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by Filligree 999 days ago
Is the opinion of the users irrelevant? They’re all racking about suddenly being independent, something everyone who’s sighted takes for granted.
2 comments

Is this a new level of user satisfaction wrought by AI? Sounds like there has been a non-AI solution for a while too?
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.

This service can already be reliably provided by humans.

Humans have well understood failure modes, and society has an existing framework for handling issues that arise between humans.

I wonder who will be held responsible when Be My Eyes AI tells someone to step into traffic? My guess is no one.

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.
From the page:

> 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.

So basically you throw the responsibility to the user for Be My AI reading medicine label wrong
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.

How many blind people have full time human assistants? My guess is: very few.