Posted by automate_this on Aug 24, 2026
I think AI could democratize tech.
I think that because I’m seeing people building apps using AI, when they had no prior experience with app development. They needed something so they made it. (Or made AI make it.) I think this could be the way to a bright and beautiful future.
In the future, apps might become a lot less work. Apps might become expendable, ‘throw-away’ items when they need to. You might make an app to help you manage a trip you’re taking, and once you’re back home, you never touch it again. Or a small shop might build a custom inventory management system, exactly suited to what they need.
For designers, this means the days of distilling thousands of individual human beings down to personas will be gone. Experience can be tailored specifically to the people using them, by the people using them. This is an opportunity to empower people with tech, rather than making them reliant on corporations to decide what their experience will be.
If people have access to always-on AIs that can build anything you want (theoretically), people will use that power. With the right infrastructure, building your own app could become as ubiquitous as owning a smartphone. As simple as posting something on social media. We could all be tech wizards and that would dramatically change the landscape of the world we live in.
But we would have to make sure AI is a shared social resource, not an exploitative money-making endeavor.
And people are doing this. There are open source LLMs and all kinds of other open source AIs available. One of the big differences though, is ease of use and adoption. If I want to use Claude or ChatGPT, all I have to do is go to the website and start talking to the AI. It’s effortless. If I want to use an open source AI, where do I start? How do I begin leveraging these more ethical tools? Ease of use should not belong to the corporations. When a new technology comes along, everyone should be talking about an awesome open source project that makes it easy to use that technology, not a product from Big Tech.
How do we get ease of use for more open source projects? And what even is ‘ease of use’?
To me, ease of use is a subset of accessibility. It means making a tool available to as many people as possible by removing as many barriers to access as possible. Not knowing a lot about coding or AIs or LLMs is a barrier to using open source AIs. Putting an easy-to-understand interface on top of a powerful AI makes the technology more accessible.
Solarpunk HCI and design for digital spaces is about not gatekeeping. It’s about meeting people where they are at, and speaking a language they can understand.
Maybe a solarpunk future for HCI is one that asks ‘how do I get this technology to a place where it can be used by the maximum number of people?’. Maybe we reclaim that from the corporations.