As far as my applications for open-sourcing goes, AI has actually done a good number on assisting it.
I’m a DIY sort of person, and use a lot of software for things like ESP32 boards to complete niche tasks. The problem is that very many applications just didn’t have some preexisting code made for it, so it took a much larger load for me to try programming it by hand. In recent years, I’ve had a much easier time finding software for things, and sure enough, many of these projects have some mention or disclaimer about AI.
I know AI brings its own problems with it, namely that of code produced with lesser-optimized techniques, but the alternative I had to deal with was simply no premade code at all.
That being said, many of these projects did die out after AI was implemented, but not because the community was less interested, or the developers were less caring. These projects died because they reached their end goal, they did exactly what you needed it to do, no more or less. Far as I’m aware, that sounds like a successful outcome.
I don’t know anywhere near the full scope of this industry, but what seems to’ve been the case so far is that Lithium Ion battery recycling isn’t really happening because not enough batteries have died yet, to sustain a company in that industry. Which y’know, bit of a good problem to have, but it’s also a problem that Lead-Acid batteries had toward the early phases of their use. As was the case then, it took time for enough batteries to die to sustain an industry in battery recycling, and even moreso exacerbated with Lithium car batteries having a longer lifespan.
The interesting part is that once we have enough batteries to sustain the market, a very small proportion has to be manufactured from raw materials to makeup for product lost in the recycling process. This has Lithium in a weird state where we currently heavily rely on its extraction, yet as far as the auto industry is concerned, it won’t be too terribly long in the future when we’d have the baseline supply we need.
Anyways, no clue if that’s truly their approach or not, but we’re at a point that I feel it wouldn’t be entirely unjustifiable to consider.