> If writing, maintaining, and deploying software stops being the hard part, all three of those gaps start closing. The freedoms we value become accessible to a much wider range of people, and they will be able to use them on a wider range of otherwise “waste” devices.
It is incorrect to speak about "freedom" and "ownership" when you have willingly traded in your agency to an AI to "do the legwork" for you. You may own the files the AI has created and can run them, but you do not truly own the underlying capability to create or modify them independently (so free software principles kinda stop applying)
For all software, you have a conditional freedom entirely dependent on an external service. Should the service change, disappear, or become inaccessible, you suddenly ran out of "freedom"; you cannot understand or fix the code, or adapt (not create) solutions to novel problems without the AI's mediation.
All you have is the illusion of freedom wrapped in dependence.
If we go with your argument then nobody has had any freedoms or agency at all.
You need a library and other people to tech you useful skills, you need a car to get to a job, you need a farmer to farm the food that you eat, you need an engineer to create the device you're using the internet through. Etc. Etc. Etc.
> If writing, maintaining, and deploying software stops being the hard part, all three of those gaps start closing. The freedoms we value become accessible to a much wider range of people, and they will be able to use them on a wider range of otherwise “waste” devices.
It is incorrect to speak about "freedom" and "ownership" when you have willingly traded in your agency to an AI to "do the legwork" for you. You may own the files the AI has created and can run them, but you do not truly own the underlying capability to create or modify them independently (so free software principles kinda stop applying)
For all software, you have a conditional freedom entirely dependent on an external service. Should the service change, disappear, or become inaccessible, you suddenly ran out of "freedom"; you cannot understand or fix the code, or adapt (not create) solutions to novel problems without the AI's mediation.
All you have is the illusion of freedom wrapped in dependence.
This argument would be more compelling if self-hosted, open-weight models didn't exist.
If we go with your argument then nobody has had any freedoms or agency at all. You need a library and other people to tech you useful skills, you need a car to get to a job, you need a farmer to farm the food that you eat, you need an engineer to create the device you're using the internet through. Etc. Etc. Etc.