Labor theory of value > subjective theory of value

The comic Resident Philosopher for AI Ethics by Corey Mohler (Existential Comics) explains how the ideas of a philosopher who died over a century ago are not only applicable today, but are vital to understand if we want to come out the other side intact.

Resident Philosopher for AI Ethics

“Your entire business model is to take control of the free exchange of information, and manipulate it for your personal gain!

“See this chart? The red portion is what you created. The blue portion is what you built off pre-existing open source technology, science and stolen data. You can’t see the red part because it is so small.

“The only possible ethical thing to do is destroy this company, open-source everything, and hand over control directly to the people, to use it for the common good.”

Mohler wrote underneath the comic that,

“In The Conquest of Bread, Peter Kropotkin makes the argument that all technological progress more or less belongs to everyone.

“We simply find ourselves existing in the modern world that inherits the efforts of billions of people to make it livable for us, spanning tens of thousands of years. The very land we live on has been cultivated by our ancestors to make it suitable to farming. Technology created in the past is handed to us to work this land. The crops we grow have been selectively bred for thousands of years to feed us. Animals like sheep and cows exist, which are nothing like their natural selves, having their DNA altered by the long slow efforts of our fore bearers. All this work belongs to all of us, but often the capitalist comes in at the last moment to buy the land, buy the animals, and patent the last 0.0001% of technological improvement to some contraption. From this ownership they are allowed to control everything.

“[…] literally billions of man-hours have been spent just on the software side to create operating systems which are free and open and given to capitalists (such as the Linux kernel and ecosystem). All of this work, as well as the scientific work to create the hardware, represents 99.9999% of the work to create something like OpenAI, and it belongs to all of us. From this, they spend a small amount of money to create a system, and in their case they also train their model off the additional billions of hours of man-hours in writing text, producing knowledge, and creating art, and then they seize control of the output of this work, and use it exclusively for private gain.”