Hi Pjotr, > What I don't like about GCD008 - and I'll say it again - is that it > makes us look like dinosaurs and it splits our community. It won't be
It's not the GCD that splits the community. All it does is make the risk of a split more visible. The split risk is all over the FLOSS universe right now. > Rejecting AI, in my book, is like rejecting electricity or medicine. In a way, it is, in another way, it isn't, and I think that's part of the divergent views on genAI. AI is the most recent step in a direction that Western societies started to take in the 17th century, when the discovery of fossil fuels spawned the industrial revolution. Moving along that path brought us electricity and medicine, along with science and a lot more. But the path also implies ever increasing use of resources, first and foremost fossil fuels but also minerals and more. Plus increasing population, increasing intoxication of the biosphere, etc. Yet another closely associated aspect is ever increasing power concentration, which goes hand in hand with the exploitation of an ever larger part of the world population by an ever smaller number of ever richer people. This path of industrialization has always bet on new technology to solve the problems created by the existing technology. And now it bets on AI. There has been a counter-movement for social reasons, starting roughly with Marx. It has fueled much of the "anti-tech" movements of the past (luddites etc.), who weren't against tech as such but against the power concentration it implied. Today it fights AI for the same reasons. Some of the motivations in the GCD are in this lineage. In addition, there is a growing movement that sees the impossibility to continue on a path of growth in a finite world. Its arguments are climate change, planetary boundaries, etc. That's the second root of the GCD motivations. Nobody has a credible plan to get us out of the growth-in-a-finite-world issues. Some bet on new technology, in the tradition of the industrial revolution. For them, AI is hope. Others are convinced that this will only make things worse, and push for a change of direction away from the path of the industrial revolution, meaning necessarily towards something unknown. For them, AI is a step in the wrong direction that we can still avoid, unless the steps of the past that already have created strong dependencies. This is what The Split is all about. If we do nothing, we will remain on the path of the industrial revolution, which is always the default. And five years from now, Guix will be dependent on genAI, like most other FLOSS projects. For some, this is fine. For others, it is inacceptable. For me, the goal of this discussion should be to find a middle ground in the sense that Guix can make a positive contribution to either of the two paths being envisaged. But I am not sure that this is even possible. Cheers, Konrad
