Rich Hickey on AI.
https://gist.github.com/richhickey/ea94e3741ff0a4e3af55b9fe6287887f
Rich Hickey on AI.
https://gist.github.com/richhickey/ea94e3741ff0a4e3af55b9fe6287887f
@borkdude I'm pasting what Rich wrote here for people who don't want to open the GitHub link
Thanks AI!
I got this email:
Rich,
Your creation of Clojure ...
sycophantic blather worthy of a third grader's homework assignment to write a letter to a public figure you don't know, using sources you don't understand, to express an emotion unfelt, with no intention whatsoever
Claude Haiku 4.5
Ah, Christmas time. That time of year when our hearts are warmed by the best wishes of an idiot robot. All tingly from the experience, and in the holiday spirit, I thought I'd write my own letter of thanks to those bringing us this next generation of 'AI'.
Dear 'AI' purveyors,
How shall I thank thee, let me count the ways:
Should I thank you for pirating the entire historical output of creative humanity and then asserting ownership of your loot?
For destroying education?
For raising utility rates and killing the environment?
For wasting vast quantities of developer time trying to coax some useful output from your BS generators, time which could instead be used communicating to interns and entry-level devs who, being actually intelligent, could learn from what they are told, and maintain what they make?
For eliminating entry-level jobs, and thus the path to experience, ensuring future generations of unskilled, unemployable people?
For giving me a fake person to talk to when I need support instead of an actual person who understands what I'm saying, can help me faster, and has a chance of caring?
For replacing search results with summary BS?
For providing the tools to fill the internet with slop, making actual human content almost impossible to find?
For enticing CEOs with the promise to save some fraction of a percent on personnel costs, not actually be any faster, cutting off their future labor pool while only experiencing a modest to severe reduction in product quality, integrity and customer satisfaction (tradeoffs they are apparently eager to make)?
For replacing musical expression with the sounds of robot parrots chirping?
For adding an 'AI' feature to every flipping thing, most such features requiring a deep invasion of privacy?
For running the second biggest and most damaging con of this century (running hard at first)?
I think not.
This email was a reminder that agentic 'AI' is sure to flood the remainder of human communication channels with BS, swamping many services, and making every interaction with people not in the same room suspect, and filtering it a time-consuming waste, forever.
When did we stop considering things failures that create more problems than they solve?
Rich
@borkdude i read lately something about we all wanted ai to replace us in all the boring work and what we got was ai trying to replace us in all creative stuff so that we have to do all the boring stuff our selfs. What a revolution.
Rich says exactly what i think all the time about those slop mashines
@borkdude I made the mistake of reading the comments, specifically nukeop's which boiled my blood. Imagine saying a human isn't allowed to have opinions about the machines and the humans running the machines who are actively ruining the world for profit. Nobody said he couldn't use it. JFC.
I hate how infectious tech bro hyperbole is to the lower earning creator.
@SusanPotter @borkdude I did the same, and same.
This is literally the same dude that will say tech is not political, after spewing precisely all the right wing talking points in a conversation about AI.
@RosaCtrl @SusanPotter @borkdude Unless I'm missing some politically charged perspective on the vim vs emacs conversations, I think the comparison misses this side of AI, which for me seems key here.
It's easy to brush off a lot of the issues around AI if you're right-wing and believe it's everyone-for-themself, try harder, pull yourself by your boostraps, don't believe in global warming, don't understand how all of this disproportionately affects minorities (or don't care because it's their fault they're poor), etc.