But at the moment it’s so exciting to see if we’re headed more for a Waterworld-esque dystopia or something more similar to Neuromancer / The Matrix. I guess it’ll depend on the rates at which the global economy collapses as a result of AI and WW3 vs climate change, exacerbated of course by the inevitable global thermonuclear war.
It’s probably already too late to put these horses back in the barn, but having an “allow AI commits / PRs” would have probably been a good idea for GitHub to make available to projects. Even better might have been something like a robots.txt for repos with rules that could be auto-evaluated and PRs auto-rejected if they weren’t followed.
Then again, we see how well robots.txt was honored in practice over the years. As with everything in late-stage capitalism, the humans who showed up with good intentions to legitimately help typically did the right things, and those who came to extract every last gram of value out of something for their own gain ignored the rules with few consequences.
It was interesting the other day tracing the lineage of Aaron Swartz -> Library Genesis / Sci-Hub -> LLM vendors relying on that work to train their models and sell it back to us all with no royalties or accountability to the original authors of all this painstakingly researched, developed, and recorded human knowledge they’re making billions on.
Everyone wants to be the CEO of their own megacorp managing thousands of AI engineers I guess. Just like microservices, there’s probably a ton of overhead doing things this way vs monolithic / single agent. Certain types of engineers just love over-engineering hugely complex stuff to see it work. Goldberg architecture was already prevalent and bad enough in enterprise before the AI boom.
Good thing we can also preemptively divest on our retail accounts and just wait this out so we don’t get stuck bag-holding this turd sandwich. Ooh wait, selling triggers cap gains taxes.
What a great scam. So either dump all your index funds and pay the huge tax bill now or stay in and hope against all signs and odds that someone does something to stop this.
I’d love to see a lawyer point out how this is no different legally from the NSA only “collecting” your data if a human actually views it and is therefore totally above board and adhering to the letter of the law.
I’d argue that it’s not specifically that they prefer it, it’s that they don’t understand and appreciate what they’re selling to get whatever service without paying money. Now that we live in a world where everything is collected, aggregated, sold, and weaponized regardless of you paying or not, maybe it doesn’t matter much anyway.
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