Thoughts on thinking

I run an informative website for a living. If the trend continues, I will lose my job to AI trained on my content.

I get the feeling of pointlessness, but not because AI is making me obsolete. AI still needs me, because it still needs human beings to experience the real world and report on it. It need to copy someone's homework. It just destroys the economics of doing that homework.

But there is not the faintest chance of AI doing that sort of work itself. It might repeat what it knows, but it can't survey an audience, shake hands with industry experts, empathize with users, feel friction, or knock on doors.

These are still jobs for thinking humans.

The way forward seems to be radically restrictive licensing and having a lawyer's phone number at hand.

I used to be a strong critic of copyright laws and fondly remember when the Internet promised to be a world of freely flowing information. These days, I think the best bet for the net to survive would be if we found a way to sue every AI company into trillions of debt and make sure that nobody ever dares freeload off the work of others, ever again.