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I read and reviewed Oliver Platt’s **Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age** over a year ago, and I haven’t been able to get one small story from the book out of my head. In 1793, the British government launched the Macartney Embassy, the nation’s first formal diplomatic mission to China. A few ships led by statesman George Macartney set sail from Portsmouth, England, traveled down to Rio de Janeiro, then around the southern tip of Africa, across the bottom of the Indian Ocean, up through Indonesia, along the Chinese coast, to finally arrive at Beijing. The whole journey took ten months, and the diplomats played cards, drunk tea, looked out for exotic wildlife, and watched crew whippings to forget about being bored out of their minds. While in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the crew spotted a tiny volcanic island. To their surprise, there were two men on the land desperately waving a makeshift flag in the air to get the crew’s attention. Macartney assumed the men were shipwrecked sailors, and he quickly ordered the ships to stop to lend assistance. On the island, the crew found five men – three Frenchmen and two Americans (from Boston). Surprisingly, they were not shipwrecked, but were living on the island voluntarily under contract with a French merchant company. Their jobs were to harvest seal pelts to sell in Canton, China. They had been alone on the island for _six months_ and had wracked up _8,000_ seal pelts, and they still had another _year_ to go on the contract before the merchant company picked them up. This seemingly deserted 21-square-mile spit of land, was actually Amsterdam Island, one of the most remote pieces of land on earth, located more than 2,000 miles from the nearest continent. The hunters had managed to create a makeshift village of stone huts and dirt paths on the opposite side of the island from the hunting grounds. But aside from that, there was no settlement, no port, and no other trace of human contact. Platt doesn’t say why the seal hunters waived the ships down in the first place, but I’m guessing they did so out of boredom. It turns out the hunters didn’t actually need any help or anything else, so after a short but unspecified amount of time (maybe a day at most?), Macartney and the diplomatic mission sailed on. That’s insane. The whole situation was insane. Those people were insane. The more I think about this, the more insane it gets. Five men agreed to live on a deserted 21-square-mile island in one of the most remote places on earth for 1.5 years. Platt doesn’t say whether/how often these men were resupplied during their 1.5-year contract, but given the expense of shipping at the time and the remoteness of the island, I’m guessing they were never resupplied after being dropped off. So they had no man-made goods besides what they initially brought, no housing besides what they made, no toilets or plumbing, and no correspondence with the outside world. They probably only had whatever alcohol and food they brought along except maybe what could be harvested from a small garden and a few animals (though Platt doesn’t mention either). Also, no medical care, so any significant injury could have resulted in death. And what did these guys do all day on this tiny island in the middle of nowhere? They _clubbed and skinned seals_ … and a lot of them. Let’s do some basic math: > 8,000 seals/180 days = 44.44 seals per day > > 44.44 seals per day/5 men = 8.89 seals per man/per day So each of these five men woke up every day to bludgeon nine seals to death with clubs (feel free to Google “clubbing seals” for images I don’t want to put here). Then to get the pelts, they skinned these nine seals, which surprisingly only takes about six minutes each according to this NSFW video (2:52-8:40). And then… that was it for the day. I guess they just lounged around the rest of the time and shot the shit until nightfall. That’s what these men did. Every day. For 1.5 years, or 18 months, or 548 days. With no human contact beyond the other four men on the island, and I guess the very occasional passing ship. And with no women. And with no technology, amenities, luxuries, or entertainment except what they initially brought. They just got up each day, bludgeoned and skinned nine seals, and then sat around on a deserted island. For 548 days. VOLUNTARILY. And keep in mind that the five hunters could fail. Any man could get injured and die without medical attention. The trading company could default on the contracts and refuse to pay what was