About

Chris Mairs is a blind entrepreneur and technologist with 50 years experience in the computer industry. He was awarded a CBE for services to engineering in 2014. He now spends most of his time as an investor and advisor for early stage technology start ups, with a heavy emphasis on AI. He is also a board member at Raspberry Pi and Venture Partner at Entrepreneurs First. 

Inclusivity of blind people in technology driven societal change during Chris’ lifetime has been frankly abysmal. But the tremendous strides in AI capabilities since the introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022 provide a genuine opportunity to rectify that state of affairs, accompanied inevitably by an equal opportunity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Chris is more optimistic now than he has ever been about what technology can do for blind people. And so this blog is an, often wry, non-technical, commentary on the rapidly unfolding AI landscape viewed through a blind lens (if that is even conceptually a thing).

The first post lays down a gauntlet for Artificial General Intelligence. Subsequent weekly posts meander between expansions  upon the challenge, comments on new advances in AI from a non-technical perspective and anecdotes from Chris’ own life as a blind man living in a visual world.

All images in this blog are created by Chris using ChatGPT (other state of the art foundation models are available).