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The legal battles over AI currently playing out—and the large number still to come—may profoundly impact the balance of wealth and power in countless democracies in the decades ahead.
For an idea of the scale of the prize, it’s worth remembering that 90 percent of recent U.S. economic growth, and 65 percent of the value of its largest 500 companies, is already accounted for by intellectual property. By any estimate, AI will vastly increase the speed and scale at which new intellectual products can be minted. The provision of AI services themselves is estimated to become a trillion-dollar market by 2032, but the value of the intellectual property created by those services—all the drug and technology patents; all the images, films, stories, virtual personalities—will eclipse that sum. It is possible that the products of AI may, within my lifetime, come to represent a substantial portion of all the world’s financial value.
In this light, the question of ownership takes on its true scale, revealing itself as a version of Bertolt Brecht’s famous query: To whom does the world belong? (Sources: complit.fas.harvard.edu, bostonreview.net, via ft.com/alphaville)
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