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0 pointswrs1d ago0 comments

Well, on the other hand, software isn’t all about checking emails.

I know someone who worked for a nonprofit that made pregnancy health software that worked over text messaging. Its clients were women in Africa who didn’t have much, but they had a cell phone, so they could get reminders, track vitals, and so forth.

They had to find enough funding to pay several software engineers to build and maintain that system. If AI allows a single person to do it, at much lower cost, is that bad?

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crabmusket1d ago

So, here is a case where AI was a technical fix to a social problem: that as a global society, funding is skewed away from things which benefit people. Google can find the budget for as many ad-touchers as it wants, but nonprofits have to scrounge and make do by paying for "metered intelligence" from a megacorp.

So in isolation, I think it's great that they managed to achieve this. But I mourn that the only way they achieved it was via this rapacious truth-destroying machine.

This isn't a new trend - AI didn't cause it. It's just the latest version of it.

wrsOP8h ago

To be clear, this work was done years pre-AI. I was just giving an example of how lowering software development costs could be a public good.

bGl2YW5j1d ago

This is awesome. It's sad that examples like this are few and far between.

remich1d ago

Are they? Or do you just mean that it's few and far between that we hear about them? If it's the former, I think there's a much bigger universe of this kind of stuff than most people realize. Otoh, if you're just commenting on the lack of coverage, then, yeah I agree I wish more publicity was paid to small software like this. Maybe we need a catchy term - "organic software"? "Locally grown software"?

HaloZero1d ago

I talked to my friends who aren't in tech a lot about what they would want with software. A lot of the benefits of small software like this would actually be compliance and reporting issues with non-profit. Sifting through large amounts of data with very unstructured inputs.

The actual community building is fairly not as automated unless you have very specific problems. Like even in the example above, having an automated message is useful but staffing the team to handle when things are NOT in a good spot would probably be the real scaling cost.

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