Consider that property rights have been a concept since Ancient Mesopotamia, and were definitely not something the English cooked up during Industrialization. People have entrusted resource protection and allocation to sovereigns or collectives for as long as people have moved around as groups.
Why is there an underlying assumption that there were any “commons” to being with? Everything belonged to somebody at some point, whether or not there was a legal contract which mitigated bloodshed or confusion is another thing. But people would fight to the death to make their claims over land and other natural resources, and that’s how things went till codes were developed to bypass that, and resolve disputes via exchange instead. I’ve never understood why Marxist start out with this underlying assumption, it’s a very self-serving narrative.
As far as AI is concerned, if it does turn out that AI can replace 50 workers with 10, then that just means that you can do that too, and the cost of production is lowered by such a tool. Isn’t then AI shifting the means of production to many except to the few? There are other work modes out there than just being someone’s worker, and maybe AI will enable those. I don’t know, it remains to be determined, but we’re better off making those kinds of work modes easier as opposed to wishing about turning back the clock.
Some reading for the curious, https://babylonian.mythologyworldwide.com/hammurabis-code-a-...
That said, I think it would be better if more models were open sourced, or if FOSS non-profits would buy GPUs and start their own model training program based on the currently released open source models. The commons argument doesn’t apply here if there are multiple open source models which contain information from hundreds of hours of GPU training which someone else has already done, and thus can be picked up by any open source organization to train on additional content for whatever is of interest. Some orgs have tried that already, but didn’t gain traction due to poor marketing and lack of funding, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EleutherAI. Maybe if there were government subsidies to encourage open source model release, or non-profit funding for setting up and paying for GPU farms for training models which could be used by everyone, then this type of organizational behavior would become more productive.
