I used to be a personal support worker for adults with cognitive and physical disabilities.
In some sense, I was a non-AI solution that enabled them to do their activities of daily living.
I'm pretty sure they'd have preferred not to be dependent on me, though. I imagine that's true here, too--no more need to edit your behaviour/filter your thinking/navigate interpersonal stuff just to do something minor.
As A blind person, hopefully this never happens. But if it does, hopefully the person who decided to use the AI improperly. I know this might sound crazy, but maybe, just maybe, we should allow blind people themselves to take responsibility for the ways in which they use technology. Rather than locking up the dangerous AI that they might hurt themselves with, perhaps we might just allow blind people themselves to determine how much risk they are comfortable with taking.
> Be My AI is perfect for all those circumstances when you want a quick solution or you don’t feel like talking to another person to get visual assistance.
I think as all in life it's situational. Would I trust imperfect AI to pick medicine out of 1000 available in a drugstore? Probably not - what if it picks Fentanyl (or whatever drug that can kill me). Would I trust it to pick Ibuprofen to treat headache from my home medical cabinet? Absolutely. There is nothing there that can kill me. Would I trust it to tell me dose in mg? Current systems are already better at OCR than average human.
This summer I used Google Translate to pick medicine in Italy and it was pretty good at translating labels - definitely better than pharmacist who did not speak English at all.
By the way, lots of people die in US because wrong medicine was dispensed - and that has nothing to do with AI. People are imperfect and many drug names are long, incomprehensible and easy to confuse with each other.
Lots of blind people have their homes set up with everything carefully arranged and no hazards. They prepare food, clean their house, commute to school, to jobs, and to appointments via familiar routes with no dangerous intersections, or they might use buses, trains, and Uber / Lyft just like millions of other people who aren't blind.
Being blind can be full of annoyances and frustrations, but I think it's a stretch to say that it's "dangerous".
Here we have a tool that can materially improve blind people’s lives and instead of making it accessible you want to deny them access until the product reaches a quality bar that is impossible to reach.
That’s wrong and immoral. The world is full of risk. As individuals we choose to accept some risks and move on with our lives. I think it’s appropriate that blind people are given the same opportunity