One can only hope. Copyright has, for a long time been wrongdoing against the public by denying it a robust public domain. We should have free access to ideas less than a century old.
This reveals, nonetheless, even European government is about control, not governance, enforcement of established hierarchy, not civil rights for all.
When I hear free energy I think of perpetual motion machines and other notions that conflict with basic laws of entropy.
However, we're absolutely interested in clean energy (that is, energy that doesn't muck up our environment) and cheap energy (that is, energy that burns low or sustainable fuel). This is why we're looking to mimic the sun and develop fusion. But fusion is super tricky. It's so tricky we've been about 30 years away from fusion for over half a century. Meanwhile, the movie Chain Reaction didn't feature a literally free energy source, just one so drastically cheaper than what we're using now that it's practically free. It's the way that humans have been in existence for such a short time (in contrast to the cosmos, the earth, life or even some dinosaur species) that we practically don't exist.
Another interesting thing to me, is our capitalist system has always half-assed solutions. For the longest time we used simple fission reactors that are not particularly efficient, elegant or clean, and right now we have a waste mess that is, in some places, a waste crisis. (I remember a LWT segment on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, why we haven't finished building it, and what the consequences are having failed to do so.)
As I see it, the end game of capitalism is not to have a sustainable society of billions of people, but to have a sustainable society of one person that uses all the resources, and has replaced everyone else with automation (even to the point of curing his own loneliness with drugs or sexbots or whatever). So making production of stuff better, cleaner, more efficient, more sustainable, whatever, is not a priority. Heck, the dude may be happy with training an AI to mimic his own headspace and leaving that as his heir.
There are some really awesome paths towards better power, and while it'll never be free, we can make it really cheap, so that households can afford gigawatts or yottawatts of energy use. But Paul Shannon (Morgan Freeman) is right that established industrialists will put all their resources toward stopping any disrupting technology or movement that might unseat them, even if it would benefit all of humanity, including them. Social power is just that sweet.
Here in the US, there are no progressive legislative bodies. The Democratic party treats its progressive members as the red-haired stepchildren who have to dine at their own table.
[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
The whole point of IP laws (according to the Constitution of the United States) is to develop a robust public domain. Every registered idea, multiplied by every limited rights extention is a violation of public interest and public rights.
By burying or failing to preserve content, they are in fact stealing from the public, since we won't be able to access it when it is our right.
This was a Donald Duck comic when I was a kid in the 1970s. The smart inventor (Ludwig Von Drake) was trying to mine gold from the ocean, but the energy cost was too great and so it was done at a loss.
We try this once in a while, and it's still to expensive.
Although any sociologist or veteran of the internet will tell you humans will engage in any exploit that yields a funny result. The Diet Coke + Mentos rule.
And that means we'll actively search for hilarious Google AI responses.
Google is so f double-plus filthy rich, it is obligated to run its projects by experts or be relentlessly mocked. So it should have known this was the outcome.
Unless this is 5D chess and Google is willfilly using itself as a cautionary tale to discourage future webservice sites from arbitrarily inserting AI into its features.
The people on your man o' war Are treated worse than scum I'm no flogging captain And by God I've sailed with some Come with me to Barbary We'll ply there up and down Not quite exactly In the service of the Crown
But, according to Das Kapital (and the last two centuries) capitalists will always capture the government and regulators, neutering their ability to fulfill their role. Greed and the susceptibility to corruption will always drive the system to where it is today, in which only revolution will free us from the established system.
But even then, civil war rarely heralds a communist revolution, but usually a run of dictatorships, each overthrown by the next. We have to get very lucky or be tired of fighting before we can install a public serving state. And we haven't yet tried pre-writing and publishing the new constitution.
I thought it was dark as in manipulation that isn't readily visible. For instance, a micro-transaction for a character reskin accompanied by default skins being crap. In Watchdogs Legion all the Londoners you could recruit generally had poor fashion, then money was scant and clothes were super expensive (but you could by more money with micro-transctions).
In one of the Space Quest series, as a joke (black humor in theme with the series) whenever an airlock interface was opened, the mouse cursor started on the Open Outer Door button, so an accidental double-tap was deadly, so dark patterns were known about in the 1990s, though not yet given a name.
Click-wrapped TOS and contracts for software and services were one such strategem, though we're more aware of it today, and more judges are willing to reject contracts and TOS that didn't include a clear, announced disclosure of their odious terms.
