From an AI safety perspective, I'm also worried it will accelerate the transition to self-learning code, ie. the model both generating and learning from source code, which is a crucial step on the way to general artificial intelligence that we are not ready for.
I think the real lesson to learn is if you look at the sheer amount of energy (wattage) used to replace humans it's clear that brains are really calorie efficient at doing things like producing the kinds of code that Copilot creates...but it doesn't matter because eliminating labor cost will always be attractive no matter what the up front cost is to do it. They literally can't NOT do it based on the rules of our game.
If it wasn't MS it would be someone else and is...you think IBM isn't doing this? Amazon? GTFOH. So is every other large company that has a pool of labor that is valued as a cost.
Maybe a better question would be how and why major parts of human life are organized in ways that are bad for the bulk of humanity.
But they ain't some kind of special villains, its today's monopoly market kicked in. Selling startuprs to Yahoo comes with consequences.
> capable of laundering open source code That's an exaggeration. Copilot is still a dumb machine which accidentally learned to mimic the practice of borrowing intellectual property from human coders.
They also built a program that outputs open source code without tracking the license.
This isn't a human who read something and distilled a general concept. This is a program that spits out a chain of tokens. This is more akin to a human who copied some copywritten material verbatim.