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Comment by ch71r22 | Hacker News Reader

The article isn't trying to find a particular example. It's talking about the overall stance of Linux on AI use. It argues that maintainers should consider political/moral/ethical arguments around climate change, effect on water supplies, energy prices, etc.

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AI is just a tech like any other. Can be powered by CO2-neutral electricity like anything else. Otherwise, we'll have to protest against aluminum cans, airplanes, golf courts, lemon trees, and whatever else that uses water or electricity.

Plenty of people campaign against things like airplanes or golf courses. They might even be the same folks protesting AI usage! Imagine that!

Well thanks, but I prefer to have airplanes, and maybe occasionally even golf courses. As for climate change - you'd need to protest against Chinese (and Western, but mostly Chinese) coal and gas power plants way way before than you protest against airplanes and golf courses. I don't see too many protesters holding signs like "stop Chinese coal plants". For some reason.

Maybe because their ability to influence coal power generation policy in China is much less than their ability to influence it in the US?

Or because Chinese AI has enabled a complete crackdown on dissent?

Hmm, imagine that!

Well I see much less protests against gas and coal powered stations in the US than against, say, nuclear.

That's a false equivalence. AI is not the same as aluminum cans.

All technologies have political, social, ethical, and economic aspects, and not all technologies are the same. AI is not, in reality, powered by CO2-neutral electricity. As the article mentions, AI is the fastest-growing energy user in the world, so it probably merits a deeper look than aluminum cans.

AI is also an incredibly useful tool that could automate many industries, so it deserves some leeway because of the benefits it provides.

And while it is 'fastest-growing', it is small as an absolute share - around 0.2% of total world CO2 emissions.

So it can both outprice people as well as take their jobs? Well, leeway away.

The only reason we have the standard of living we do today is because of automation. I welcome more of it.

Only insofar as you were able to keep a job. If you lose your job to automation, and there are no more jobs left, what do you do? Where do you get the money to keep your standard of living?

Either we will invent new jobs, as we have always done in the past.

Or if truly all jobs can be done by machine, we retire and go live a life of fully automated luxury space communism.

I wish I could share your optimism.

Having jobs for the sake of having jobs sounds like living in hell.

From what I can tell your argument works out to be as simple as we can’t do this because we want to keep people working, which the vast majority of people hate doing.

There is a small minority of people who enjoy work. It seems cruel to enslave a people in mass simply to keep them busy.

The current economic system is based on people working in exchange for payment. They can then use it on their own life, including living space, food, health and entertainment. Those who do not work do not get such "luxuries."

I'm not arguing for forcing people to work. If we get to a point where no work is economically feasible for humans to do I would very much like some form of UBI or similar to take care of people.

Speaking of enslaving people, the billionaire class has started speaking of removing peoples right to vote if they do not pay taxes (e.g. if they do not work.)

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/why-did-154-bil...

I very much wish that people would no longer have to do busy work and that they would have time for family and hobbies, but being the pessimist that I am, I'm not very hopeful we'll get there any time soon.

No they haven't. That whole news article is based on one two-word tweet in a thread about how old people dominate local politics.

Someone suggested that pensioners shouldn't get a vote, and the Shopify founder responded with "good system".

That's it. That's the whole story. Somehow you turned that into "billionaires are trying to enslave us", probably because you already believe that anyway.

That's a very uncharitable take on what I said. A comment that I've written semi-sarcastically as a reply to someone accusing me of supporting slavery.

Now, I'm fully aware that it's just one guy. But technically, under the proposed system it would be more like 5 guys.

Incredibly useful for some definition of incredibly useful. What I see:

- I now regularly receive AI-written spam emails (marketing pitches, "vulnerability reports").

- I was receiving AI-written garbage quality pull requests. It got so annoying I closed pull requests on my project's repo.

- When I try to contact some company's customer support these days there's a good chance I will be fed slop by an agent posing as a customer support person, this is absolutely infuriating.

- When I search for information on the internet, for certain queries, 90% of the results is slop.

- AI crawlers are DDoSing websites.

- The already mentioned things – hardware getting more expensive, climate impact, unethically sourced training data.

Aluminum production is one of the largest electricity consumers out there, much larger than AI.

True in fact. Aluminum manufacturing is responsible for roughly 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and if you add in metal manufacturing as a whole it comes up to 11%. Refining ore is very energy-intensive.

> AI is not the same as aluminum cans.

True. AI is actually useful.

Aluminum cans had a distinct use. AI just invades a perfectly working industry that made Torvalds filthy rich and adds nothing- And he defends it because he is corporate now.

It is more like leaded fuel or DDT.

Adds nothing? In what world are you living?

> It argues that maintainers should consider political/moral/ethical arguments around climate change, effect on water supplies, energy prices, etc

Is the assumption that maintainers did not consider those things?

Imho, this is the crux of the debate.

Of course Linus realizes linux development is political, because he's lived that, however he might phrase it.

What I think both are actually saying:

Drew Devault (blogger): Linux development should place political/moral/ethical arguments in primacy (or at least more important?)

Linus: Technical reality should always come first, with other considerations secondary

If the above read is correct, I'm sympathetic to Linus' position. If the linux kernel doesn't work and improve, technically, then nothing else about the project matters.

Bikeshedding about political/moral/ethical qualms impairs the technical work.

Ergo, a strong lighthouse statement from Linus that the technical work always comes first, even if other considerations are made when appropriate.

The AI genie (referring broadly to 'any LLM-based tool that performs a useful development function') isn't going back in the bottle, and linux sticking its head in the sand for ethical reasons will harm linux.

One could place political/moral/ethical arguments in primacy and still conclude that the greater good is best served by continuing on.

Why not fix all the issues with private jets and yachts first? Why don't they use regular public transportation as we all do? Instead, let's bash poor Clanker, who reviews kernel code.

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