Resisting at the table: AI, disability, and access
Nobody who is a good person who also dislikes AI wants to hear this: Refusal and resistance are necessary, but if we don't have power, we will probably lose. We need to resist and refuse while we still have a place at the table. And if we don't have a place at the table, we need to invite ourselves to it.
Don’t like AI? Time to get involved. I don’t think there is a single path forward where AI isn’t going to be part of every aspect of our lives. It’s just unreasonable to believe otherwise. But we need smart, informed people who keep the bad guys from winning. And they are winning. Artists, the environment, privacy, intellectual property, and workers are all currently losing. We don’t want AI to become yet another gap between people with disabilities and everyone else. But if there isn’t anyone else at the table, this will happen.
We need policy change, we need resistance within companies, we need refusal from individual workers and users, we need radical new ideas too. We also need researchers and designers, dreaming of better worlds. We need all of these strategies and directions together. But how do we stop the inevitable, massive, encroaching empire of AI? The sheer economic power invested into AI might just brute force it into every corner of our lives regardless.
I don’t like using AI, personally. I love close control of the things I build and design. I love transparency. I love interactive systems that let me clearly verify what the system is doing and what I am doing. But this preference of mine is a marginal opinion in the grand scheme of things. Most people don’t care about this kind of stuff. They want black-box algorithmic agents to manage things for them as much as possible.
But that means that figuring out how to make AI transparent, fair, verifiable, built in ways that respect intellectual properties, secure, privacy-preserving, and better for the environment are all massive problems. Each of these are their own area of study in the world of research.
But we need way more people who actually want to be involved but are still skeptical, cynical, or apprehensive about the “good” of AI right now. We need smarter, more critical minds and not just sycophants and power-users. I hope people that care stay involved and don’t just spend their time at the margins, yelling into the void, or worse: check out entirely and leave the conversation.
As Karl Grove writes, “If accessibility advocates aren’t at the table now, AI systems will continue to reflect the same exclusions we’ve been fighting for decades.”
One of the best places to get involved right now is unfolding in conversations on Github, where web standards are created and negotiated and edited.
There is a conversation on the ethical impact of AI (opened 5 days ago) in the ai + accessibility group. That same group also has a fresh (as of 30 minutes ago) conversation specifically on the environmental impact of modern models. Decisions are also being made in all kinds of corners of virtually every major company. Try to get a seat at any table you can. The time to say something is now.