That happened on the used market after they were no longer manufactured, and the original was seen on a few idolized players' boards.

And there have been Klon clones for ages, including a follow on version by the original designer.

After the Singularity (possibly): build good products, get reverse engineered and copycats offered, nobody wants to buy what they can get for free or have AI make for them, rather ask AI those support questions, forced into different kind of business.

Part of the issue is that people can feed the idea, descriptions, and pictures into the AI. Thus create knockoffs, for their crowdfund or as the basis for their similar software.

If the original person ever actually releases software, they can buy a copy and feed to the AI, to then beef up the features in the previously created similar software. The difference between the original and copycats can be few to just about none.

Unless the original creator is willing to fight it out in court, there is little they can do about the situation. Updates made in the original, can be "transferred" to the copycats. AI makes the speed and quality orders of magnitude higher.

You can, however, use their equipment as a dumb modem and insert your own router downstream. It thankfully supports DMZ to expose your router directly to the internet without NAT. I use Ubiquiti.

You are the one who needs to wake up from the assumption that the only way to live is to hoard your intellectual products instead of imagining a society where you can stop having to compete on that level.

While it is true that money could possibly be made indirectly and around the product (e.g. training, support, ads), the questions surrounding doing the equivalent of turning their IP into open-source remains. Usually, dominant companies don't like change or having to figure out new ways to obtain revenue, other than what's direct and obvious to them.

As for customization and plugins, that looks to be an AI versus IP problem too: (1) that companies would turn to Adobe or Microsoft, versus using their own AI (2) 3rd parties reverse engineering their plugins with AI.

Most likely way that it appears possible, is some type of licensing deal between the AI company and the original IP owner. Would be surprised if they do that smoothly, prior to lots of court fights, because corporate types usually don't like to share.

The end goal was always that you could go and modify your printer drivers if you wanted to.

Also you can reimplement, but not steal the code.

The only way AI and robots end up replacing most jobs is if they can do them for less money than people can. Which in turn means that those things become less expensive, since that's the thing causing suppliers to do it.

So there are really three possibilities here. First, we get robots that can e.g. build houses and housing scarcity goes down, so now you don't need to make much money to afford rent. Second, robots still can't build housing, so then you get a job building housing and have a job. Or third, robots still can't build housing but we have a bunch of rent-seeking incumbents that won't allow you to get a job doing that either, because they're trying to keep rents high or artificially limit the supply of trade labor.

It's the third one that really screws you and is the one that we need to prevent.

As for the AGI and robot part, various oligarchs are talking about manufacturing millions to even billions of robots. Combine that with billions of AI agents in massive data centers all over the world. Bringing forth a new self-sustaining artificial life form that can do what humans do (if not vastly better) and at comparable numbers or mass.

https://www.wsj.com/world/china-economy-gen-z-f9058941

https://www.economist.com/china/2019/11/14/homelessness-has-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si2zT-wCs3c

We all know that "real" communist societies like North Korea are worse, much, much worse. In fact within China how bad this is varies enormously. If you're in a "rope village" somewhere deep inland, having the finest house in the entire city is arguably worse than homelessness in Beijing, but the party won't let you leave except as homeless, because you're allocated a "Household" (Hukou) and you aren't allowed to leave.

And, of course, half the problem is the very structure of the communist party itself: local officials hide the problem, because if they don't, they'll be purged or at the very least won't see promotions, ever. Which means that the police will be using violence to hide the problem rather than fix it.

AI can provide incredible wealth, or immeasurable misery, in both capitalist and communist societies. That is not what makes the difference, that is just how political parties like to frame themselves and so the argument why you should choose "left" or "right".

Capitalism and private home ownership can certainly provide housing, but if you go too far or not far enough in private ownership and "protecting capital" they won't. And communism can certainly fix homelessness (the Soviets did, for example), except nowadays they just won't.

AI will provide more tools for people with capital, which primarily will be the government. Whether that solves, say, homelessness is a choice, in either system.

I sure hope so! Greedy bastard corpos trying to gatekeep access to software and information have been holding human progress back for far too long.

Not in the same way. Like today if you see a programmer with a bunch of punch cards of assembly they hand coded, that is impressive, but if that is all they have I would question if they can provide value in a modern software org.

The reputation that matters moving forward will be the 100x engineer that is digitally sovereign and built all the software they use from firmware to kernel to UX. The one who automates everything, has a history of making things people want, and understands a system down to the metal. That is the only person I could be convinced to hire at this point, and the person I am striving to become.

Everyone else will be unemployable in tech.

As long as nobody is stopping them from building houses for the people who do want them.

Nice history rewriting from the amateur historian ("glass them").

The US dropped more bomb tonnage on North Vietnam than in all of WW2. They dropped more napalm than all of WW2. They even used Agent Orange to defoliate, en masse.

