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.
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...
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.
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.
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.