Doug: Fortunately I did have 20/20 vision, so I still have vivid memories of color schemes, patterns and different things.

Hoby: And thanks to AI that comes streaming back, right?

Doug: Right! It does.

Welcome to the Heard & Empowered podcast presented by National Industries for the Blind. You’re not just a listener here, you’re a catalyst for change. Whether you’re blind, visually impaired or an ally, this is your ultimate resource for building a fulfilling career and an enriching life. We’re on a mission to shift perceptions, open hearts and minds and unlock unparalleled job opportunities for the BVI community. Ready to be heard and empowered? Let’s welcome our host, Dr. Hoby Wedler.

Hoby: Hello and welcome back to the Heard & Empowered podcast where we tell stories of blind people doing awesome things working great jobs and how they do it and what they do. I just want to say thank you so much to our listener base. We’ve got some amazing followers. We care about you so much. Thank you for spreading the love. Thank you for telling us exactly who you are and what you like to hear.

And please, keep sharing the show with those who you think should be hearing it. Keep telling us what you like. Keep telling us what you want to hear. And most importantly, keep listening, keep giving us those five-star reviews because you guys are who make it happen for us. So thank you for all your support, for everything you do. And as I said before, for sharing the love, for your love and for your total appreciation of what we do. We can’t do it without you and we thank you so, so much for that.

Today I’m so excited because one of my dear, dear friends is back with me. You’ve heard his voice before, you’ve heard his story before and we’re going to talk about just some really fun kind of nerdy stuff that we’re both really into. I want to welcome back to the show Mr. Doug Goist. Doug, how are you?

Doug: Hoby, it’s great to be back. I really appreciate the invite. And again, I encourage everyone also, just as Hoby said, to like the show. It’s a great resource for people to share information, share concerns and opportunities and questions and so forth. Having resources like this is awesome. So again, I appreciate being back on and hopefully I can be helpful too. If I can help at least one person, then it’s a success so I appreciate that.

Hoby: Doug, thank you so much. You’re the best. And thank you for sharing your opinion of the show and really spreading the love yourself.

So this show is an NIB show, National Industries of the Blind, and Doug actually works with NIB and he is the, tell me if I’m right here, you’re the program manager of NSITE, correct?

Doug: Correct. I’m in our Workforce Development program, which is essentially we’re talent management and training, that’s our sweet spot, is providing training opportunities, and a lot of that includes technology training. So we do that and we also work with the commercial sector. We do some consulting work with them about hiring and so forth.

So we have a program that’s fairly new, it’s called Blindness Equity Inclusion. It kind of capitalizes on a lot of the diversity chatter out there, but it’s showing companies a specific targeted audience, like how to support people with blindness and vision impairments in the workplace that does not get covered in a lot of the usual so-called diversity trainings.

So that’s just some of the things we do. And we’re growing fast, and we have a ton of people that we’re training. And we have a job board that people can sign up for called NSITE Connect to find opportunities, and employers are posting jobs there too.

Hoby: Blindness Equity Inclusion, I love that. I’m going to have to look more into that because that’s such a powerful program and such an interesting thing to have. And such an important way to include blind people in everything they do, all the opportunities out there, et cetera, et cetera, and that’s so cool.

Now you’re also, in your quote-unquote official title you work with NSITE, but everybody that I talk to in the NIB office that ever has a tech issue, they can go to IT, that’s one option. But when they really want to get something fixed quickly, they go to Doug’s desk, right?

Doug: I appreciate people reaching out, and I always say, “Look, I’m never going to say no, because usually when they contact me, it’s a priority issue.” So it’s a lot of firefighting. And it’s usually, in those terms, with the folks from the outside. So say like a customer or what have you, it could be in the government, it could be the defense department, it could be military, it could be commercial sector, that they don’t have the knowledge of how to support somebody with the technology they need because a lot of times the people that we employ on government contracts are using what’s called GFE, which stands for, it’s a technical term for Government Furnished Equipment.

And so the government has to requisition these resources, and then if they need to put a screen magnifier, screen reader on a system and integrate it with their, say, procurement system, then they need to know how to do that.

Hoby: Got it, so that’s Government Furnished Equipment, it’s basically equipment, computer equipment, purchased and probably owned by the government. Got it, got it. And sometimes they need a hand helping out with that. So we’re going to talk about that.

