AI and the Enclosure of the Scientific Commons

There’s a very important paper on arXiv by P.K.G. Williams (of the Harvard-Smithsoninan Center for Astrophysics) with title AI and the Enclosure of the Scientific Commons and abstract: The scientific literature can be viewed as an “information commons”: an intangible resource that “no one owns and is shared by everyone.” There are well-established economic and political frameworks for understanding such commons, emerging from the history of agricultural common lands found in places like preindustrial England. This article provides a primer on the history and these frameworks, and considers a key difference between the information commons and the fields of yore: while information commons are robust and immensely valuable — some can be said to rank among humanity’s greatest achievements — the English agricultural commons no longer meaningfully exist. The latter are gone not because of the well-known “tragedy of the commons,” but rather a phenomenon known as the enclosure movement…