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Blind person here. I can confidently say that vision AIs for navigating the real world are pretty much hype. It is a bandwidth and latency issue. Latency fro

by lynx97 2y ago

Blind person here. I can confidently say that vision AIs for navigating the real world are pretty much hype. It is a bandwidth and latency issue. Latency from camera to AI, and bandwidth from device to brain... Please, don't hype accessibility just for your personal fun. There are people out there with real problems, and dangling impossible solutions before their "eyes" is pretty much cruel. > describing the beautiful scenes they’re in And this part is ableism at its best. Do you eally think what people like me are missing are computer generated descriptions of our surroundings, so that we notice the beauty? Reminds me of the Cochlear implant debate some people from the deaf community have. Is my life less interesting because I dont see your colours? Am I a lesser human that needs treatmenet because I dont see your beauty? Me thinks no.

JohnPrine 2y ago
Agreed, blind people and sighted people are able to experience different kinds of beauty that are inaccessible to each other. As a sighted person, if there was a technology that could describe the beauty that a blind person experiences in a given moment I would think that would be pretty cool to try. > Please, don't hype accessibility just for your personal fun. There are people out there with real problems, and dangling impossible solutions before their "eyes" is pretty much cruel Do you think it's going to be impossible forever? bandwidth and latency seem like the surest things to improve in AI tech
- lynx97 2y ago
  I don't know about bandwidth from device to brain. Maybe Neuralink or something similar? It has been tried a lot. I saw the first sonar-alike navigation aid in the early 90s. It basically translated detected obstacles into vibration. Thats where you start to realize that bandwidth is the issue. Because a single, or maybe even a group of, vibrations, doesn't really tell you anything about the nature of the obstacle. Now, we're at a point where vision models (if they dont hallucinate, DANGER!!!) can actually destinguish different obstacles and even describe them. Nice. However, you're pretty much limited to speech synthesis as an information channel. That is not that bad, but very distracting when you move about outside. After all, blind people already use their ears to learn about their surroundings. There isn't much, if any, bandwidth left to stick some constantly chatting voice in. You end up deminishing your actual senses input about the surroundings, which is also dangerous. Nothing beats the turn-around time of your own ears or tactile info you might get from your cane... So, to answer your question: Maybe. I haven't seen a technology that can squeeze some more bandwidth out of the current situation yet.
  - JohnPrine 2y ago
    Thanks for the insight. Very cool to get your perspective on this

by lynx97 2y ago

JohnPrine 2y ago

Agreed, blind people and sighted people are able to experience different kinds of beauty that are inaccessible to each other. As a sighted person, if there was a technology that could describe the beauty that a blind person experiences in a given moment I would think that would be pretty cool to try. > Please, don't hype accessibility just for your personal fun. There are people out there with real problems, and dangling impossible solutions before their "eyes" is pretty much cruel Do you think it's going to be impossible forever? bandwidth and latency seem like the surest things to improve in AI tech

lynx97 2y ago
I don't know about bandwidth from device to brain. Maybe Neuralink or something similar? It has been tried a lot. I saw the first sonar-alike navigation aid in the early 90s. It basically translated detected obstacles into vibration. Thats where you start to realize that bandwidth is the issue. Because a single, or maybe even a group of, vibrations, doesn't really tell you anything about the nature of the obstacle. Now, we're at a point where vision models (if they dont hallucinate, DANGER!!!) can actually destinguish different obstacles and even describe them. Nice. However, you're pretty much limited to speech synthesis as an information channel. That is not that bad, but very distracting when you move about outside. After all, blind people already use their ears to learn about their surroundings. There isn't much, if any, bandwidth left to stick some constantly chatting voice in. You end up deminishing your actual senses input about the surroundings, which is also dangerous. Nothing beats the turn-around time of your own ears or tactile info you might get from your cane... So, to answer your question: Maybe. I haven't seen a technology that can squeeze some more bandwidth out of the current situation yet.
- JohnPrine 2y ago
  Thanks for the insight. Very cool to get your perspective on this