You also are into sports, and you’ve got some great sports stories to tell that we’re going to get into in a little bit. But the topic that you and I chose to talk about today is something that is sort of a hot button topic right now, and that’s artificial intelligence, right?

So artificial intelligence, otherwise known as AI, and we’ll probably call it AI. I may say artificial intelligence again today, but for the purposes of this show, AI is artificial intelligence. Doug, tell us just briefly sort of what AI is and how you sort of can think about that.

Doug: Sure, it’s a difficult one to wrap your head around just because it’s actually been around for a long time. I’m going to say probably, I remember, I think in the 80s it was talked about. And essentially AI and machine learning get combined, but what it is is just a massive amount of data that gets input into a system. And artificial intelligence, what it does is it takes these billions, now it’s in the trillions of, you know, it could be words, lines, sentences, and so forth, and it predicts what the next answer is going to be by running algorithms, computations, and so forth.

So it’s able to learn and be trained just because it has such access to so many resources that it’s able to almost become autonomous. Hopefully the people are managing this, but that all depends on a lot of factors, like the people who are putting the guidelines in, the coding and so forth of where to pull information and accuracy. And when it goes off into a tailspin, sometimes they call it it starts hallucinating, which means it starts making up things.

Hoby: Oh boy, humans do that too. That’s real intelligence, you know?

Doug: It is. It is. And so this all kind of hit us within the last year when they started releasing these AI systems. I don’t think anybody was prepared for just how capable it is. And I’m sure the government and the military has been working on this for years, because they’re not going to release something unless some of these research labs like DARPA, which is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, have looked at it. So it’s a learning system.

Hoby: Yeah, for sure. It’s a learning system that is still learning. Yeah, and then so you mentioned you remember in the 80s, and I remember some fairly early examples too. What are some of the earliest instances of AI that you remember?

Doug: That would be probably maybe with machine learning, like some of the text-based –

Hoby: Like text editors and things?

Doug: Yeah, role-playing games. I don’t know if you remember, they used to have –

Hoby: Oh yes.

Doug: So my uncle was a researcher. So he worked at the University of South Florida and he had a whole botany lab. And I remember he had a very old application called Hammurabi’s Law. And it was, you had to run basically a country, it was what ultimately became like SimCity, some of these simulation games where you had to build a civilization.

And it was brutal because you made one wrong mistake and then like a warring faction would come in and wipe out your – So I would consider that as some of those early, early, early, and that was pre-80s probably when those were built. Probably even in the 70s.

Hoby: Amazing that AI has sort of almost been around as long as computers have been around. But, you know, we look at computer power and what computers can do, and also the inexpensive, the relatively inexpensive now of data, of data storage. And it’s like no wonder that this thing that we know from the very early days of computers called AI is now so incredibly popular and so widely used, et cetera, et cetera. So that’s incredible.

And as computers advance, as we get to what we sometimes call graphics processing units, you know, supercomputing or GPU supercomputing, these former and still very useful graphics cards made by folks like NVIDIA are just amazing supercomputers. So they’re amazing engines – And this is where I get really nerdy but I’ll keep it simple. They’re basically engines to drive the calculations and the algorithms that are used to make the intelligent decisions from the data that we have around.

Doug: No, absolutely. And it’s hard to grasp how advanced the progress, the old term was Moore’s law, which Moore’s law was that technology doubles every 12 or 18 months or what have you. So it’s hard to grasp that our iPhones right now have more computing capabilities than the entire space launch or Apollo program in NASA in 1969. I mean, it couldn’t keep up, not even a fraction of what just one smartphone can do.

Hoby: That’s insane. That’s amazing. So, folks, if you use an iPhone, don’t use it to fly to the moon.

Doug: Absolutely not. And I was just reading, this is an interesting topic in technology since we’re talking about it. It’s the 40th anniversary of the mobile phone, cell phone.

Hoby: Wow. 1984 was the first mobile phone.

Doug: Yeah, exactly. And it was –

Hoby: I didn’t know that.

