Video games are a perfect example of how innovation all but stops when a few companies have access to all of the resources. Companies like EA, Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard all make mostly hot garbage these days because they 'innovated' themselves into making the same 4 games over and over. It's happening with movies too where everything is either a sequel or a remake because recognizable IP has been deemed more important than making something actually good.

Video games have always been about copying the other guy and making it better though. Blizzard famously akways just made the best parts of all other games in the genre packaged up with cool looking cinematics. Every single FPS borrows from every other FPS any time something new comes along. And thankfully when Nintendo tried to stop it with Palworld they (mostly) got egg on their face.

The one famous example that did stick that I can remember is warner bros patented the nemesis system in Shadow of Mordor. Nobody can use that actually rather cool idea until 2036 and it hasn't been used in a decade now. Real cool stuff and definitely pushed the industry forward.

No. Patents and copyright are there to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.

I'd love to hear you justify it

There has been plenty of crap released in the past, and even in the AI age we should be able to look at the same signals to filter through it today.

Should an AI have expanded it to 3 paragraphs to say the same thing?

What point are you trying to make? The comment I responded to added nothing. Your snarky low value response to me is to suggest I believe expanding the nothing by use of AI would be good? Why would you make such a bad inference or worse joke?

> today it offered me “Finances” which would allow me to connect my financial data

Did you though?

Reality is that telling future bad parents not to have kids isn't going to stop them having kids, even if you say please

So.. stop producing smartphones / tablets? TVs? What's your other option?

Stop marketing to them to kids or normalizing kids using them?

This is really not that hard. Modern app culture is highly addictive and provably poison for our brains over time. Adults can choose poison if they wish but when they give it to their kids it is called child abuse.

I'm not saying go to zero. But definitely not over 3 hours and definitely not a dedicated device for them.

Not always. AI is being pushed on plenty of people. Let's just say that not all products serve consumers and there's room for regulation.

Even if I want to buy uranium, I shouldn't. And if I want to buy a chair, I shouldn't be seeing only uranium chairs.

I mean uranium can be a hazard to people around you, so I don't think that's an equivalent scenario.

Drugs could be a good analogy as it (mostly) affects yourself. A safe route for people to buy those would fix the #1 leading cause of death of young adults in the US today (fentanyl)

Amusingly, I totally bought Uranium off of Amazon ~7 years ago when I wanted to test my Geiger counter. Doesn't seem to be available anymore though? Sad!

This is also a great argument for low-tar cigarettes for children.

Do you have a strong argument against them?

The group of parents who let their kids smoke might get those instead, improving their health

The parents who don't allow it would never consider them

I suppose it depends how many of group 2 could be converted to 1 if they were "low tar!".. my intuition is close to zero

You're asking if I have a strong argument against targeting children with tobacco products?

The existence of them, yeah. I don't think it's so clear cut that it'd be a net increase in harm. Advertising I'm not so sure about, but as for the mere existence of them:

Group A is going to smoke regardless, having a healthier product reduces harm

Group B is never going to smoke no matter what's on offer

You’re missing Group C, who didn’t offer cigarettes to their kids until their kids heard of these “healthy” cigarettes that are “safe for kids”

Juul was essentially this scenario.

Absolutely no cigarettes should be marketed to children. That doesn't mean various cigarette-adjacent products cannot exist.

The net harm result really only changes because the scope and numbers differ. I don't think I've ever met anyone who actually allows their kids to smoke, I see a lot who give them tablets though.

If we instead imagine a world where parents allowed, even encouraged 60% of children to smoke, and there was no clear route to outright stopping them, giving them at least a better alternative that doesn't hurt them as much would be worth considering

I think I get what you're saying, but it's really an unfortunate example.

I think it's still better to ban these obviously harmful things and to reduce exposure to them as much as possible.

I don't see what banning it actually accomplishes unless we totally ban tablets altogether. From the way I see it, it's the parents who are choosing to give their kids tablets in order to make their own parenting job easier. Am I wrong there? What do you ban to stop that happening?