owed. The company could go bankrupt and just not bother picking them up. Slavers from south-east Asia could swing by and make their lives an even worse hell. If the work was commission-based, I wonder if any of the hunters were tempted to murder other ones to claim their pelts… EDIT – I forgot to mention that it would take about _six months_ for the five men to sail to the island from France, and then another _six months_ to get back to France. So add another year to the isolation for a full accounting of the costs. I can’t wrap my mind around it. The isolation, the microscopic social circle, the brutal work, the barren terrain, the risk, the long time-frame… it all seems perfectly calculated to make a man go insane. How much money would you have to be paid to accept their contract? That is, to live on a 21-square-mile island in one of the most remote places on earth, with no contact with the outside world, no amenities except what you initially bring, with four other men (or women if you’re a woman) for 1.5 years to kill and skin seals all day? What would you have to gain to sacrifice that much quality-of-life for that long? My answer – To agree to such a contract, I think I would need to be financially secure for most or all of the rest of my life. I wouldn’t need to be able to retire to a mansion and a yacht, but I would need to have enough money to at least coast by comfortably on savings + investments for the rest of my years. That would be my price to sustain a rock-bottom quality-of-life, to perform a nauseating job, and to basically sacrifice 1.5 years of my life. I say this as a 28 year old with honestly not that well-developed of a social life. While the misery of the island life would be bad enough, the biggest cost in my mind is the time, which is something I can’t buy back, especially _youthful_ time. By accepting the contract, I would miss out on 1.5 years of friends, family, romance, sex, entertainment, the entire range of ordinary life experiences, etc. I value that opportunity cost in the millions of dollars. If I absolutely HAD to put a solid price on how much I would have to be paid to go on this expedition, I think I’d say… $2-4 million. Or at least that’s my current price. If I was 40+ years old and time would feel like it moved faster, and if I had no family, my price would come down considerably. How much did the hunters earn for their contract? I don’t know, Platt doesn’t say. But I’m going to do some research to make an _extremely rough_ estimate. If the hunters collected 8,000 pelts in six months, they should have ended up with 20,000 pelts at the end of their 1.5 year contract. I don’t know if they were paid a lump sum or commissions or something, else, but let’s try to see how much 20,000 seal pelts were worth in the 1790s: * > James L. Clayton’s “The Growth and the Economic Significance of the American Fur Trade, 1790-1890” puts the price of an Alaskan seal pelt at $5.26 in 1870, and $35.47 in 1890. By admittedly extreme rough inflation adjustments, those prices in 2020 dollars are $102.95 and $999.37. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any prices from earlier years. * > Also from Clayton, between 1870 to 1890 the Alaskan Commercial Company (which had a government-granted near-monopoly on the seal fur trade) harvested over 1,800,000 fur seals at an estimated profit of $18,754,000, or $10.42 per pelt ($293.59 in 2020 when converting from 1890 dollars). * > Callum Roberts’s**Unnatural History of the Sea** says that the over-hunting of seals in the early 1800s collapsed the population to the point where hunters stopped going out to look for seals. Rather, ships would engage in fishing or whaling, but might stop and hunt seals if they were lucky enough to find them. Roberts gives an example of a “fortunate ship” in 1848 getting 7,510 seal pelts in a single outing. * > Roberts also says that annual seal production in Alaska (one of the biggest seal producing regions in the world) in the 1860s was 30,000-40,000. After America purchased Alaska, production would increase to 100,000 per year in the 1870s and onward. * > From the Wikipedia article on seal hunting: “In 1778, English sealers brought back from the Island of South Georgia and the Magellan Strait area as many as 40,000 seal skins and 2,800 tons of elephant seal” * > Not as relevant, but Wikipedia also explains that seal pelt prices today are extremely low because seal fur has been outlawed or heavily regulated in much of the world: “Pelt prices were about [Canadian]$21/pelt in 2010, which is about twice the 2009 price and about 64% of the 