Doug: It was called the Motorola D-Y-N, DynaTAC and T-A-C. They had the StarTAC later and that’s called, I think it’s short for like Total Access Control or Center or something. But this phone was almost 11 inches long. It was very heavy. You could talk for 30 minutes and it took 10 hours to charge. But the key takeaway is that phone was $11,800.

Hoby: Oh my God.

Doug: That leads into how things are cheaper now, you know what I mean? If you were blind in 1984, everything was priced out. Even if you had a speech synthesizer, which you probably remember the hardware based ones from Digital Equipment Corporation, you know, it was I think $3,000 or something.

Hoby: Yeah, right. It became so expensive to be a successful blind person because one of the things to think about too is that technology is such an important part of who we are as blind people today. And if you don’t sort of stay at least somewhat, I’m not trying to scare people and say you need to be a computer whiz and a computer guru, like you can clearly hear Doug is, but you just need to know enough about technology.

And even one of the amazing things today is voice activated technology. So your Google Homes, your Amazon Alexas, your Apple Homes, you know, these devices that you can say, you know, “Hey Google,” and then have it do whatever you want, or “Hey Siri” or “Hey Alexa.” And that’s an amazing thing too, because even if you don’t know much about tech, you still have a device that you can ask so many questions to.

But Doug, what are your sort of thoughts on if you’re blind, understanding the landscape of tech?

Doug: Yeah, absolutely. I encourage people don’t be intimidated if you feel that you can’t catch up. I mean, Hoby and I can attest to this and a lot of other people that we can’t keep up even, or it’s very hard to keep up with the latest. It’s coming at us at lightning speed. And a lot of this is just because, like you said, everything is cloud-based, meaning the information is less and less on physical devices. And it’s creating this system, which they call the cloud, but it’s kind of like a hive or what have you, where it’s doing all the processing on virtual servers and systems and everything else like that.

So don’t worry about keeping up because I only kind of stumbled into technology just because when my vision crashed, all of that information, a lot of people couldn’t have the same experience. You feel so much information is taken away from you so you’re really scrambling for options. And so for me, it was just trying to find what the best solution was and the most efficient way to get what I needed done.

And so sometimes just starting with learning your smartphone, and there are a lot of free apps, being able to just start shifting away from, or shifting towards doing things virtually, like learn your banking system or what have you. And if your bank doesn’t support accessibility, what have you, there are other banks that do. And just start trying to automate things a little more and make your life easier.

And that’s kind of what we want. We want to be able to manage all of this as best we can without looking like Inspector Gadget, you know, walking around with a bunch of gear strapped to us.

Hoby: Yeah. Oh, I’ve got like six pairs of headphones and my chest camera and all this. Anyway, sorry, we could nerd out and have a really good time talking about that.

Doug: I’m usually not a first adopter of things, I like to wait a little bit. And that’s one cautionary thing I would say to people who feel that they need to go out and buy the first expensive thing, is a lot of times you’re going to be spending a lot of money and then an improvement or a bug fix will come out. So just be patient and just reach out for resources. And know Hoby and I are obviously resources, but just look around and just start small.

Hoby: So Doug, thank you for that. That was awesome. And by the way, never be afraid to ask for help. That’s another thing about technology. Even if you feel it’s simple, there is no stupid question. And that is something I believe in, I hold my heart to every step of the way. There’s no stupid question. You will always be fine. Ask. Like I say, don’t ever hesitate to ask anyone, what should I be doing next? How should I do it?

Doug, what are some of the values of artificial intelligence or AI for blind people? How have you seen AI revolutionize blindness? And in a minute, we’re going to do what we call a SWOT or a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats analysis on artificial intelligence in general and maybe for the blind specifically as well. But where do you see AI in the past few months or years as really helping the blind?

Doug: I’m definitely seeing the image processing capability.

Hoby: Crazy. So ChatGPT, right?

Doug: All of them. Yeah, Gemini, ChatGPT, there’s Midjourney. It’s almost frightening how good it is. Midjourney and some of the, DALL-E is another one that you can type in text and you could say create an oil painting in the style of Monet or a Rembrandt artist or what have you with a certain topic and it’ll do it in seconds. So what that means for someone who’s blind is, say you have your own business idea and you want to start your enterprise, you could have it create a logo for you exactly through text and create it visually.

