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Who Owns Your Brain?: How "AI" Might Break Work Completely - Brainforkbrainfork.is/blog/who-owns-your-brain
348 sats \ 7 comments \ @Scoresby 11 Aug AI
I think this article is pretty misguided. A basic axiom I have is that information is really, really difficult to control. So much so that it's almost always futile (bitcoin key material is an interesting counter to my belief here).
What differentiates knowledge and skills that we've previously owned and made available to our employers in return for payment, from knowledge that the company owns?
This question brings out the problem nicely: we hold that a piece of software can be owned, but the knowledge gained along the path of producing such software less so. Ideas about how the software might be used in the future -- who knows?
This is why maintaining ownership of your knowledge will be a key challenge.
Here is where I think the author really goes wrong. Knowledge is a thing you can possess, but it is not really a thing you can own. Or maybe it's that in the attempt to exert ownership over it, you greatly diminish its value. It's bad enough when individuals attempt to bolt ownership onto information, but it gets much weirder when corporations or governments try to do it.
Very soon, employees will want to bring their own agents to the workplace without losing ownership of the agent to their employer, whilst employers will want to manage and mitigate the risks of unknown agents running riot in the workplace.
I don't think any of this is very likely to come to pass.
The piece concludes with what it calls a sovereignty manifesto:
  • Guard your knowledge corpus like it’s your pension. Because it is.
  • Record it on your own terms. Write, talk, sketch, store — but keep the keys.
  • Train your own agent. If you don’t, someone else will train one on you.
  • License, don’t hand over. Let them borrow your intelligence, not own it.
  • Get it in writing. Employment terms should spell out precisely who owns what.
Maybe it's because I am coming at this from the angle of a person who writes and makes images rather than software, but I don't want to guard my knowledge, I want other people to interact with my ideas; I do want people to train their agents on my ideas, and I don't understand how incan stop anyone from owning my knowledge -- as soon as they read something I write, it plays a role in shaping how they think. What the authors call giving away ownership of my knowledge is actually exactly the thing I want to do.
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232 sats \ 2 replies \ @perscrutador 11 Aug
What you are presenting are two different concepts, in my opinion. One thing is knowledge and another is an idea. You transcribe ideas and present them publicly based on your knowledge, so that agents and people can read them, people will gain knowledge or not, and agents will add their language and mix it with many others to answer the questions of idiots who can barely think for themselves. Continue spreading ideas, adding knowledge to people. Our knowledge is private, and nothing and no one can access it except for the tidbits we share through ideas.
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby OP 12 Aug
If I were to use your rubric, I think the only thing I would classify as knowledge is the internal stream of thoughts in my mind, that is pretty much inseparable from me -- the person. I don't see anyway that this could be claimed by another person. They can only claim the products of my person. And that's where I'm asking whether it makes sense to try to gate access to one's ideas.
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102 sats \ 0 replies \ @perscrutador 13 Aug
That's exactly what I meant, and that's why it makes no sense to restrict access to ideas. That's why I believe that intellectual property doesn't exist.
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102 sats \ 0 replies \ @LibertasBR 12 Aug
Knowledge is a thing you can possess, but it is not really a thing you can own.
This subject seems a little far-fetched to me, perhaps because of the language. I understand that you own the knowledge you have created for yourself in the sense that you can access it and you have built it in your mind.
I also understand what you are saying about this, that a person is only a user of knowledge and not its actual owner.
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102 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 11 Aug
the knowledge gained along the path of producing such software less so.
I'm not sure what the current state of the art is in NDAs but the last few of my friends that landed a job at Google 1 basically had to sign their ideas away. Cynically put: if you have an awesome idea on a Sunday night while you masturbate under the shower, it's goog's IP.
Very soon, employees will want to bring their own agents to the workplace without losing ownership of the agent to their employer, whilst employers will want to manage and mitigate the risks of unknown agents running riot in the workplace.
I don't think any of this is very likely to come to pass.
I'd totes do this. It would be a hard requirement. 2
I don't want to guard my knowledge, I want other people to interact with my ideas
I've personally done a little back-and-forth on this because it can be infuriating when someone uses your code and then uses your name to buy credibility for their product. "Look this app is super awesome because it uses <opti's library>." Kinda sucks. But I think AI actually fixes this because ultimately no one will care anymore who coded what, #noheroes. 3 I think this is actually for the better. Hero devs are an awful phenomenon and it almost always ends up in people making bad decisions based on the fame of a person.
I don't understand how [I can] stop anyone from owning my knowledge
Well... it'd be sucky if a patent troll would C&D your own idea from you. So maybe this is the final straw for the idea that ideas and knowledge can be owned. I'd not cry if that were the ultimate outcome of LLMs and AI training on pirated stuff.

Footnotes

  1. Now that I think about it, Google hiring someone I know didn't happen in a while. The hiring freeze is probably real for a few years now. ↩
  2. But then, I also refuse to carry client's hardware or hang my clean machine on their dirty, dirty wifi - something that always causes light conflict. ↩
  3. If you browse the comments at phoronix re: RISC-V stuff (#1076180) then it becomes clear that #noheroes is real. Even Linus probably wouldn't be immune to being disposed of without his tm. ↩
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby OP 12 Aug
I'd totes do this.
I should have been more careful with my words. My enthusiasm got the better of me: I don't think an employer will be bold enough to claim that some agent a person brings to work is the employer's property. If I download a script I find on Github and use it at work, nobody is going to argue that gives my employer the ability seize ownership from whoever made the script available.
maybe this is the final straw for the idea that ideas and knowledge can be owned
Yes! This is exactly where I'd like to see things go. It makes no sense to claim ownership of an idea. It might make sense to claim credit for it. But once the knowledge has passed to one other person, you lose all control over it. It's just how knowledge works. I think most efforts to control the flow of information are probably going to do more damage than they avert.
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102 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 12 Aug
If I download a script I find on Github and use it at work, nobody is going to argue
A little over a decade ago I worked with a client where GPL licensed open source was forbidden because, there being a lot of coders in that company, legal deemed the risk too high that someone would need to contribute back and the company becoming liable for something they couldn't control and wasn't their core business. Per Hintjens, Apple has done a similar thing with GPL-3, but for a different reason:
So, the last requirement is protection from patents. The GPLv3 has language that scares off patent lawyers. It's effective. and arguably the main reason Apple has invested so much in removing all GPLv3 products from its stacks and tool chains.
It makes no sense to claim ownership of an idea.
We're aligned. I do think that the system will need to change radically for this to become reality. I nowadays work a lot with entreprenerds that have no love for the patent system but allocate and spend massive budgets on patents regardless, simply because if you don't register, a troll will, and you'll be in trouble.
Maybe this could be a silver lining in the otherwise ridiculous valuation of AI tech. But I also feel it's a long shot.
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