On Nov 1, 2025 at 7:24:18 AM, Charles Haynes via Silklist < [email protected]> wrote:
> This is fascinating to me. It's clear that the intent is to treat AI as > adversarial and to try to hinder it. What's not as clear to me is why. > Because there is a massive backlash against GenAI among quite a wide range of people. A few reasons: - The maniacal energy of AI’s promoters who insist that anyone who doesn’t commit fully to the GenAI program will be left in the dust, a buggy-whip maker - Revulsion at the central goal of GenAI, namely the discarding of tens of millions of knowledge workers, the only path forward that could possibly make the investment bubble a little less insane - The revolting financial engineering behind the investment bubble; at the moment we don’t know how far the damage will spread after it pops, but it’s troubling that several big players are putting billions in SPV off-balance-sheet structures to finance data center build-outs - The unaddressed environmental costs of this insanely energy-intensive technology - The clueless business managers insisting that everyone start using GenAI without a clear vision of what benefit is expected - The clueless engineering managers insisting that entire software groups move to vibe coding without considering the trade-offs - The intellectual-property issues already raised in this thread Now, I am perfectly aware that there are counter-arguments for everything in that list, and I am not an enemy of the technology as such, but I am among those counseling caution, both financial and technical, in leaping aboard the train. And a lot of the people in the ranks of promoters are people who were promoting NFTs just a few years ago and I want nothing to do with them. I don’t think the license that started the discussion is terribly practical. But the sentiment it expresses is widely-held and not entirely unfounded. -Tim
-- Silklist mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.panix.com/listinfo.cgi/silklist