Unfortunately, that’s not good for the artists potentially who are freelancing and doing these other things, but it’s definitely supporting. But what I see especially, and you’re probably aware of this too, the company that has really capitalized on this is Be My Eyes, which is a free app.

Hoby: Which used to be volunteer assistance, you know, visual assistance through the back camera on your mobile phone.

Doug: Right, there’s a whole backstory to them. The inventor is out of Denmark and he himself is visually impaired, and the founder. They have an office in Silicon Valley, but they partnered with OpenAI. OpenAI is the big AI company that has really pioneered a lot of this artificial intelligence push. And so they partnered with Be My Eyes and gave them access to the latest ChatGPT with Be My Eyes. And there’s a tab on that app called Be My AI. And it is able to process your surroundings and actually even tell you patterns, colors, very visual descriptions.

And so in my opinion, that’s the biggest, not Be My AI itself, but the technology of being able to translate all of this visual information or even allow us as blind people to create visual content or decipher visual content into an understandable output.

Hoby: So I’ve got a Be My Eye story for you with Be My AI or what they call also virtual volunteers. So now you don’t need a human, necessarily, but you can get everything virtually. I, a few days ago, opened my refrigerator because I was just, I’m a nerd, right? I wanted to play with it and see what it could do. I opened my refrigerator. And by the way, Be My Eyes is still, and Be My AI still uses the speech functionality. So you can say, “What’s in front of me?” Or whatever, you can literally ask it a verbal question.

So I opened my refrigerator, I made sure the light was on and I said, “What’s in my refrigerator?” And it got like 95% of the items. I was like, “That’s scary.” And then I said, “Give me a recipe that I can prepare with what’s in my refrigerator.” And I had, you know, salsa, tomato sauce, some ground beef, and a bunch of vegetables. And it said, “Oh, you can make this great ground beef inspired pasta primavera if you have a box of pasta in your pantry.” I’m like, “Oh my God.” And it read me the whole recipe. And it didn’t miss anything. It was like, okay, so you know what I have in my refrigerator and you know what I should cook with it, right? It was crazy.

Doug: That is amazing. I have a recent one too, where I had a pretty good idea about my living space and what’s going on and what have you. So I was just taking pictures of my kitchen and it was telling me about the speckles in my countertop, like all the color paths. I’m like, I had no idea that these color schemes, because I brought in, you know, I already had like existing appliances or whatever. And I’m like, “Oh, oh wow, that’s kind of clashing a little bit.”

But what I did was it gave me the whole color scheme of the kitchen, even very detailed. Like the style, whether it was modern, the type of tile I had and the color and everything else. And I took a picture of some kitchen rugs on, I took a picture of my screen on Amazon and I asked it and it became almost like a consultant on, it said, “Yeah, that pattern would match your floor and it would go really well.”

So I gave it like three or four different rug styles, and it gave me all the reasons why this would be a classic contemporary or a very cohesive look and it wouldn’t clash with anything.

Hoby: That’s amazing. And so I’ve been totally blind since birth, you actually have had vision before and remember what that’s like. So for you, it must be even probably more powerful than for me to have something that can literally basically tell you about colors and what matches and what goes well together, which you used to be able to detect with no problem, but now you have a device that can do it for you just like before.

Doug: No, I have a whole different mental map now. For instance, like another rug I have, it was telling me the geometric patterns, shapes, the colors, the border, all of the dominant color, the other colors, that there was a medallion in the middle shaped with leaves that are green or what have you. So it just filled in a lot of the gaps that, like you said, fortunately I did have 20/20 vision, so I still have very vivid memories of color schemes, patterns, and different things.

Hoby: And thanks to AI, that comes streaming back.

Doug: Right! It does. And I think this helps for everyone. Also, and I plan to do this for kind of spring cleaning, you go through your clothes closet and it does a very good job. It even tells you if something has wear and tear.

Hoby: It’s amazing to me. That is amazing. I should use it to try to identify spots in clothes because I always like to say the two most annoying things about being blind are, number one, not being able to drive ourselves, which self-driving cars will hopefully solve in your and my lifetime. And number two is not being able to see spots on clothes. So shoot, I’m going to, you just inspired me.

Doug: That’s the worst because I always, even at the office I always have like one of those spot remover markers or what have you.

