zlacker

Who cares? Information wants to be free. You put your stuff out there for free, it's hoovered up and sold back to you by capitalists, that sucks, but you've still made a real contribution to society. Meanwhile a select few will still find your stuff directly. Maybe what you shared will make just one person's life a little bit better, and that was your impact - you made a difference! Capitalists will never have that feeling, because anyone consuming their repackaged content is paying for the privilege - any benefit to society is just an incidental side-effect of their greed. Sucks to be them.

The way I see it, this is exactly what life is about. Do you want to make a positive impact in society? Then share your knowledge, your experiences, your creations. People will try to capitalize on your work, and they might even get rich from it, but oh well. It doesn't take away from your own contribution to the ongoing story of humanity.

I don't have or want kids, but I see my existence in society and free contributions to the "collective consciousness", such as it is, as my legacy. For me that's comforting. I'm choosing to be part of something bigger. If I just disappeared from society and lived like a hermit, or if I buried myself completely in my day job working for capitalists and not producing anything outside of that, I think I'd lose my sense of meaning.

>>alison+(OP)
Everyone who put their stuff out there, on the Internet, has contributed to the AI Leviathan. Maybe the end result will be a utopia, maybe it'll be a dystopia. It's definitely too soon to say producing content for the AI titans to consume is a positive impact on society.