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 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.