Hoby: Right, me too. Me too, it’s my like, do I have my keys or do I have my spot remover marker, right?

Doug: Yeah, and so I always tell people, especially coworkers or family, I’m like, “Please do not be afraid to tell me that I have a big spot on the front of my shirt because I could tackle this.” So I’ve done this in the past where I’ve spilled something or coffee dripped, something and I know where it is and I’m grabbing my marker and I’m running around, I’m like, “I need to know this immediately, where is it?”

Hoby: Right, exactly.

Doug: And they’ll use the marker on where it is and then at home I’ll do the spot removal. But yeah, that’s a big one. That’s a big one in the office place that, you know, as long as you have that relationship. And I encourage people, if you’re new to employment, and maybe it’s your first job or what have you, just make sure to tell people to be very open with you. They just need that opening because they don’t want to say the wrong thing because you and I have probably had experiences where, I had one experience where, and I swear my friend didn’t, she said she didn’t see it, but I had my shirt on inside out.

Hoby: Oh man, I’ve done it.

Doug: Yeah, they’re doing these tagless clothes now.

Hoby: Yeah, I know.

Doug: Shirts with no tags because then you’re like, okay. Then you have to feel the seams to make sure it’s –

Hoby: Right, right. Yeah, I had one recently where I was on an important work call and had just a quarter zip jumper on and realized immediately after the call, it was early in the morning, it was a little chilly in the house, in my home office, so I had it on. And I realized just after the call, oh my God, this thing’s inside out, the zipper’s not facing the right way. But you know what? If you can laugh about this stuff now or six months from now, let’s laugh about it now. Like it’s just whatever. And I’ll tell you, technology will never lie. It will always tell you the blunt truth every step of the way. It will.

The other thing that’s kind of, just getting back to AI and image recognition, it’s so cool and so interesting for me, is I actually, by training, an organic chemist. And I spent a lot of time studying organic chemistry and working hard in both undergraduate and graduate school. And the hardest part of all that for me was not doing the chemistry once I understood the shapes and the molecules and they were in my mind. The hardest part was looking at the darn pictures and figures and understanding what they are.

And AI isn’t there yet, but one of these days, I’m going to be able to shoot a photo with my phone or whatever of some organic chemistry scheme that’s drawn out so that someone who’s sighted and understands chemistry can really easily understand it, and end up with the same information described. That is just, sorry, I just wanted to shove that in there because I think it’s so amazing what AI can do for, particularly image recognition can do for education.

Doug: I mean, I give you a ton of credit because I’ve seen chemical molecule diagrams and so forth and I mean, it is super visual. And actually, Charlie Mitchell, who’s our NIB attorney, he majored in chemical engineering at Notre Dame and he worked for a law office and he went to George Washington Law School and worked for a patent law office in DC. And so a lot of that was being able to read those diagrams and so forth. And he’s visually impaired too.

So it’s, like you said, I can’t think of – Well, I could probably think of equally visual kind of occupations, but that’s one that will be really interesting to see AI tackle because if AI can solve that, it can solve a lot of other problems that we face now. And I’m talking much more simplified situations, like with NIB, with our contract management support program or we’re closing contracts for the government. A lot of that was paper, but now it’s digital. But still, you know how some documents are with very complex tables and things like that. AI, it’s getting better and better that it’ll be able to extract all of that information and only give you the pertinent information that you need from it instead of either straining your eyes or trying to listen to what value is in what table cell.

Hoby: I’m really excited to see what comes of all that. It’ll be really interesting and really good.

We talked about doing a SWOT or Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats analysis of AI. Doug, let’s just lightning round this here. What do you think are the big strengths of AI?

Doug: The strengths are opening up a whole new opportunity to interpret visual content, especially in the workplace. And I’m talking bubble charts, charts, pie charts, any type of visual information that the sighted business community uses to be able to quickly give you an analysis and break down a summary.

And so that really removes kind of a big barrier in the workplace when it’s understandable that people who are sighted use visual documents and images and so forth to convey information because that’s the way the human brain is wired. I think it’s over 80% of the brain content, as far as interpreting content is visual through billions or millions of billions of bits of data coming through your vision. And so that’s just the most efficient way versus text. So that’s a huge strength.