2007 price. Based on the above bullet points, 20,000 pelts in 1794 (when the contract ended) were definitely worth a fortune. In 1.5 years, the five seal hunters on Amsterdam Island would produce almost three times as many pelts as a good ship haul in 1848, 2/3rds-1/2 as many pelts as the entire annual production of the Alaskan seal industry in the mid-1800s, and about 1/5th the annual production of the Alaskan seal industry in the late 1800s. Unfortunately, the only prices I have come from 80 and 100 years after 1794, and they’re for Alaskan seal pelts rather than south-Indian Ocean seal pelts, so take this with a colossal grain of salt, but if the prices ARE comparable, then the Amsterdam Island 20,000 seal pelt haul was worth between $2,059,000 and $19,987,400 in inflation-adjusted 2020 USD. That’s just raw market value. The profit earned by the French trading company would take into account the costs for shipping, personnel, Chinese taxes, etc. But based on these (again, very very rough) numbers, the five seal hunters on Amsterdam Island were paid nowhere near my $3-5 million demands. If the hunters were paid 1/4 the gross value of the pelts, then each of the five men would receive only about $1 million at the most optimistic price. I’m sure their true payment was far less. Theory – individuals living in the past (at least pre-1800) placed vastly less value on their own lives than modern people do (EDIT – modern people living in at least average Western conditions). I wouldn’t want to live on an island in the middle of nowhere with four other men for 1.5 years to bludgeon and skin seals all day because I value my life and time too much. There are too many other interesting, beneficial, fulfilling things I could be doing with my time. But maybe if I was a bottom-tier British sailor drifting between port towns in the late 18th century, I’d value my life and time a lot less. The opportunity costs of abandoning such a life for 1.5 years would be dramatically lower. The quality-of-life to be gained from a big pay-day would probably be a lot lower in absolute terms, but much higher in relative terms. Especially if I was an individual comfortable with silence and solitude, I’d strongly consider signing up to burn a chunk of my young life for huge financial gains. (EDIT – The same analogy could be made to the modern average inhabitant of say… Bangladesh). I wish I could find it, but I once read some sort of diary or will written by the head of a Roman family in a besieged city that was about to fall, and it has always stuck with me. What struck me was how _nonchalant_ the man was. He and his wife and kids were probably about to be butchered (and the wife raped), and his attitude was sort of… “this sucks, but oh well, these things happen. I hope the afterlife is better.” I genuinely believe that people in past generations just didn’t care about their own lives as much. There wasn’t as much good to live for in the present, so the loss of time or life wasn’t as big of a deal. Plus, more people believed in an afterlife, so the cost of death was significantly lower. ### Share this: * Share on X (Opens in new window) X * Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Like Loading... ### _Related_

# The AI Pascal’s Wager ## Should you accept contributions generated by LLMs in your Open Source project? Let’s put aside for a moment all the ethical/ecological/societal considerations about the use of generated code (also known as "slop" if you don’t like it and "vibecode" if you do) in open source projects and consider it from a simple, practical, pragmatic point of view. There are basically three potential positions: 1. Mostly accepting LLMs as neutral tools that contributors could use (with safeguards or not, with policy of human reviewing or not). 2. Finding a compromise or choosing not to do anything, issuing some "not yes, not no" guidelines. This is now known as the "Debian AI policy". 