It is a visual world for sure. A lot of daily tasks such as driving, filling out forms, reading menus, and cleaning the house well all require at least decent visual ability. When I was younger, my hearing and vision were about the same, so I didn’t recognize how limited my world was in regard to those daily life tasks. I believe a combination of life experiences, age, and cochlear implants vastly expanding my range of hearing helped me understand this reality. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here, so I want to explore several ways it could be useful to me as someone with vision and hearing impairments.
Transportation
I remember when Google was working on a self-driving Prius in the early 2000s, and self driving cars were supposedly on the horizon. That iteration never really panned out that I’m aware of because a driver would always need to be able to take control in case of an emergency. Cars now come with more automated features, but fully self driving cars as envisioned years ago still haven’t really caught on in the mainstream, at least not anywhere besides select cities such as Las Vegas, San Francisco, or Phoenix. With the help of remote capabilities, the idea of self driving cars has been folded into the mainstream technology landscape. Think Waymo: https://waymo.com/. This is actually the successor to the Google Self Driving Project.
I live in a tiny town that is within an hour’s drive from three major cities, but there are no public transportation options to get to any of them at the moment. I can see a lot of potential with taxis like Waymo though because they wouldn’t require the major infrastructure investment the building bus or train stops would.
Forms and Policies
Standardized forms are a mental drain because I usually have to reformat or adjust them in some way (font size, dark mode, etc), to get them to a point that I can write or fill them out. Asking AI to do this saves me that time and energy. I have used it to create templates for me to customize. While this eliminates the need for a human to do this aspect of a job, it frees up human skills to dive deeper into more creative or scientific tasks.
Household Chores
Household chores is something that really brings my visual limitations into focus. I can wash dishes or sweep the floor, but I have to really zero in on the tasks to make sure I clean effectively. Robovacuums are a start, but I need something for more precise tasks and nook and cranny cleaning.
Conclusion
The pieces of the puzzle are coming together. As AI and its supporting technologies continue to mature, I hope that they will continue to develop new ways to make people with disabilities more self sufficient. If anything, the ability to offload these tasks at my points of need would free up space to learn complex knitting patterns or cooking techniques, rather than spending the time and effort to accommodate the ability to perform those tasks.
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