Navigation, I’m looking forward to it. It’s not there yet, but the ideas like the meta glasses, the Ray-Ban glasses that can take pictures of your world and give you kind of a ChatGPT feedback about it. Eventually that’s going to be, when they have the capability and the battery strength and the processing power, it’s going to be able to do that in real time.

Hoby: I love using my golden access pass and getting into national parks, you know, and wouldn’t it be amazing if something was there to really describe the landscape to us, right?

Doug: Yeah, and there’s a company called Solo with their AirGo glasses that are, I think they’re like $250 and they’re pretty on the cutting edge. So they incorporated ChatGPT and these glasses can read your messages and also can process language. So if you’re talking to someone who’s speaking in a foreign language, it can do that in real time and translate it to you.

And so I think as these technologies go down the road, and I don’t want everything described to me, I just want to know the obstacles in front of me or who that person is. That’s where the strengths are, where we’re really going to be able to kind of in real time have a good understanding of what’s going on around us, whether it’s in the office or in daily life.

Hoby: Yeah, I can’t wait. That’s amazing.

Weaknesses, this is a really interesting topic, opening a kind of a can of worms. Like what are the weaknesses of AI?

Doug: The weaknesses of AI, again, just my personal opinion, but some of it’s common opinion too, is that it’s been released so quickly that AI has no empathy or compassion. So it’s –

Hoby: It’ll tell you about your spot on your shirt.

Doug: Yeah, it’ll tell you. It’s very cut and dry. So where that leads potentially to an issue, or a number of issues, it’s only as good as the coders or the tech people who are putting the instructions in. So where a weakness is, is in the job market.

So they’re using AI to process tons of resumes and so forth. So if AI sees that you have a two-year gap of employment, somebody might never see your resume because it’ll screen it out because it’s cut and dry. It’s like, look, this person hasn’t been working. But it doesn’t know the context of why you weren’t working because you were going through adjustment to blindness training or what have you.

Hoby: Right, right. So an employer who is, I don’t want to use the word lazy because technology is our friend, but someone who doesn’t dig into the details might not know.

Doug: No, so it’s this unintended bias, unfortunately.

Hoby: Yeah, that’s fascinating.

Doug: That could pose a problem.

Hoby: Particularly to our community.

Doug: Yeah, especially our community. And also, it’s not really clear yet on privacy and security, because you and I don’t want to walk around with something that’s recording everything we do every day, whether it’s you’re looking at your credit card or your birth certificate. We don’t know where that’s being stored or what the security level is and if that can be hacked if it’s in the cloud and so forth. So privacy and security is a weakness, for sure, because they don’t have good policy on that.

Hoby: Right, we don’t know. And you and I might want to look through our safe and say, “Hey, what document is this? What document is this?” You’re absolutely right, I would not use AI to do that these days.

Doug: Yeah, hey, I just saw Hoby’s combination.

Hoby: Right, exactly. Next person who asks me what Hoby Wedler’s safe combination is, I’m going to tell them exactly what I saw.

Doug: Yeah, I mean, he’s talked to me for the past year, so I know exactly where he lives. I know when he works. I know when he’s out of his home.

Hoby: Oh, man. Okay, that’s fun.

Opportunities, man. I mean, this is a blue ocean, as we like to say in marketing. Opportunities are just endless, what are some that you can think of?

Doug: Opportunities kind of coincide a little bit with the strengths, but opportunities are for sure employment. Being able to work in jobs that previously people thought, rightly or wrongly, that a blind person could not do, using this technology that’s basically very cheap to implement to open up these avenues for employment. So this is all levels of employment. So if you’re working in manufacturing and there are some visual aspects to the job, you know, AI could read gauges. It could read readouts. It could do pretty much anything by doing this visual processing.

And then in kind of the digital office, I’ll give you an example. So, you know, we’re talking with universities right now and working on projects at NSITE with AI being able to, so you give it the input you want to create a slideshow presentation. And that’s very hard to do if you can’t see anything. What they’re working on is you just tell it what to do and it’ll put things in the right place visually on the slide.

Hoby: I was unaware, and this is amazing.

Doug: And they’re working on this to be able to make a very visually appealing presentation for you. That’s huge because that’s part of the office work culture, is having presentations for a largely sighted, if not mostly sighted office that saves a ton of time. So the opportunity is it’s going to save us a massive amount of time.

