work" and I might pick up a Lime bike someone's dropped into the sidewalk even though "a faceless corporation is externalizing the work of organizing the proper storage of their property on public land without paying the workers" or so on.

I just think it's nice to contribute to the human commons and it's fine if some subset of my fellow organism uses it in whatever way. Realistically, the fact that Brewster Kahle is paid whatever few hundred thousand he's paid for managing a non-profit that only exists because it aggregates other people's work isn't a problem for me. Or that Larry Page and Sergey Brin became ultra-rich around providing a search interface into other people's work. Or that Sam Altman and Dario Amodei did the same through a different interface.

This particular notion doesn't seem to be a post-AI trend. It seems to have happened prior to the big GPTs coming out where people started doing a lot of this accounting for contribution stuff. One day it'll be interesting to read why it started happening because I don't recall it from the past. Perhaps I just wasn't super plugged in to the communities that were complaining about Red Hat, Inc.

It's not that I don't understand if I sold my Subaru to a guy who immediately managed to sell it to another guy for a million times the money. I get that. I'd feel cheated. But if I contributed a little to it, like I did so Google would have a site to list for certain keywords so that they could show ads next to it in their search results, I just find it so hard to be like "That's my money you're using. Pay me!".

> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant.

The opposite is true. Central Europe was almost devoid of trees. Food was scarce as arable land bore little fruit without fertiliser.

Society was Malthusian until the Industrial Revolution.

> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woods and yet there is still game to be found, then there's no compelling reason to define and litigate who "owns" those woods.

I mean, medieval Europe (speaking broadly) had pretty well defined property rights wrt hunting. In fact, the forester at the time was thought of as one of the most corrupt jobs, as they'd commonly have side hustles poaching and otherwise illegally extracting resources from the lands they enforced and kept others from utilizing in a similar way. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

A couple thoughts…

Mostly, AIs don’t recite back various works. Yes, there a couple of high profile cases where people were able to get an AI to regurgitate pieces of New York Times articles and Harry Potter books, but mostly not. Mostly, it is as if the AI is your friend who read a book and gives you a paraphrase, possibly using a couple sentences verbatim. In other words, it probably falls under a fair use rule.

Secondly, given the modern world, content that doesn’t appear online isn’t consumed much, so creators who are doing it for the money will certainly continue putting content online. Much of that content will be generated by AIs, however.

> We are truly in the Information Age now, and I suspect a similar thing will play out for the digital realm.

The analogy seems to be backwards though. It would be as if we previously had a scarcity of land and because of that divided it up into private property so markets could maximize crop yield etc. and then someone came up with a way to grow food on asteroids using robots, and that food is only at the 20th percentile of quality but it's far cheaper. Suddenly food becomes much more abundant and the people who had been selling the 20th percentile food for $5 are completely out of the market because the new thing can do that for $0.05, and the people providing the 50th percentile food for $10 are also taking a hit because the price difference between what they're providing and the 20th percentile stuff just doubled.

The existing plantation owners then want to put a stop to this somehow, or find a way to tax it, but arguments like this have a problem:

> Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article?

This was already the status quo as a result of the internet. Newspapers were slowly dying for 20 years before there was ever a ChatGPT, because they had been predicated on the scarcity of printing presses. If you published a story in 1975 it would take 24 hours for relevant competitors to have it in their printed publication and in the meantime it was your exclusive. The customer who wants it today gets it from you. On top of that, there weren't that many competitors covering local news, because how many local outlets are there with a printing press?

Then blogs, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter come and anyone who can set up WordPress can report the news five minutes after you do -- or five hours before, because now everyone has an internet-connected camera in their pocket so the first news of something happening now comes in seconds from whoever happened to be there at the time instead of the next morning after a media company sent a reporter there to cover it.

The biggest problem we have yet to solve from this is how to trust reports from randos. The local paper had a reputation to uphold that you now can't rely on when the first reports are expected to come from people with no previous history of reporting because it's just whoever was there. But that's the same thing AI can't do either -- it's a notorious confabulist.

And it's the media outlets shooting themselves in the foot with this one, because too many of them have gotten far too sloppy in the race to be first or pander to partisans that they're eroding the one advantage they would have been able to keep. Damn fools to erode the public's trust in their ability to get the facts right when it's the one thing people would otherwise still have to get from them in particular.

Stuff gets put online when the reader isn't the customer. Someone is paying for a reader to be told certain things. So it's free at the point of reading.

> It really feels like we're in the soot-covered child-coal-miner Dickensian London era of the Information Revolution and shit is gonna get real rocky before our social and legal institutions catch up

The really discouraging part of this is that it feels like our social and legal institutions don't even care if they catch up or not.

Technology is speeding up and the lag time before anything is discussed from a legal standpoint is way, way too long