3. Strongly rejecting LLMs (with potential exceptions that have major safeguards). The middle ground (position 2) may seem like the most rational position to take. It is also the default. Let’s wait and not decide too quickly! But what we can learn from Debian is that nobody is really happy with it. If we think about it from a longer-term perspective, we can infer that the middle-ground position is unsustainable. LLM generated contributions will eventually slip in despite some guardrails such as "human review is mandatory". The longer a project stays in the "middle ground", the more ineluctable the slop infection becomes. Which is to say: not choosing or trying to choose a middle ground is basically full support of generated code, but slower. It is effectively choosing position 1 (pro-AI) without being explicit about it. It is either naive or hypocritical. Instead of letting the world choose for you, I believe that each open source project is now facing a strong choice that has to be made urgently. Accept AI-generated contributions or not. This is not easy. Both choices will alienate some part of the community and some key contributors. That’s sad, but a project cannot please everyone. Now, contributors may argue whether pro-vibecode or anti-slop is better from a philosophical, ethical or pragmatic point of view. Nobody can decide what is best for a project but its key community members. Let’s try to think from a generic strategical point of view. What will be the effects of both positions on the project? ## Adopting AI PROS: * More contributions and less time spent developing annoying stuff. While every study on the subject tends to conclude that using LLMs is actually slower than writing code yourself, let’s admit that advantage. CONS: * Alienate a part of the community that rejects vibecoded software. In some FLOSS circles, that may include very influential users. * Developing your project become increasingly dependent of on expensive and completely proprietary software over which you have no control. So, in the short term, adopting AI mostly alienates some community members and abandons your independence in order to improve some (perceived) productivity. ## Rejecting AI PROS: * Strong support from the “ethical” part of the community (see the growing number of anti-AI software lists) * Nothing changes. CONS: * Alienate some contributors who really want to use AI. When you think about it, contributors who are completely turned away by the fact that they can’t use LLMs are probably contributors you don’t want in your project, even if you have a Debian-like “moderate use of AI” position. People who don’t want to contribute without LLMs are probably not able to review and understand the code by themselves (or they will lose that ability soon enough). To illustrate this, see the number of Pull Requests on Github were the author admits "not having the knowledge to test their own code". So refusing contributions from those people is probably more of an advantage than a disadvantage. More importantly, rejecting AI will not alienate any users. Nobody in the world is saying "I’m refusing to use this software because it was made by humans". ## The longer-term perspective One of the main problems with using generated code is that we still don’t know what impact it could have in the long term. What will the codebase look like when each contribution is less and less understood by humans? What if AI assistants become suddenly too expensive to use and nobody understand the architecture anymore? What if huge portions of your code are, in fact, copy-pasted from another project using a different incompatible license? Cory Doctorow compares slop to asbestos: it looks nice, shiny and it is easy to put it everywhere. But if you ever need to regain control or remove the slop, it will take years of work, at best. ## Your own version of Pascal’s wager While mass marketing is trying to instil a Fear of Missing Out hysteria, the most rational and pragmatic approach is to strongly reject all AI-generated contributions to your projects. For now. Someday, we might realise that LLMs are doing good in the world, that they are evolving toward ethical, reliable, sustainable solutions, and that people who use them are happier (try to read that sentence again without rolling your eyes). If that really happens, you could always change your AI policy. It will cost you nothing. But if you let the slop in now, you may regret it forever… You may be forced to abandon your project. On the other hand, if you refuse AI-generated contributions to your project right now, the worst very hypothetical regret you could ever have is "I should probably have done it sooner". The conclusion is simple: If you are AI-agnostic, the pragmatic course of action is to strongly refuse any AI-generated contribution to your project. * Picture of a Pascaline by Rama ### About the author I’m Ploum, a writer and an engineer. I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss. I value privacy and never share your adress. I write science-fiction novels in French. For Bikepunk, my new post-apocalyptic-cyclist book, my publisher is looking for contacts in other countries to distribute it in languages other than French. If you can help, contact me!

