Tech Giants, Gorging on AI Professors Is Bad for You

Eat too much and there won't be grass for anyone. In an essay written in 1833, the British economist William Forster Lloyd made a profound observation using the example of cattle grazing. Lloyd described a hypothetical scenario involving herders who share a pasture, and individually decide how many of their animals would graze there. If few herders exercised restraint, overgrazing would occur, reducing the pasture's future usefulness and eventually hurting everybody. The sinister beauty of this example is that the rational course of action is to behave selfishly.