
Progression of the Inevitable (2009) - rutenspitz
https://kk.org/thetechnium/progression-of/
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kiliantics
Of course, we are all simply "standing on the shoulders of giants" \-- and
also on the shoulders of everyone else, giant or no, that we rely on in this
interconnected world. This kind of reasoning implies pretty strongly that
intellectual property should not be privately owned, excluding others from its
use who could just as likely have discovered it.

~~~
nwah1
The term "intellectual property," while popular, is so vague as to be almost
meaningless.

It is important to be precise. Patents, which are exclusive rights to ideas
irrespective of origin, are much less defensible than other rights that are
lumped into this category of intellectual property.

Trademarks and trade secrets have obvious reasons to remain privately owned.
Trademarks prevent fraud and protect reputations. Trade secrets can only be
acquired through espionage or breach of confidentiality contracts, both of
which are clear types of aggression and invasion of privacy.

Copyrights are the grey area, because a copyright is only on a specific work
with a specific origin. If I write a book that is similar to yours, that alone
doesn't violate your copyright. With a patent, you could be in violation even
if you never heard of the patentholder or their invention, but violating a
copyright requires specifically distributing copies of the work of another.
Duration is one of the key concerns here. But without copyrights, it is
unclear how one could make a living as an author, a publisher, a musician, or
a filmmaker.

If you think patents should be abolished, then say so, and you'll be on strong
footing. If you think copyrights should be abolished, you better bring some
good arguments. If you wish to abolish trademarks and trade secrets, then you
are on extremely weak ground and also should not try to conflate these legal
concepts with the others.

~~~
trevyn
> _But without copyrights, it is unclear how one could make a living as an
> author, a publisher, a musician, or a filmmaker._

IMO, the obsolescence of the perceived “need to make a living” is the
Inevitable here.

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mattnewport
I feel it's a little more complicated and nuanced than this article suggests.
If there is this technological inevitability, how to explain the lack of
wheels in the Americas mentioned in the article? Some argue that similarities
in widely separated cultures like in South America and Egypt suggest an
unknown common origin. The case of the wheel is a little hard to explain
either way. We do have historical examples of technologies being largely lost
/ forgotten however (the fall of the Roman Empire and the dark ages, Easter
Island). Is the wheel better explained by a common origin that one culture
forgot or a failure of technological inevitability?

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VladimirGolovin
_> The laws of genetics, like other inventions and discoveries, are crystals
inherent in the technium, awaiting to materialize. There is nothing magical
about these patterns, nothing mystical about technology having a direction.
Every technology in the abstract is a latent structure_

This reminds me of Meditations on Moloch, a great essay by Scott Alexander
([https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-
moloch/](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)):

 _> Just as the course of a river is latent in a terrain even before the first
rain falls on it – so the existence of Caesar’s Palace was latent in
neurobiology, economics, and regulatory regimes even before it existed. The
entrepreneur who built it was just filling in the ghostly lines with real
concrete._