This is basically the needle exchange argument. Except instead of just needles, you just want to hand out the drug.

I agree that if a parent is dead-set on giving their kid endless screen time, tobacco, or heroin, they will find a way to do it. But the tobacco story demonstrates there are many interventions that can significantly decrease the net amount of abuse. If you want to take a public health argument, do it honestly.

I don't really think looking at it through the lens of tobacco works. Parents giving their children tobacco and heroin aren't a thing. In reality many are self-motivated to give them a tablet for their own benefit, nothing much to do with the kid

Screens or tablets aren't the harmful drug in this situation, they're the needle. A needle that can contain medicine or heroin. The harm is from specific apps and social media. A device can be locked down. You can control what it's able to do and how much. I've used screens to teach myself a language to fluency, a hell of a lot about software development, and countless other things.

Would you object to a tablet that could only access Khan Academy, Openstax and Udemy? What about if we added on a 20 minute allowance of social media? I haven't looked super deep into the Amazon device much but it seems this is the direction they're heading with the parental dashboard

"Educational content has to come first. Your child completes reading or learning goals in Kids+ and educational apps before entertainment apps unlock"

I mean obviously kids are going to try to game the system to get to what they want.. but it seems like a reasonable path to test, and it doesn't require trying to turn every bad parent into a good one, or do something outlandish like ban tablets

I thought that people don't know what they want until you show it to them? They thought they wanted faster horsies but Amazon gave them noxious cars?

The demand was for transportation, not any specific product.

Amazon's target market here, wants to parent their kids without parenting their kids. Whether that's a TV with cartoons 20 years ago, a tablet 5 years ago, or a "digital pacifier" today nothing has changed. It's just being fulfilled differently.

My point is that the responsibility is on parents, not companies who will inevitably get the blame and nothing will change. See the other commenter here who said their kids don't even own a tablet.

> Massive toll

Example? "Massive" is relative, and it's almost never actually massive to the person paying. Software is incredibly cheap.

Adobe is primarily a professional program and even at higher fees it's a miniscule amount compared to the rate of the professional using it. Adobe isn't scooping up 20% of their earnings, it's more on the order of 0.07%.

The entities seemingly paying "massive tolls" are large corporations, who pay the big bucks because they're paying per seat, employing tens or hundreds of thousands of people. The toll per-person is, again, absolutely tiny and nothing compared to the salaries paid.

So in exchange for devaluing the labor of anyone in the firing lines of AI, removing a path to building a business with time, smarts and energy instead of capital, not actually fixing the lower and middle classes main categories of expenses (food,housing,healthcare) where is it going to make everyone better off?

I feel like anyone optimistic about these changes hasn't actually thought it through..

> Adobe is primarily a professional program and even at higher fees it's a miniscule amount compared to the rate of the professional using it.

I feel that that is an optimistic take - for now the professional using it can command high salaries. It will not remain that way. The endgame for AI in an economy is to drive the value of labour and knowledge to zero.

Knowledge and labour don't magically exclude the AI labs. Who still needs to get paid in such an endgame?

dead labor something something

Oh but why do they need a high salary when AI gives us free software? /s

> Work is not life.

When 20% of your waking hours are free, and 10% of your mental energy.. it's pretty hard to argue that work isn't your life.

I agree. I have several thoughts on this.

The more I use AI at work the less I have to "think myself", which should mean I have more mental capacity outside of work, right? That isn't the case. Because the task I "hand over" to Claude (I never really hand stuff over, but I usually work together with Claude to help me understand problems) doesn't magically disappear from my cognitive load.

So when I leave work now compared to 5 years ago. I have done more stuff, but my cognitive load is higher and it is harder to unwind than it was 5 years ago. Which makes me more tired. I wonder if is this the general experience? Or am I doing something different.

One difference I can see is if I was already a grandmaster in my field, and AI was literally only doing stuff that I already know exactly how works, then I would have less anxiety.

The point is that work isn't the meaning of your life or your self-actualization. Not that work is what you sacrifice most of your life to in order to make a living or fund something else you actually want.