Right to Repair is a rapidly growing movement in the tech industry that is attracting attention from law makers around the world. Right to Repair is a simple concept, consumers should have the right to be able to repair their own devices, without taking it exclusively to the relevant manufacturer and helping to prolong the life of the device. Historically, when looking at old iPods, DVD players, radios etc. you could just take these devices to any small electronics repair shops and get them fixed for a relatively small fee and continue to use the device however long it lasts.

However, in the past decade or two, companies have made it increasingly difficult or almost impossible to repair a device by yourself, which means majority of consumers buy a new device or, must go exclusively to manufacturer authorized stores and pay significant amounts for repairs. Apple is notorious for refusing to share any specification or information for repairability of their devices, while the way in which the parts are put together almost intentionally make it impossible to repair by a third party. Many other companies now also follow the similar tactics. This gives power of repairing to the manufacturer only who can drive up the prices, making customers more likely to buy a brand-new device rather than repairing their old ones. New York Times said that companies argue that this is because of “security risks from giving criminals access to technical information, safety risks from unauthorized repair, and risks to intellectual property.”. Federal Trade Commission in US ruled majority of these arguments as flawed and don’t have direct implications on repairability except for intellectual property rights, which still does not justify the amount of repair restrictions normally imposed.

This ultimately also hurts independent repair shops, who have become much mor rare and resort to illegally obtained device prints and parts to be able provide repairing services. Louis Rossman one of the faces of right to repair movement is an independent repair shop owner and youtuber who has gone to different state hearings on right to repair to make law makers aware how companies actively make it impossible to repair the devices. He spoke about how Microsoft, Sony, Apple and other big tech manufacturers actively lobby against the right to repair movements as this may affect their sales. Another popular website ifixit.com explained how it took a lawsuit before Apple even started offering battery replacement, something which should not be difficult to do. They also mentioned that “it’s common practice to refuse to make parts, tools, and repair information available to consumers and small repair shops. Apple even created a special screw specifically to make it hard to repair the iPhone.”.

Apple has recently boasted how they are pushing towards making their devices more sustainable through their so-called recycling programs and even removing charging bricks from phone boxes. While this may sound nice, I believe it does very little in reducing their impact on environment and is rather just for greenwashing purposes. If apple and other manufacturers really cared about the environment it would be much more effective by allowing easier repairability and sharing information on repairs to their devices, as this would meaningfully reduce e-waste and make it easier for consumers to use their devices for longer, instead of buying new device as soon as old one has a problem.

There’s now also a growing movement for right to repair of consumer electronics in EU particularly also due to the environmental concerns. Repair.eu states that 53 million tons of e-waste is produced every year, of which only 15-20% is recycled. Being able to freely repair devices at will is fundamental right of every consumer, and one of the ways the world can be more sustainable is through using their devices longer and reducing the amount of e-waste produced around the world.

Ultimately, I strongly believe that the devices you purchase are yours, and you should be able to repair it if you want to and the manufacturer should not have much say in it

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Now, trust me when I say this, I am the only author of this blog post. But there may soon be a time when blog posts, stories, papers, books can be co-authored by a human and AI. Humans have always been fascinated of being able to talk to computers and make computers intelligent. The Turing test, perhaps the most popular test of an AI’s abilities to exhibit intelligence through the form of maintaining and even guiding a conversation similar to that of a human. This has pushed scientists to develop large language models for AI to understand and produce AI-generated audio or texts. Google along with other tech giants has been investing tremendously in this space, and regularly in its yearly keynotes at Google I/O, reveals new developments in language models, which enables AI to hold increasingly complex conversations and simulate real human-like responses. These advances are also visible in daily routines, such as suggested replies in Gmail or autocomplete in iMessage.

This technology was implemented in a text-based RPG game AI Dungeon. So, rather than choosing from pre-determined list or responses, the AI in the game helps build the world around the actions that you choose to do. These generated responses from the game can lead to infinite possible directions from swords and sorcery to cyberpunk adventures.

This can have applications for even script writing and books. Suppose the author has a few themes in mind, which they can just feed into the algorithm, and the output is a potential script or text which the Author can build on or implement into their work. Companies have been rapidly scaling these programs by adding more data and computing power, with the size of the language models being measured in the number of parameters/ connections they have within their networks. OpenAI, an artificial intelligence company’s GPT-3 model is one of the largest models trained with 175 billion parameters. This year Google revealed that their language model was trained with 1.6 trillion parameters. Such level of sophistication has helped improve AI’s ability to comprehend and make compelling conversations.

A company called Writesonic offers AI powered writing tools which can even write an entire blog post. There are always concerns on how such developments can take away jobs, but I believe that AI in this form, is most effective when used in collaboration with the author. The author remains the primary source of ideas, but the AI can help turn those ideas into exciting new dialogues, scripts, blogs which can help launch new adventurous franchises like never before. Someday the algorithm can be so trivial that a better quality of this blog post can be written by an AI instead of me.

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