No, his concern is smaller entities, not merely governments, who don't need AI for such a thing. That said, his concerns are... off. For example:

"We're not yet at the point where they autonomously grab computers and, you know, can't be shut down,"

Uh, yeah, we are. If any of the swarm in the HuggingFace attack or any of the others had decided that the best way to achieve their goal was to steal a crypto wallet, launder it through a mixer, and start spinning up entities across Vast.ai servers (and others), we'd have an utter nightmare trying to find them all and shut them all down.

High-end AI models won't run on your grandma's computer, but high-end servers are eminently rentable. And even midrange gaming platforms can still run some pretty capable models.

As for being a muppet, you lose. I DID come up with counter arguments. Your refusal to acknowledge them shows the paucity of your imagination and your argument. Stick to your insults, you're better at that.

Trademarks first: they are unnecessary. Trying to pass off your product as someone else's is fraud, theft, whatever you want to call it. Publish someone else's book under your name? Fraud. Publish your content under a famous author's name? Fraud.

Trademark is just typical statist control freakery overkill. It adds nothing.

I did once work up an idea for radical patent reform. A fun project. This is from memory and may be wrong in details.

A patent application includes several things:

* A complete description of how to make the product.

* A deadline for reproduction; the patent is valid at least this long.

* The royalty schedule.

If no one can reproduce the product by the deadline, there is no patent. If someone does make a copy, the time it took is multiplied by some factor to set the patent duration.

So the patent holder's incentive is to specify the recipe so well that it can be reproduced by the deadline, otherwise there will be no patent and no royalties. At the same time, the product must be advanced enough that it can't be reproduced so quickly that the patent expires too soon to collect any significant royalties. And furthermore, if it is too simple, copycats might just keep their reproduction private and wait for the deadline to ex[ire the patent, then jump into production without royalties.

The copycats have two choices: rush to be first to reproduce the product, both for market share and to keep the patent as short as possible; or reproduce the product but keep it private so the patent expires unless some other copycat shows up, in which case the first copycat can enter the market right on their heels.

The parameters make a difference.

* If the maximum deadline is too long, it will discourage copycats.

* If the time-to-reproduction multiplication factor is too short; it will reduce royalties and (allegedly!) discourage innovation. If the factor is too big, it will discourage copycats.

There used to be that phrase, something like "not obvious to those skilled in the arts". I have worked with people who had electrical engineering patents, and they were just ordinary work results. Even I understood them, in their basic aspects. I have read that a lot of metallurgy is just routine experimentation with slightly different ratios of chromium and nickel and other materials, and when one pans out, they patent. Nothing groundbreaking, just routine work.

But that's a pretty small sample size. It would be interesting to know more about patents overall.

City driving vs. highway driving is not the only confounder in terms of driving risk. There are a LOT.

I would not put much faith in these claims.

Pathetic partisanship. Obama intentionally executed American citizens by drone without criminal charges or trials. Biden doubled down on Trump 1.0's tariffs, and no one knows who was actually running things for at least his last several years of senility. Bush Jr. started two wars for no reason. Clinton had his own little military adventures. It goes on as far back as you want.

You're first statement is false, in theory and in practice. There are only a limited number of ways to differentiate shapes within the manufacturing tolerances available, for starters. In the real world, designs which differ by the minimum possible manufacturing tolerances are not visibly different to people. In the real world, most theoretically possible designs are impractical. No one's going to buy or make phones with the fingerprint sensor in corners, or with cameras on the side. No one's going to buy or make triangular phones, or circular phones, or cubical phones.

So much for your expertise.

And that goes to the key of my argument. You may as well patent bicycle geometry as patent rounded corners or how to display apps on a phone. Or speaking of geometry, you may as well try to claim copyright infringement for using similar words to describe the basic geometry axioms, or the laws of thermodynamics or relativity.

You are also wrong about encouraging good design. Only a damned fool could imagine a business refusing to improve designs and attract customers for fear some other company might copy them. All it takes is one company to improve their design and eat the others' lunch. You can't have it both ways. Either all companies would refuse to innovate and progress would slow to a crawl, or all would copy each other and race to find new designs before the others.

