[toyg]

Music composers existed before music sheets were copyrightable - and that was what copyright was invented for...

Without copyright, some business models would have to change, but to say that knowledge "would not be generated" is simply false.

[sk0g]

I was responding to an obvious exaggeration in kind, which was a bad move on my part.

Yes people can and will still continue to do stuff for the sake of it. Some of it will be amazing. The huge things like building the next 5 CPU generations though, is that going to be practical? Who will fund that, and why?

Trying not to get political but the end of copyright feels like communism to me. No private property and all that. While I didn't live through it myself, the associated trauma WRT the USSR certainly left some deep scars that people still haven't healed from.

In any case, if -- and it's a big if -- AI continues to develop at the current rate, a solution like UBI will have to be seriously considered. Economies probably don't function when people don't create value, earn, or spend.

[toyg]

There is some confusion between copyright and patents here. Copyright forbids transmission of knowledge; patents forbid manufacturing. The incentives to manufacture CPUs would still be there if copyright were to be abolished, because patents would still work.

What AI demolishes is the pretense that human art is rare and precious, a scarce resource to channel through forced rivers in order to make money.

What machine-learning will probably result in, is a U-turn from the "knowledge economy", based on gatekeeping information, back into manufacturing-oriented systems, based on actually making stuff.