An untimely eulogy for Vim
A recent post on Drew DeVault's blog got me thinking. He seems to suffer from a problem that I find myself fighting with frequently as I get older, and I wanted to think out loud about it a bit.
The post announces that Drew has forked Vim in reaction to a perceived tainting of Vim by some purported AI-generated commits. Now, I think readers of this blog will agree that I am no great lover of AI generally, and my complaints about it are numerous and varied. The problem here, though, is a sort of puritanical fixation that calls for a little unpacking.
I think AI is bad in a lot of ways. It is bad for its profligate use of energy. It is bad for encouraging an unthinking use of it to supplant reason and thought. It is bad for allowing the billionaire class to exploit it to lift themselves ever higher above the rest of society. It is bad for supporting violence against certain groups of people. It is not, however, bad in and of itself. It is a tool like any other and, when used well, can help tremendously.
Given the substantial list of ills that arise from AI, I think it is natural to view it as bad in the same way as cancer is bad; to view it as innately evil and without redeeming qualities. This is untrue, however. It can be used profitably in many areas. What AI demands, as all new tools do, is a careful consideration of where it can help and where it can hurt.
In the blog post, Drew says:
I think it’s more important that we stop collectively pretending that we don’t understand how awful all of this is.
This is the line that really hits me. It hits me because I catch myself thinking the same way. I keep thinking that the whole world has gone mad, and I'm just waiting for everyone to come to their senses. The reality, though, is much harder. The reality is that things have changed in profound ways. For most of my life, I have tended to short-circuit to exactly this sort of black-or-white thinking. If I am to find some way to live happily, I must learn to find the gray. I must find ways to understand and think about the people I disagree with.
When I write people off as idiotic or evil, I make my world a little smaller and angrier. I finally got sick of thinking like that. I hope that this blog is a way to think through it all and find new ways to understand the rest of the world.