The last few years have been hard as someone who is not only very much engaged with technologies, their applications, damages and affordances as well as their politics. We’ve been moving through hype cycle after hype cycle with increasing promises at increasing speeds. Which is somewhat natural of course: Being built not around something material, […]

# I Don’t Want to Interact With Stochastic Parrots > My AI policy is "I don’t want any kind of interaction with that thing." And this should be all you need to know. > I don’t care if you call it AI, LLM, chatbot, or whateverGPT. I simply don’t want to interact with it in any form. If you interact with me, make sure to never send me any output from those nor to use it as a "source" to justify one of your arguments. I’m one of those people deeply interested in all the extraordinary stuff other humans have to say. Unfortunately, life is already too short to hear them all. I need to make a lot of choices. That’s why I will not tolerate any attempt to steal the little time I’ve on this planet by making me interact with stochastic algorithms trained to produce tons of "average," non-human content. The direct consequence of my choice is that I will refuse to interact with humans who take pride in making themselves a meat interface between me and the algorithm they’ve chosen to replace their free will. I will not read your website, I will ignore your emails and I will happily walk away from real-life conversations as soon as it is clear that I’m not talking to a fully sentient Homo sapiens sapiens but to an empty shell who has happily delegated their cognitive abilities to an external proprietary tool designed to be some sort of "random average garbage." ## I will not read the text The very essence of writing is what makes you think. When you write, even something as mundane as a short email, you transform a bunch of contradictory neural stimuli into an ordered thought. If you don’t care to write it, there’s no reason I should waste one single second reading it. The effort should be on your side first. I don’t mind mistakes, typos, or badly formed sentences. In fact, I subtly appreciate them when we interact because they are part of you, they tell a lot about yourself. I’m not a literary agent, I will not judge your way of writing: I’m there to exchange ideas, knowledge, and experiences. If you find yourself typing a prompt to express your idea, then just send me that prompt. I’m not interested in what an algorithm would do with your prompt, I want to know what you asked in the first place. I care about you, the human. You may find it hard to express yourself, to write what you think: remember that the less you practice, the worse it will be. Prompting might feel easier. It does not make it right. If it is from an algorithm, it is not you. Only you can write what’s inside yourself. ## I will not look at the pictures Generated images. Seriously. They all look hideous. When I spot one in a given context, I immediately have a feeling of cheapness, bad taste, and poor culture. Like this fancy restaurant of a luxury hotel I saw in a big European city. It had a huge AI generated picture on its main building: a kid eating malformed fries with his six-fingered hand and putting them in his skull through his cheek. Or this other restaurant which had a very nice menu, full of pictures of Italian cities. Until the kid’s menu which, was shockingly out of place and totally unnecessary. It also showed a kid awkwardly eating a pizza even though there was no pizza on the kid’s menu. If you don’t have the resources to pay for an artist, you probably don’t need a picture at all. If you are making a poster, write what is important to know instead of burying it in a gloomy generated picture. If you write a blog post, I will not read if it is illustrated by generated pictures. A website illustration, if any, conveys an emotion, a feeling. I sometimes spend more time finding a good illustration for a post than writing it. If I don’t find a satisfying picture, I don’t put any. The first feeling conveyed to me by a generated picture is an uncanny unease, an obnoxious emotion that immediately makes me want to leave. It also tells me enough about the author not to want to know more. It might be a kind of overreaction. But as I said, there’s too much to read anyway so it’s a good first filter. No, that picture is not pretty. No, it is not funny. It doesn’t share any human feeling, any artistic expression. You like it because you had fun generating it. But it is wasting my time. ## I will not run the code I don’t want to run generated code on my computer. Good code is knowledge. Even in a purely productivity-oriented business, every line of code should reflect the choice of an employee knowing the business and choosing a way to solve a business problem. Reality is, of course, different. I’ve worked with enough different codebases to know that proprietary software is simply badly coded. Each line is written assuming "I will not be there anymore to deal with it in a few years." But at least we know that each line, as bad as it can be, was added by a human for a reason. LLMs move the needle from "no need to care in a few years" to "no need to care right now." You cannot assume anything about generated code. Maybe it was simply hallucinated and, by chance, it compiled. Which means that, as soon as generated code is added to a project, the whole project becomes unmaintainable by humans. You can’t understand the code because there’s nothing to understand in the first place! It follows that the whole project now needs LLMs for any change which, will make it even worse from a human perspective. We end up adding more and more lines of code nobody understand where the problem has always been "There are too many lines of code and too few people understand them." I’m convinced that accepting generated code will lead most projects to become broken beyond all hope