Hi, I took my vacation serious and thus did not contributed to the discussion so far and have read only a minor fraction. Intentionally not using the help of LLM for this mail it took me way longer than I wished. In any case I would like to drop some thoughts here.
40 years ago I had a math teacher who was the greatest teacher I imagine
since he taught us to think self standing and to even disagree with him.
He once told us that real math is done with pen and paper (and eraser)
but not with computers. He had good reasons to say so and I understand
these - but I did not follow the argument as you might guess.
20 years ago there was the advent of smartphones and I think real
communication is not done with smartphones and my friends know that I
do not own such a device. That's not a dogma but for me *personally*
the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.
We tend to call computers and smartphones progress but progress has some
kind of positive interpretation. Lets rather call it change. We have
seen other changes in technology that enabled people moving faster -
like cars (I do not own a car also for my *personal*
disadvantage-advantage ratio) and planes. We know mankind pays a price
for the ability to move fast. Regarding flights I evaluate every single
one - sometimes I do not even fly to DebConf like this year. I have
friends telling me I should not fly at all. Since I know I will not
save the world when I stop flying completely I simply try to reduce it
to what I personally consider "responsible".
Are all those techniques "progress" in terms of "the majority of people
in this world have a better life"? We don't know and can't know since
we have no parallel earth without those inventions.
For some years AI has been changing the world. It will do so with or
without Debian. We can decide to ignore this change. Whom will this
really serve in the long run? Any change has pros and cons - my big
concern is climate change and all changes I mentioned above are
contributing to this problem.
We can claim that we have morally won and do not use what has lots of
problematic features and I'm aware about a sufficient amount of those
features that I can perfectly understand people who do not want to use it.
The only consequence I see from forbidding usage of LLMs in Debian is
that the world will keep on increasing LLM usage while we will not catch
up with other OS producers serving those users who were happy with
Debian before.
I hope we agree the world is not black and white. I consider a plain
"no" to the usage of AI an answer that does not meet the complexity of
the problem. I actually see that this GR attempt will fail due to a too
large set of options which are hard to compare. I wished we could have
re-evaluated our previous attempt for an AI usage GR by finding some
consensus about a set of two or three options to vote.
The real problem I see is the fact that very few over-rich people are
controlling this technology. Their influence might prevent that a
potentially great technology serves the majority of human beings on our
planet. Declaring we will not use this technology will not change this
problem.
I think its better to settle with responsible AI usage as we try to
provide "responsible software" (what we call Free Software). Saying
no to AI usage strictly will prevent us from making things better.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
https://fam-tille.de
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