On 2026-07-15 21:27, Alan C. Assis wrote:
AI is just a tool, like a calculator. You can decide not to use a
calculator and do all the maths by yourself (in our head or in pencil
and
paper).
This is not universally true. If your job involves doing a lot of math
and you choose to not use a calculator, it may be your decision... until
it becomes apparent that other people, who do use the calculator, are
way faster and way reliable than you. At that point, you are likely to
lose that job.
And that is correct. Since humanity developed a tool that makes some
task trivial and reliable, humans are supposed to move on, leave that
task to the tool and do things that the tool is not able to do.
This AI debate is the same as with every new technology. For example, no
one here is arguing that we should not use computers because of
[reasons]. We are used to computers just being here and doing a lot of
stuff we would not consider worth doing ourselves. Sum of 10000 numbers
manually? Why?? Thanks but no thanks.
And yet, just a few decades back people were quite strongly opposed to
computers. My grandma was against them because they are taking jobs away
from people. She was right of course - but the same thing can be said
about agriculture machinery and yet no one yearns for the back old days
when 90% of Earth population worked the fields from dawn to dusk.
Agricultural machinery stayed, industrial machinery stayed, calculators
are still present, so are computers... AI is here to stay as well. Yes,
there are a lot of moral problems with it. Everyone who wants to train a
model considers all contents on the internet free for grabs, regardless
of costs incurred on the content provider. Current AI industry is a big
economical bubble and when it bursts, it will be felt far and wide. To
feed the bubble, AI companies are trying to build more and more quickly,
with no regards to how it affects people who have to live near the new
datacenters. Government corruption runs rampant with regards to all
that.
... and none of this matters. In the end, the sole deciding factor will
be that AI is a very useful tool for a lot of jobs. And motivation to
use it will simply be too high to be ignored - so people will simply
ignore the morals instead. That is our nature and AI is here to stay. If
an individual or a group chooses to ignore the tool, they are going to
set themselves back immensely and will be eventually pushed away by the
competition (that is - everyone else.)
As for NuttX - anyone is of course free to not use any tool when making
a contribution. But trying to put a ban on using AI is - if enforced -
going to kill the project outright. Try to imagine that you read NuttX
contribution rules for the first time and one of the rules is: "You are
not permitted to use any text editor/IDE when creating your
contribution". Your reaction to such a rule now is how a newcomer will
feel about "AI ban" rule in few years.
