I think almost everyone is on board with ai as a tool used by people.
The pushback is against ai being used in a way that is mostly or fully automated withoit human confirmation. Or when ai is used to justify terrible practices by shifting the blame from the people doing those things, like blaming ai for denying medical care when humans were doing that already.
Though it would be poetic justice if some future AGI decides that billionaires are the problem and must be culled for the sake of humanity.
Don’t expect anyone to come running to make things better for disabled people unless they think they can make a profit off of it.
Which, since all this AI bullshit is driven purely by the profit motive, means that you’re just as right to be wary of things that help the disabled from these AI companies as much as anything else.
Lots of companies have “helped the disabled” with specialized technological implants. Then when the company goes tits up, the people they’ve “helped” are left with slowly breaking implants and a fortune of a surgery to get the implant removed, since it no longer works or is supported.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/25/1073634/brain-implant-removed-against-her-will/
Expect the same treatment from AI companies. Once you’re not profitable, they want you to get fucked.
What about open source projects?
They’re great, but if the last 20-30 years of Open Source are any indication, most average people do not use Open Source, and beyond that, most don’t even know what it is.
The use of Open Source projects is mainly in corporations, while individuals using Open Source projects make up a small minority of the use cases.
I would love to see growth in that arena, but if the past is any indication, it will struggle to grow.
Further, as these may be considered “medically assistive devices” you run into the issue of possibly needing FDA approval to even distribute it.
Open source AI is huge, and I don’t think you need FDA approval to distribute a model. Where are you even getting that from?
We’re talking about people with disabilities, and depending on what you’re doing with AI, it can get organized under being a medically assistive device, which suddenly becomes an FDA issue.
Ask the people who run Open Source projects aimed at opening up things like Glucose monitors or CPAP machines. They are harangued by the FDA. The FDA claims the projects are dangerous and that only professionals and doctors should have any ability to modify them.
Which projects have been shut down by FDA order?
You realize there’s regulation other than just banning things, right?
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/open-source-software-risks-in-the-health-sector-tlpclear.pdf
October 2023: FDA finalizes guidance mandating that all medical devices running software must create and maintain a software bill of materials (SBOM), including for open-source software.
Still, the point being is that to develop Open Source medical software, you’re going to be dealing with potential regulations that you must pass to be able to legally release the software in places like the USA (you can always host the files in some country that doesn’t give a shit). Achieving meeting the regulation can often drastically increase the cost of development. Open Source projects can’t just magic up more money for development like giant corporations can.
Look in 2024 we’re barely cracking 5% of people in the world using Linux as a desktop. The FDA doesn’t have to ban it to make “normal” people scared of using Open Source solutions. It’s a harder hill to climb than just getting people to change their desktop OS.
There are more ways to help people than making medical software. Rather than saying they could focus on doing simpler things, you automatically jumping to all projects running afoul of FDA regulations is pretty telling. All while still having not provided a single project halted by FDA order.
Exactly this. I’m a developer currently. Before that I had only a vague idea of what open source was, basically that it’s visible to everyone. Didn’t know about github, or any other application of open source outside of pc software and I was kinda advanced tech user with flashing custom roms, trying out Linux etc. Laymen have no idea what’s going on, exceptions aside.
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Yeah, it will be used to “scientifically” entrench discrimination and denial of medical care.
Absolutely nobody is going to benefit from AI except ghouls like Nadella and Altman.
You should listen to blind smartphone user Steve Nutt discuss his experiences using AI tools on the Phone Show Chat podcast or read about the experiences of Ann, a woman who was paralyzed after a stroke, who was able to communicate again using her voice thanks to AI. In other words, let the disabled speak for themselves instead of assuming they are some homogenous group of people who all share the exact same opinion as you and have nominated you as their sole representative.
I’m already benefiting from it on a daily basis, and I’m neither of those people.
Capitalists will always capitalize, but that doesn’t necessarily negate usefulness. On the contrary, by some estimates llama3 cost nearly $1B to develop, yet it’s free on huggingface for anyone to download and use.
I am benefitting right now. It’s great for programming. It’s built right into my IDE now. In fact, this has been a thing for quite a while now with many people…
My sister is blind and she is very excited about the prospect of good screen readers that don’t read out the pointless shit while at the same time being completely unable to describe images.
AI has the potential to be hugely useful for people with disabilities. It just needs to be done in a way that’s private, hopefully ran locally.
This would be a good point if anything in the article was actually “AI”.
Does anyone even want an “intelligent” prosthetic? Is it realistic or desirable to have deep conversations with a prosthetic foot? I can understand people falling for LLMs but this is too much.
Just because a machine can fetch your butter, that doesn’t actually make it intelligent.
