@matt@toot.cafe I have decided to write a LinkedIn post about this, because I have sat in silence for months while people have been too frightened to speak up for fear of being deluged with flaming attacks. It might take me a while because I want to give it careful thought.
I am old enough, and enough of a student of history, to know that this discussion is not new at all. Industries have been disrupted, jobs have changed, since at least the industrial revolution.
Specifically relating to technology, I was on the Internet in the late 1980s at my university, using a shell account, Pine, Telnet, Gopher, Usenet etc.
When the Internet started to be adopted by those who wanted to use it for commercial purposes, it was the end of the world as we knew it. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of the same people are now beating this current drum, and those who are too young to have been around then sure would have been had they been around then. It is often human nature to be resistant to change. And these people back then wanted the Internet to be the sanctuary of people with exceptional computer skills. We see this behavior among those who have stifled Mastodon’s advancement when there was a window for it to go truly mainstream. Had those people had their way back in the early 90s, blind people would be significantly information deprived today, and many of the devices we take for granted would not exist.
Music is another example. It was inevitable that as bandwidth and codecs improved, we would find ways to send music over the Internet, now that the zealots had lost that battle and ordinary types could use it. The music industry first raged against digital music happening at all, then they imposed draconian DRM, and finally they found a way to accept the new norm. That has been incredibly disruptive for the music industry, but there’s no holding back technology, and they are now at peace with the idea that you adapt or die. I used to have to save my money as a kid so maybe I could buy one album every month. Now, with inflation taken into account, for less than the cost of that one album, I can have an unimaginable amount of music.
A lot of the people at the heart of the disruption in recent decades affecting every gadget we use, every aspect of life, is the software development industry. The different here is now the disruption has come for them, and many of them hate it. I, for one, celebrate it. I have been at the forefront for decades of advocating for the needs of blind people to be met, only to be told that it’s not a priority, that blind people should wait their turn for an unspecified period, that accessibility isn’t a “feature” they want to support. Well, I, for one, have had enough.
When I see blind people developing solutions to meet our specific needs, in other words by us, for us, I celebrate. We have more power, more control now. And it occurs to me that blind people make great vibe coders, because many of us understand UI. We are great troubleshooters. We are terrific at workarounds and understanding what we’re using. It is liberating, it is democratizing, we are putting ourselves at the front of the line through our own action.
Bonnie and I now have to allow time on our schedules when we want to catch an Uber or Lyft to get to an appointment, just in case we get a guide dog refusal, which happens regularly. Blind people worked hard to get laws passed that too many drivers willfully ignore without consequences. And if we do get a ride, we’re often asked intrusive questions about our medical history. Give me an autonomous vehicle any time.
Of course there are problems. In many cases, serious problems. If I get a description of an image, how do I know if it’s accurate? We’re not getting confidence levels in these things and I believe we should.
We have to take great care that AI does not simply inherit societal prejudices that have been holding blind people back, and I am actively working on that.
You are right, we as a society must work out how we definite and compensate for intellectual property in this new era, and the companies producing this technology are not in the best position to make those determinations. We as a society must find a consensus on that, in an era when consensus on anything is very hard to find.
But we are not going to solve those problems with self-interested posts that are really just whining about how, finally, software development is being disrupted in the same way that software development has disrupted everything else for years.
People are free, of course, to say what they want. But some of us choose to have the difficult conversations, to try and solve the complex problems. Obviously as a parent, the way that some of these LLMs have amplified people’s mental illness rather than assisting with getting help for it absolutely breaks my heart.
But some of the AI rhetoric here has crossed a threshold and is now tantamount to bullying. Those who push back, even politely, are bombarded with hate posts. I, for one, am choosing to stand up against the bullies. AI has many problems. Of course it does. Just as the software developed by some of the humans now doing the complaining has had many bugs. But it is also doing a lot of good. We have to work hard to ensure it does less harm, because there’s no turning back.
