aglynn 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (24) comment rss

  • On the post: If Intellectual Property Is Neither Intellectual, Nor Property, What Is It?

    aglynn ( profile ), 21 Nov, 2014 @ 03:55pm

    Re: Problem is with property itself, not just intellectual property

    To explicate further. In the change from a dead-tree edition book to an e-book, the essence - what makes a book a book or 'bookness' has also changed, not just in how a book is determined as such, but in the sense that a book's 'essence' is not something invariable beyond or behind the real book but is itself a mutable, finite determination.

    We can't use the term 'real' in the old sense at all to do with an e-book, since a 'real' has extension, location and durability that e-books completely lack. 'Virtual' is a transitional modifier, but in the old sense of 'real property' it's no longer 'real' nor 'property', yet in some sense it 'is' and is 'mine', so the problem is in the way we define a thing in the first place. The e-book loses certain determinations in the change, and gains others (for instance, a significant gain is the difficulty involved in theft of an e-book).

    Because it's not a continuation but a disruption it's neither progress nor regress, since both imply an underlying continuaty that is lacking.

  • On the post: If Intellectual Property Is Neither Intellectual, Nor Property, What Is It?

    aglynn ( profile ), 21 Nov, 2014 @ 03:40pm

    Problem is with property itself, not just intellectual property

    Modern technology brings with it an ontological disruption, i.e. what things 'are' fundamentally changes. Heidegger referred to what determines what something is in the modern age as "Gestell", which simultaneously means Enframing and Apparatus: the technological thing itself can substitute for its essence and vice versa. This means that the meaning not just of property, which is the real meaning of 'thing' or 'object' within the older view of reality, but also of essence has changed. The meaning of property has changed, but so has 'ownership', 'value' and 'exchange'. It's not a reformulation with invariants that ensure continuity, there are no invariant terms.

    We can see the effects in the difference between owning property in the old sense of something durable such as a book, and the new sense, where with a change, for instance, in the common e-book format or the delivery system the 'object', whether the e-book itself or the apparently more traditional 'device' on which I read it, can suddenly become worthless, since most of its value is in the network of delivery that supports it.

    Techdirt spends a lot of time on both intellectual property, in the sense of something like an e-book, and also on technological things that initially appear like property in the old sense, but do not have the same mode of being. The difficulty is that trying to discuss things that are essentially different, that is they are different and their essence is different, using old terminology doesn't work; it becomes difficult to make any sense of the argument being put forward.

    The failure of things like web ontology language are implicit in these changes, since what ontology itself means has also changed. When a disruption has no invariants between the 'before' and 'after' it's impossible to discuss the properly new with terms that make invalid assumptions based on what used to be implicit in them.

  • On the post: Why The Lack Of Scarcity In Economics Is Getting More Important Now

    aglynn ( profile ), 06 Jan, 2012 @ 04:41pm

    It's not simply a matter of removal of scarcity.

    Technology has always revealed things, as Heidegger pointed out, in terms of their resource value. Things can be revealed in plenty of other ways, but by being viewed as resources exchange values can be applied to virtually anything. This mode of showing of course eventually was applied to human beings themselves, and "human resources" came into existence.

    This holds fine while "technology" refers to the network of meaningful relations between technical things, something that was true until technology succeeded in containing its own context and being able to replicate that context, as the general purpose computer and even more so the internet can and do. Removing scarcity from the economic landscape in certain areas is only one effect of the "system" of technology becoming easily replicable to any arbitrary number of systems.

    At that point it is precisely the view of something as a resource, with a concomitant exchange value, that becomes irrelevant. What can be given an exchange value is what is equivalent between multiple instances of a type of item, but if that item can be replicated at will the exchange value becomes infinitely small. Worth as opposed to value, on the other hand, refers specifically to what is unique to a given instance. A live concert is still *worth* something because the experience is unique for each person at that specific time and place.

    As another example, the laptop I'm typing on, as it came from the factory, has a very minimal exchange value, particularly when you compare it to what that value would have been, were an equivalent available, fifteen years ago. However as it came from the factory it had nothing unique about it. Having spent plenty of time setting it up to work the way I want it to work, much the way a carpenter might set up his workshop, it's *worth* to me is far greater than its exchange value.

    This type of change will affect more and more industries due to the qualitative change from a technical artifact being a tool, to its being a personal, customized network of tools; a workshop, not a hammer. That's what we've let out of Pandora's box, and the battle to stop factories will look like it should have been easy compared to the difficulty people will face trying to stop this revolution.

    Industries that are based on selling things with a predictable exchange value now have to face the difficult challenge of providing worth to their customers. Being unique, worth is inherently less predictable, and inherently more difficult to judge, and the corporate configurations of most current businesses will not prove flexible enough to weather the change. Which means of course that newer, more flexible models of doing business will inevitably wipe out most of today's big business, just as they did during earlier periods of significant change.

  • On the post: When Will We Have To Grant Artificial Intelligence Personhood?

    aglynn ( profile ), 19 Mar, 2011 @ 09:04am

    artificial intelligence

    AI hasn't really even begun yet. Expert systems "mimic' the behaviour of a thinking being, but thinking itself is nowhere to be found, and this can be relatively easily demonstrated. The majority of AI researchers don't have a cogent enough understanding of intelligence itself to even know where to begin.

    One of the interesting things, assuming a realistic AI is attempted, is that due to the nature of multi-level systems and the results of adding complexity the development of AI is likely to closely mimic the development of intelligence itself. i.e. just as we see moods and emotional responses in animals far below the complexity level associated with self-aware intelligence, we will see the unpredictability associated with moods and emotions long before we will see anything approaching and intelligent, self aware artificial being. The sci-fi notion of the purely logical, unemotional self-aware being is inherently self-contradictory, firstly because self awareness is first manifest in an awareness of the overall system state of the being in question, and this awareness is what we know as mood.