of repair in only a few years. "Carefully reviewing" will soon not be enough. Unfathomable code will eventually slip in and gradually destroy the whole project. I predict that the projects too important to be left to rot and die will take decades to recover from those couple years of "assisted productivity." We need to remember that what we call "code" is merely a specification of the software we want. Those specifications will be given to the compiler to make the real software. The role of a coder is to take vague, imprecise, and contradictory specifications from a manager or customer and then make sure to remove any ambiguity. This could be done by clarifying with the customer or by silently making choices. History and mathematics have demonstrated that humans cannot make unambiguous and non-contradictory specifications without using a formal language designed expressly for that purpose. Natural languages simply cannot remove ambiguities and this may be an evolutionary feature. Removing the coder and replacing them with a tool designed to pretend to agree to anything said could never produce good, maintainable software. It may produce a small throwaway script. It may find security holes more efficiently than fuzzing. But it will never be able to build something useful and reliable for the long term. Which is what I expect from software. I want to be able to trust software enough to invest time in learning it. That has always been one of my main arguments for using open source: if a free software is good enough, I trust that there will always be people to maintain it or to fork it if needed. If I have a problem with a free software, I can always look at the code to understand what the humans who designed it wanted to do. I may also modify it. This is not theoretical: I’ve done that with countless pieces of software in the last 20 years. I rely on it! For that reason, I will carefully avoid running any openly "vibecoded" tool, and I’m trying to focus my efforts on projects that actively try to distance themselves from the current bubble. ## I will not listen to the discussion "I’ve asked ChatGPT and…" That’s it. No need to say more. All those years speaking about "fake news" and "checking your sources" just to blindly repeat a random series of letters assembled by a stochastic algorithm? Seriously? I don’t care about your credentials, I don’t care about your experience. With a couple of words, you gladly announced that you are obliterating them and refusing all forms of free will. Goodbye! That’s not very friendly, I know. I never pretended to be. And I didn’t start it. ## I will not grade the student report Across the last years, I’ve not managed to find one single student who astonished me with their use of a chatbot. In every single case I’ve met, the use of a chatbot made my student perform worse. Sometimes spectacularly like, this student who contributed to a project on Github but, when asked, could not even tell me what the project was about. On the opposite, forcing the student not to use any AI makes them better every single time. No exception. It also vastly improved their self-confidence. * Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots (ploum.net) It is not a matter of "learning to use the tool". You cannot learn to use a proprietary stochastic tool which can be changed at any time. You don’t need to "learn to chat" (and if you do, not in my course). What the "tool" is really doing is making you lose the essential ability to learn, making you lose your self-confidence. As John Scalzi points out: playing Guitar Hero is fun. But even thousands of hours of playing Guitar Hero will not enable you to play "Happy Birthday" on a real guitar. * Generative “AI”: The Guitar Hero of Creativity (whatever.scalzi.com) I consider that my students are in my class to learn. Chatbots are actively preventing any kind of learning. That’s why, from now on, I make it a strict policy that anything my students are submitting should be entirely produced by them. It can be short. It will be imperfect. It will be full of mistakes. It may even be wrong. The report will have fewer bullet points and emojis. But it will be yours, and that’s what I want to see. I will not technologically "enforce" this rule. Cheating has always been part of university. If you are smart enough not to be caught, you probably deserve to pass. But it will probably require a lot more effort on your side than simply writing your own goddamn report with your bloody fingers on a keyboard. ## I will not judge what you do in private AI/chatbots/LLMs are known to have a terrible impact on your brain. They are bad for you, for the whole economy, for the political atmosphere, and for the environment. They consume huge resources, destroy the whole Internet and our ecosystem. But they are addictive, I get it. They make you feel productive (which, studies have demonstrated, is largely a feeling). I consider them a kind of drug. * AI Isn’t Breaking Work. It’s Already Broken. (calnewport.com) They may also be useful when you are forced to accomplish a stupid one-time task you don’t want to do but is required. We all have to deal with our share of bullshit jobs, I get it. Using AI is like a shameful drug addiction or a weird sex fetish. If you want to use it privately or between consenting adults, it’s up to you. As long as you don’t brag about it, I will not judge. Just make sure that I don’t have to interact with it. * Human made logo by Matt Kindt (commons.wikimedia.org) ### About the author I’m Ploum, a writer and an engineer. I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss. I value privacy and never share your adress. I write science-fiction novels in French. For Bikepunk, my new post-apocalyptic-cyclist book, my publisher is looking for contacts in other countries to distribute it in languages other than French. If you can help, contact me!

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