| > But quantitative changes in an activity produce qualitative changes. Interesting take. I think a corollary is that the qualitative changes are in the economics of things. And more than the scale, it is the value of those economic effects that determines how "accepted" that activity becomes. Take Uber as an example; it basically enabled mass avoidance of taxi regulations, and naturally existing taxi drivers and lawmakers cried foul. But enough people found value in the service and kept using it that gradually and inexorably society and laws adjusted to it. On the other hand, copyright infringement is an interesting case. While pretty much everyone and their dog pirates content to some extent, the % of people who think it's acceptable to do so is surprisingly small (22% apparently, up from only 14% in 2019). Furthermore the media industry, especially including ads, is a significant % of US GDP. I think those reasons, more than any RIAA/MPAA lobbying, are why copyright laws have remained as stringent as they have. As such at a social level, I don't think these effects were dismissed, rather they were considered and formally internalized. I suspect the same thing is happening with AI companies. They get away with devouring and training on the sum of human knowledge largely because existing laws are insufficient to stop them. So stopping this would require new laws but... well, given the early economic impact LLM technology is having my hunch is new laws will be brought in to protect it rather than restrain it. |
But in many places, the ways that society and laws adjusted to it were to make extra clear in their local ordinances that Uber was required to operate as an actual taxi service, or get out.
It's very disingenuous to imply that the public broadly decided Uber was Right, Actually, when both in its case and in that of many of the other gig economy companies, what really happened is that gradually and inexorably, they had to adjust to society and laws.