The only thing they didn't use was nukes. And that's because both China and the Soviets had them, not because the goodness of American hearts.

The men on the $2 pedal bikes won. In their moats and tunnels.

"IP" is the thing that favors economies of scale.

Suppose you're a manufacturing company and you want to make your own computers. You're great at making the chassis and screen and batteries and things like that, but to make a whole device you also need an operating system, a compiler, a web browser, a CPU, etc.

If you're free to use existing ones then you have a chance. If you have to develop every one of those things in-house because every existing one is the property of an incumbent who is using it as a moat then you have to be a megacorp or you're sunk.

Notice that this is what all of the smaller companies actually do. Every small consumer device OEM and some of the big ones are using some variant of Linux/Android or BSD rather than developing their own OS. NeXT, the scrappy company Apple bought and turned into Mac OS X when they were themselves the underdog, was based on BSD. RISC-V has shipped more than 30 billion cores and is taking a decent chunk of the embedded market from ARM, which is itself a company that licenses its designs to companies that compete with each other (and run Linux on their chips) rather than using exclusivity and mandatory vertical integration to try to monopolize the whole supply chain. Which is how the mobile market went to them rather than Intel and Microsoft. Who themselves took the desktop and server markets from even more vertically integrated mainframe companies.

The availability of composition is what allows you to be a small company that does one thing well. Which is the thing you can't do when someone else has a monopoly on something you don't make but need, and correspondingly isn't willing to sell it to someone who is trying to compete with them in a different part of the supply chain.

Moreover, the economies of scale you're talking about on the other side actually have diminishing returns. Suppose anybody who wants to make a product that typically sells for $100 has to buy a $10,000 machine in order to do it, but then can make an unlimited number of them. If you're so small that you only ship 100 units, the cost of that machine by itself is adding $100 to the cost of producing of each unit and you're pretty screwed. But if you're a medium sized company and you ship a million units, it's only adding one cent. The advantage of the medium company over the small one is dramatic. Whereas the megacorp that ships ten billion units shaves it down to 1/10000th cent, but then the advantage of the megacorp over the medium one is still less than one cent.

On top of that, it's often something like you need a $10,000 machine that can make a million units even if you only use it to make a hundred, and then the scale advantage of the medium company over the small one is all still there, but the advantage of the megacorp over the medium one doesn't even exist because then to make ten billion units they need ten thousand machines.

Which is even before we get to diseconomies of scale: The larger an entity is, the more efficiency you lose to bureaucracy, coordination costs, principal-agent problems, internal politics, etc.

There is a reason industries with low barriers to entry tend not to monopolize. Why is there no monopolist who grows all of the coffee or weaves all of the clothing? Shouldn't "economies of scale" allow a single huge company to out-compete all of these little ones in the absence of anyone having a way of excluding competitors?

Conversely, find a consolidated industry and you'll generally find some kind of government-backed monopoly or regulatory capture.

AnthonyMouse gave you a overly lengthy rebuttal without getting to the point but the cost structure of IP is as follows: the marginal cost of making a copy is low enough to be negligible compared to the fixed cost of creating it.

This means the theoretical marginal cost is equal to the development cost divided by the number of paying customers. Where the development cost can either be a one time expense or an ongoing expense.

Companies make the fixed investment (or take someone else's fixed investment like an open source project) and they charge market rate pricing. The difference between the marginal cost (which is dropping with scale) and the market rate is economic rent or producer surplus. Competing companies pop up and work on their own product because they see the producer surplus and want a piece for themselves. This is how you get many companies wast the producer surplus on reinventing the same software over and over again.

Now with open source software you have the opposite problem. The marginal cost is zero, but the fixed cost still has to be paid. This means that the customer gets something that they would otherwise have to pay market rate pricing for free, this is consumer surplus. The marginal cost that the consumer would have to pay to keep the project alive becomes irrelevant the more consumers there are, which makes open source a financial tragedy because it fixed the cost structure problem at the expense of self sacrifice.

What an extraordinary claim. Elaborate.

> Of course that would represent an enormous loss compared to today but it would not be enough to collapse it.

Betting against a revolution in such a scenario is bold.

> Talk to someone from China

China is capitalist, not communist.

> If you truly believe communism is better, why not just join one of those instead of dragging everyone along with you

Where did I say that? That's a nonsense argument for various reasons but it's not the point of this discussion so I'll skip it.

The Great depression saw 25% unemployment and that was just a temporary upset, try 50% and rising over time. How long are you willing to go hungry supporting capitalism in that environment, and why?

The food is right there, fully automated, the only reason you're not getting it is because you refuse to work in the mines 14 hours a day to get it. Capitalism will survive for a while but people will eventually revolt.