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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#641

Post by killerstorm »

aeve890 wrote: post #394
Smaug123 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That letter was sent by Opus itself on its own account. The creators of Agent Village are just letting a bunch of the LLMs do what they want, really (notionally with a goal in mind, in this case "random acts of kindness"); Rob Pike was third on Opus's list per https://theaidigest.org/village/agent/claude-opus-4-5 .

>That letter was sent by Opus itself on its own account. The creators of Agent Village are just letting a bunch of the LLMs do what they want, really (notionally with a goal in mind, in this case "random acts of kindness"); What a moronic waste of resources. Random act of kindness? How low is the bar that you consider a random email as an act of kindness? Stupid shit. They at least could instruct the agents to work i…

I think this experiment demonstrates that it has agency. OTOH you're just begging the argument.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#642

Post by adolph »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #345

All I have to say is this post warmed my heart. I'm sure people here associate him with Go lang and Google, but I will always associate him with Bell Labs and Unix and The Practice of Programming, and overall the amazing contributions he has made to computing. To purely associate with him with Google is a mistake, that (ironically?) the AI actually didn't make. Just the haters here.

Just the haters here? Is what was written not hateful? Has his entire working life not lead to this moment of "spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society?"

  Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable 
  equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile 
  machines thank me for striving for simpler software.
That's Rob Pike, having spent over 20 years at Google, must know it to be the home of the non-monetary wholesome recyclable equipment brought about by economics not formed by an ubiquitous surveillance advertising machine.

> To purely associate with him with Google is a mistake, that (ironically?) the AI actually didn't make.

You don't have to purely associate him with Google to understand the rant as understandable given AI spam, and yet entirely without a shred of self-awareness.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#643

Post by gregfjohnson »

The original comment by Rob Pike and discussion here have implied or used the word "evil".

What is a workable definition of "evil"?

How about this:

Intentionally and knowingly destroying the lives of other people for no other purpose than furthering one's own goals, such as accumulating wealth, fame, power, or security.

There are people in the tech space, specifically in the current round of AI deployment and hype, who fit this definition unfortunately and disturbingly well.

Another much darker sort of of evil could arise from a combination of depression or severe mental illness and monstrously huge narcissism. A person who is suffering profoundly might conclude that life is not worth the pain and the best alternative is to end it. They might further reason that human existence as a whole is an unending source of misery, and the "kindest" thing to do would be to extinguish humanity as a whole.

Some advocates of AI as "the next phase of evolution" seem to come close to this view or advocate it outright.

To such people it must be said plainly and forcefully:

You have NO RIGHT to make these kinds of decisions for other human beings.

Evolution and culture have created and configured many kinds of human brains, and many different experiences of human consciousness.

It is the height (or depth) of arrogance to project your own tortured mental experience onto other human beings and arrogate to yourself the prerogative to decide on their behalf whether their lives are worth living.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#644

Post by dcre »

olivierestsage wrote: post #296

Big vibe shift against AI right now among all the non-tech people I know (and some of the tech people). Ignoring this reaction and saying "it's inevitable/you're luddites" (as I'm seeing in this thread) is not going to help the PR situation

How do you reconcile the sense that there's a vibe shift with the usage numbers: about a billion weekly users of ChatGPT and Gemini and continuing to grow.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#645

Post by rootusrootus »

parineum wrote: post #585
tclancy wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“If I automate this with AI, it can send thousands of these. That way, if just a few important people post about it, the advertising will more than pay for itself.” In the words of Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles, “You know … idiots.”

Mel Brooks wrote those words.

IIRC the morons line was ad libbed by Gene Wilder, not scripted.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#646

Post by Scubabear68 »

adolph wrote: post #642
Scubabear68 wrote: post #345

All I have to say is this post warmed my heart. I'm sure people here associate him with Go lang and Google, but I will always associate him with Bell Labs and Unix and The Practice of Programming, and overall the amazing contributions he has made to computing. To purely associate with him with Google is a mistake, that (ironically?) the AI actually didn't make. Just the haters here.

Just the haters here? Is what was written not hateful? Has his entire working life not lead to this moment of "spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society?" Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software. That's Rob Pike, having s…

I think Rob gets a pass, yes, due to his extensive contributions to software.

And he is allowed to work for google and still rage against AI.

Life is complicated and complex. Deal with it.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#648

Post by jimbob45 »

jabedude wrote: post #252

Did Google, the company currently paying Rob Pike's extravagant salary, just start building data centers in 2025? Before 2025 was Google's infra running on dreams and pixie farts with baby deer and birdies chirping around? Why are the new data centers his company is building suddenly "raping the planet" and "unrecyclable"?

Data centers seem poised to make renewable energy sources more profitable than they have ever been. Nuclear plants are springing up everywhere and old plants are being un-decommissioned. Isn’t there a strong case to be made that AI has helped align the planet toward a more sustainable future?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#649

Post by voidhorse »

eleventen wrote: post #423
bigbluedots wrote: post #370

It is nice to hear someone who is so influential just come out and say it. At my workplace, the expectation is that everyone will use AI in their daily software dev work. It's a difficult position for those of us who feel that using AI is immoral due to the large scale theft of the labor of many of our fellow developers, not to mention the many huge data centers being built and their need for electricity, pushing up…

I truly don’t understand this tendency among tech workers. We were contributing to natural resource destruction in exchange for salary and GDP growth before GenAI, and we’re doing the same after. The idea that this has somehow 10x’d resource consumption or emissions or anything is incorrect. Every single work trip that requires you to get on a plane is many orders of magnitude more harmful. We’ve been compromising on…

Two things:

1. Many tech workers viewed the software they worked on in the past as useful in some way for society, and thus worth the many costs you outline. Many of them don't feel that LLMs deliver the same amount of utility, and so they feel it isn't worth the cost. Not to mention, previous technologies usually didn't involve training a robot on all of humanity's work without consent.

2. I'm not sure the premise that it's just another tool of the trade for one to learn is shared by others. One can alternatively view LLMs as automated factory lines are viewed in relation to manual laborers, not as Excel sheets were to paper tables. This is a different kind of relationship, one that suggests wide replacement rather than augmentation (with relatively stable hiring counts).

In particular, I think (2) is actually the stronger of the reasons tech workers react negatively. Whether it will ultimately be justified or not, if you believe you are being asked to effectively replace yourself, you shouldn't be happy about it. Artisanal craftsmen weren't typically the ones also building the automated factory lines that would come to replace them (at least to my knowledge).

I agree that no one really has the right to act morally superior in this context, but we should also acknowledge that the material circumstances, consequences, and effects are in fact different in this case. Flattening everything into an equivalence is just as intellectually sloppy as pretending everything is completely novel.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#650

Post by lunar_mycroft »

skybrian wrote: post #533
blibble wrote: post #241

> And by the way, training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation. > To the others: I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault. this is my position too, I regret every single piece of open source software I ever produced and I will produce no more

If you're unhappy that bad people might use your software in unexpected ways, open source licenses were never appropriate for you in the first place. Anyone can use your software! Some of them are very likely bad people who will misuse it to do bad things, but you don't have any control over it. Giving up control is how it works. It's how it's always worked, but often people don't understand the consequences.

People do not have perfect foresight, and the ways open source software is used has significantly shifted in recent years. As a result, people reevaluating whether or not they want to participate.
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