There is something to be said for how the technology stack keeps growing for businesses and what this might mean for the future.
Thirty years ago, you had an OS and you installed applications. No problem.
Later, you had to build and use apps on the internet, an infrastructure that is susceptible to DDOS attacks, government firewalls, and other security risks. Still fine, sort of.
Now, you not only have to build apps on the internet, you also have use LLMs to build apps to remain competitive with other developers. Future (human) maintainers of your code might not properly understand how it works, and if the providers of the LLMs screw up or go rogue, you are properly fucked.
There is a dependency/technology stack debt that is creating risks that need to be acknowledged.
It takes the view that anyone in an administrative position will put the survival of the organization as their primary goal, while lower-level employees (who are far less invested in the organization) can remain invested in the organization's ostensible goals.
I find it to be very true after almost 30 years in the working world, and I always keep it in mind wherever I work.
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers, launch technicians, and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers' union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that, in every case, the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules and control promotions within the organization."
I've thought this for a while: a day will come when the anonymous internet becomes a thing of the past. It really feels like we are already there but not everyone realizes it yet. What's the point of conversing with someone on the internet (like right now) if you can't tell the difference between a bot and a real person? And it will only get worse.
But what does an anon-free internet even look like? Is it even possible? Or will all online content eventually be considered untrustable and worthless? You can see a world where newspapers (online or otherwise) make a comeback simply because of the need for a trusted gatekeeper (which is what I imagine made them valuable in the first place). It's wild to think about.
I don't really have a stance one way or the other, but I don't think people just produce content for ad revenue. A lot of people produce content just to get their name out there/increase their branding, an incentive that AI summaries undermine. There really is no motivation to produce something if it is just going to be regurgitated by AI agents. And, yes, I know they cite sources in their responses (at least Google does), but that is a pretty paltry substitute for actual traffic to your site.
The issue is that people produce content because they want visitors to their sites. If ChatGPT and Google just vacuum up content for AI summaries, people may stop producing that content. It really is, in the long-term, an existential issue for the web if search providers push people away from visiting websites.
There are always creative ways to present data. Dismissing the needs of a minority of people just because we don't share their visual impairment is lazy, and we can do better.
Maybe because the rot runs so deep in Washington that nobody really wants this to be a big deal. A little like the Epstein files: so many people would be caught up in the web if insider trading in DC were properly investigated that nobody wants to go there.
The bill also prevents senior government officials from betting on prediction markets if they are participating personally in the event on which they are betting.
But what happens when the bill comes in? That's my biggest fear. I heard on a recent podcast that it is a great time to be a micro-entrepreneur, and I think that's true right now because AI is so cheap. But AI companies are hemorraghing money. What happens to those micro-entrepreneurs when the price goes up? Are we going to live in a world where only large, rich corporations can afford to competitively develop things? Maybe so, but it is depressing to think about.
For the plebeians (like me), I think hand-coding skills will always be relevant and necessary.
Or it could be an awful lot of productivity. We have to think bigger. What would the world look like if every programmer were a 10x (or whatever) programmer?
In the 90s, you would have said the exact same thing about linux on the PC.
Free software ultimately has time on its side. As long as a project has enough mindshare to keep its momentum, it really is unstoppable in the long run.
As you noted, fan fiction is legal. You just can't make a profit from it, which I think is fair. Also, IP laws force people to come up with their own characters and their own twists on old stories. I would argue this is a good thing. Inventive ideas like Pokemon may not exist if people could just reuse other people's IP to make a buck.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/801/transcript