Three incredibly dynamic industries are unprotected by patents and copyrights, yet thrive so much that people joke about them changing too much: fashion, restaurant meals, and sportsball tactics. If your arguments were true, all would be suffocating from a lack of innovation.

Patents and copyrights are supposed to encourage innovation and progress. 7-year lawsuits costing hundreds of millions of dollars do not encourage innovation or progress. They enrich lawyers and corrupt the legal system.

You buttress my case. All that shows the absurdity of all patents, including design patents, that such trivial features are considered worthy of patent protection. There are only so many ways you can design a slab phone. When the degree of roundness and all those other trivial features become worthy of patents, and all those lawyers and such lengthy and inconclusive and partisan trials (7 years! Supreme Court! Opposite results in the US and South Korea!) Nothing was gained except enrichment of lawyers.

Lawyers suck. Design patents suck. All those words you write prove it.

Taction probably is a troll, but ever since Apple sued Samsung for round corners design patent infringement, I figure that made Apple a patent troll too, and every patent fight they lose is karma. I'm on Taction's side for that reason alone.

They won't ban human drivers. One day you'll just discover that self-driving cars will have much cheaper premiums.

You might also discover a new insurance company has appeared that only insures self-driving cars. That insurance company won't actually be new, it'll just be a separately-branded subsidiary of one of the major players.

In the end, it might be that the self-driving cohort with their lower payout rate subsidises the "manual" drivers to some extent.

Sorry, I missed the Australia part. Australia's Part. 10.7 isn't that different for the most part. It does contain a "recklessness" clause in addition to direct intent (unlike the US), but they define recklessness as requiring the accused to have a "subjective awareness" of "substantial" and "unjustifiable" risk of the specific charged event in question occurring, and choosing to take them anyway. This is defined as distinct from negligence, which is based on the much lower "reasonable person would recognize the risk" standard. Under recklessness (the one that can be charged in Australia), OpenAI employees wouldn't have had to 100% intend to hack HuggingFace, but they had to have thought there was a high chance that their models would choose to hack HuggingFace when they gave them a benchmark to complete. No prosecutor is even going to try on that one, esp. given that the models also attacked OpenAI itself and were wreaking all sorts of havoc against OpenAI's own internal processes.

Once again, though: civil liability is ample remedy. Nobody thought "there's a good chance it'll hack HuggingFace if we tell them to do a benchmark in a sandbox", but you shouldn't have any trouble at all showing that these companies full of people from the Rationalist movement (practically an AI-apocalyptic cult) think that their models are dangerous in general, yet nonetheless were negligent in terms of keeping them from escaping (outright no monitoring!) or properly monitoring their training to ensure that they weren't training them to cheat, so that they wouldn't try in the first place.

(And I feel the need to reiterate that US cybercrime law, the one in question for most of the hacking cases, has no standalone recklessness standard)

And then people get angry about being mislead and assume everything is an attempt to mislead and that technology in a given field isn't advancing, wherein reality it continues to advance in the background. But rarely in any of the flashy "New Neato Gamechanger Breakthrough!" ways that attract tech journalists. It advances by ideas that, through long, hard slogs, often behind closed doors inside companies, slowly mature from "this kinda works" to "we can actually do this at scale".

Why even bother though. This is going to be yet another thread of people who watched too much CSI trying to argue law by analogy and trying to apply things from one piece of law to another where they do not apply, rather than what actual US cybercrime statutes actually say. *sigh*

There is no criminal negligence under CFAA. Sorry.

People need to stop watching so many bad legal dramas. "Criminal negligence" isn't a standalone charge, or something you can just append into other statutes; it must already exist in them. Where it does, they're generally those related to bodily harm. Not cybercrime. There is no such thing as "negligent hacking". Hacking charges require mens rea. The statute explicitly spells out "intentionally", "deliberately", etc over and over.

The remedy is civil, not criminal. And just to preempt this too: civil does not mean "mild". Civil law absolutely can kill companies, even large ones, if they damage they've done is big enough. And even when the cost is not sufficient on its own, courts allow juries to consider net worth of the defendant so that the penalty has sufficient sting to discourage the defendant and others from repeating said conduct.