What Julian Darley Wrote About the Stallman Talk Regarding "AI" in Oxford (2025)
We try not to link to bad sites. But sometimes people post to these sites, with no copies anywhere outside those sites. From LinkedIn (Microsoft), by Julian Darley:
Yesterday I went to a lecture by Richard Stallman in Oxford, hosted by Oxford Artificial Intelligence Society at the Oxford University Museum Of Natural History. It was a fascinating experience, stimulating and provocative.Stallman has long been a leading advocate of software freedom, and his core message hasn’t changed: the architecture of computing directly affects our freedom. He’s deeply wary of surveillance, centralisation, and convenience technologies that quietly extract our data—from cloud platforms to smart thermometers in sex toys, apparently. We are certainly being watched to an extraordinary and frightening extent, but I was left with some questions.
Stallman talks constantly about freedom, but he did not define what he meant by it, and that matters, because “freedom” means very different things depending on who you ask—progressives, libertarians, social conservatives. If your whole movement is built on this value, shouldn’t you clarify what kind of freedom you mean? Is it freedom from control, or freedom to participate, or something else?
Stallman doesn’t hold back in his critique of AI, especially large language models. He avoids the term “artificial intelligence” altogether, arguing it’s misleading marketing speak for what he calls “pattern learning.” He sees these systems as often producing convincing nonsense, which of course is sometimes true.
However, I couldn’t help thinking about how AI tools are giving more people the ability to code, create, and participate. For many, that is a kind of digital freedom too.
One thing that surprised me was Stallman's dislike of the term "open source." I’ve always seen open source as a force for good—transparent, collaborative, and a counterweight to corporate silos, but for Stallman, “open source” is too apolitical. He prefers the term “free software,” free as in freedom: freedom to inspect, modify, and redistribute code. He sees the open source movement as having lost the ethical core that the free software movement fights for. It’s an important distinction, even if I still think open source plays a vital role in spreading better tools and values.
Stallman also strongly supports cash as a privacy-preserving tool. I almost asked a question about local currencies, but decided not to. Still, I believe local digital currencies could play an important role in the near future. They’re often easier to deploy and adapt to community needs than national fiat systems—and could help rebuild trust and local economies in uncertain times.
A final line worth pondering: "Think about your freedom in the long term or you will be crushed by the boots of the billionaire."
Whatever your thoughts on Stallman’s positions, it’s hard to leave a talk like this without re-examining your relationship with the tech you use—and the structures behind it.
It looks like this talk was attended by about 50 people. It's difficult to pinpoint Darley in those photos.
He coverage of the talk seems mostly fair. He dubs himself "AI evangelist".