What is it like to be a bat, or a bot?
More musings on the tricky question of subjective experience and the impossibility of distinguishing mimickry from true consciousness.
Chris Mairs
Wake up and smell the coffee
Deep Mind co-founder and Microsoft AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, raises big questions on UK national radio regarding AI consciousness, the future of work and more generally the two sided coin of AI’s rapid progress.
Looking back at 2025: A Blind Perspective on AI Progress
2025 saw big gains in LLMs, with smaller models now very capable. But human-level embodied AI is still years away and AGI likely a decade off. Assistive AI hasn’t progressed much yet, but I’m optimistic and excited to announce an Assistive AI hackathon at Entrepreneurs First on Jan 17.
The Ground Truth for Visual User Interfaces
Browser accessibility is almost always a nightmare and even the world’s most popular websites like Amazon are a total pig to navigate without sight due to the overwhelming amount of content. New Computer Use Agents could be a game changer for blind users
You have arrived at your destination
For blind users of public transport, the fun and games really starts when a sighted traveller, an Uber driver or a sat nav would reasonably claim you have reached your destination. Here are a few recent anecdotes.
The Blind Mans Arms
I just created my first website, The Blind Mans Arms, without code or help from a sighted person. It’s simple, but shows how easy it is to spin up the digital side of a business today. It even has a conversational voice agent. Running a great gastro pub, though, still takes real human skill.
Brain the size of a planet and still cannot make the tea
Humanity’s Last Exam is a fiendishly hard benchmark for human like intelligence. But a good score at this benchmark does not correlate to simple tasks in the real world like making tea. Assistive tech for independent living in a visual world must handle such mundane tasks robustly.
The Double Edged Sword
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A key measure of AI progress is the length of time a model can work on so called ‘long horizon tasks’ without going off the rails. Most high value real world jobs involve some ‘long horizon tasks’, i.e. tasks that take hours rather than
Managing inclusivity debt
My life is extraordinarily good—I feel lucky and hardly notice my blindness, though I love calling it an affliction. I can accept bad infrastructure, but not lazy digital inaccessibility. Conversational voice AI can finally repay the world’s vast inclusivity debt.
The Seductive Nature of the Chatbox
LLMs can be brilliant yet bafflingly bad. Often it’s faster, cheaper, and more reliable to just write code—or better still, skip the chat entirely and do things the old-fashioned way.