Guido van Rossum on AI

I love how generally unimpressed Guido van Rossum – the creator of the Python programming language – is with the whole AI hype in this interview, despite the value-laden questions.

But these quotes stood out to me:

I am definitely not looking forward to an AI-driven future. I’m not worried about AI wanting to kill us all, but I see too many people without ethics or morals getting enabled to do much more damage to society with less effort. The roots for that abuse have been laid by social media, though — another major computer paradigm shift that changed society but didn’t really affect the nature of software.

And:

I hope that Python’s legacy will reflect its spirit of grassroots and worldwide collaboration based on equity and respect rather than power and money, and of enabling “the little guy” to code up dream projects.

But also:

So I worry that Python’s getting too corporate, because the big corporate users can pay for new features only they need (to be clear, they don’t give us money to implement their features, but they give us developers, which comes down to the same thing).