I just ate a carrot. It was a fairly cheap piece of food, costing much less than one dollar. Farming a carrot doesn't use very much energy. And they taste good.

Bayer, the giant food and pharma conglomerate, just came out with a product called a NewCarrot. A NewCarrot is completely indistinguishable from a traditional carrot, but a NewCarrot costs $1,000,000, and farming NewCarrots requires 23,000 kWH per carrot. Also, you can't eat a NewCarrot unless you have internet access.

Every mainstream news outlet is talking non-stop about how NewCarrots are a revolutionary technology that will completely reshape every industry.

Many big corporations have fired most of their workers and paid Bayer to replace their workers with NewCarrots. How can a carrot do a job that previously required a human? No one has any idea, but Bayer assures us it's possible. Even if it's not possible now, carrots are a completely new invention that didn't exist two years ago and they're improving rapidly, so pretty soon carrots will be able to do everything humans can.

Bayer avoids using their own company name in marketing NewCarrots. Instead, they say NewCarrots are made by a non-existent company called "OpenCarrot." Bayer insists "OpenCarrot" is a scrappy startup standing up to the tyranny of Big Agra, despite the fact that NewCarrots are actually produced by one of the largest food companies. Every single journalist who talks about NewCarrots parrots this marketing point, calling them an "OpenCarrot" product.

Half of all posts on fediverse are about how carrots (both new and old) are completely useless and there will never be a use for carrots ever. They further argue that there will never be a carrot that doesn't require 23,000 kWH to farm: it's biologically impossible for such a carrot to exist.

Meanwhile, lots of CarrotBros respond that of course NewCarrots are useful because they taste good, and never mind that you can get the exact same taste from an old carrot.

Some have proposed a "solution" to the "carrot problem:" introduce the biggest expansion to copyright in a century to allow copyrighting the (natural!) cell structure of carrots, ensuring that it's "piracy" to plant a carrot seed unless a big corporation does it. Creative Commons has warned that Bayer, as a company that owns a lot of IP, would be the biggest beneficiary of such an expansion, and in fact Bayer's subsidiary Monsanto has spent decades lobbying for the creation of "proprietary" crops.

Many fediversians insist Creative Commons must be getting bribed by Bayer, because there's no other conceivable reason an organization founded to oppose copyright expansions might oppose expanding copyright.

Other fedivesians say "okay, maybe dramatically expanding copyright won't hurt OpenCarrot, but what's the alternative? If we don't expand copyright to give OpenCarrot a monopoly on carrots, what's to stop them from continuing to charge a million dollars per carrot?"

A whole bunch of my colleagues are talking about the "epidemic of cheating" that is inevitably caused by NewCarrots. If we don't do something like put students under heavy surveillance, they might use a NewCarrot to cheat on tests. How does a carrot help you cheat on a test? No one knows, but we're supposed to believe it's inevitable.

And here I am just eating my ordinary "old" carrots.

#Bayer #Monsanto #Carrots #NewCarrots #OpenCarrot #LLM #OpenAI #Microsoft #CreativeCommons