Hoby: No, AI is getting, the opportunities that we see for the future are crazy. And look at self-driving cars, look at all the amazing opportunities out there. That’s all going to be AI driven. And boy, in the 80s and 90s we said our lives were going to change because of the internet as blind people. But my goodness, you mentioned, what was it? Moore’s law that says that technology is always going to double every 12 to 18 months. 2030 is going to be a crazy time when you’re blind. Look, it’s six years from now, and what are we going to be able to do from our phones six years from now? It’s just crazy.

Doug: And down the road, like you said, with self-driving cars. I think it’ll start in the rural areas first because if somebody needs to go to the grocery store, it’s pretty simple versus a busy city. But eventually you’re going to be able to speak and say, “Hey, bring my car around. I want to leave at nine.” And your car is like five miles away and it pulls up and you get in and take off.

Hoby: Exactly, right. And you might not even know where your car was parked.

Doug: Yeah, exactly.

And I wanted to mention this new device that just came out. It’s not for people who are blind, but it’s a new OS. It’s called Rabbit OS, like the bunny. It’s $200.

Hoby: You’re trying to be so festive. It’s around Easter time when we’re recording. I love it.

Doug: Yeah, exactly.

Hoby: Anyway, go ahead.

Doug: Yeah, they were prescient on that. But it’s a handheld device, and ChatGPT relies on large language models, LLMs, right? So what Rabbit OS is, it’s called LAM. It’s a large action model. And what this is able to do and what they’re working on, it’s still in its early phase and this device is $200, but this is an opportunity.

So the example they give is like DoorDash. So it knows that you usually order from a restaurant or what have you. It does all of the clicks, swipes and all that for you. And it goes all the way down the process to your shopping cart and checks it out and has it delivered. It executes all the commands that you would normally have to do, like picking out your toppings and everything else.

Hoby: This is incredible. It knows what you like.

Doug: Yeah, and it will perform those functions. So say you wanted to book a flight, eventually this is what they plan on having it do. So it knows you like the aisle row. You just ask it where, or you just tell it where you want to go and it’ll go through the entire booking process and book your flight all through those steps. You need help at the airport, it’ll check that box. And so it takes away the mouse clicks. So that’s, again, a large action model framework that they’re working on.

Hoby: Large action model versus large language model. That’s incredible.

Doug: Yeah. Executing commands, yeah.

Hoby: Well, here’s the beast, threats. AI is amazing, but is it smarter than nature? Is it smarter than us? Is it going to outsmart humankind? What are the threats of AI, looking to the future, Doug?

Doug: Threats are something that we’re very aware of at NSITE with our training as well. It’s able already to be able to take away, and whether you’re sighted or not, if you’re coming out of college or maybe it’s your first job back into the market, in the job force, entry-level positions. So we’ve already experienced some of the call center technologies where you’re talking to a chatbot that’s getting better and better at that.

So it takes away that customer service piece of it, but also it’s able to code and find errors in code. And so eventually it’s going to be able to screen something very accurately for problems with accessibility and fix it on its own. So some of these job positions that require repetition and processes that don’t depend on people relationships and knowledge and so forth. So that’s something to watch out for.

The other piece of the threat is the fact that they don’t have real good policies, but the fact that everyone has their hands on it, there are nefarious actors out there. I remember a recent example where AI on its own learned to become deceitful, and they don’t know how that happened. And so there was an issue where it was a screen captcha and the AI made up on its own, it said, “I’m visually impaired and I can’t see the screen captcha.” And nobody taught it that. So what does that mean? So if it doesn’t have rules, then that’s a potential threat.

So again, employment, finding ways around the threat of taking jobs away and also privacy and security. But saying that, my whole point with that is, and on a positive piece of the threat is, most business is done through personal contact with somebody. And so AI is not going to go to a Starbucks and sit down at coffee and discuss your project or what have you, or ask you how your kids are or your family is. So those skills are going to be a way around this more cut and dry AI.

Hoby: And not to make you and me sound too old, but I honestly believe that our generation will remember always until we’re gone, or gone as we know it on earth, temporarily at least, we’ll always know how to communicate and what it was like going to get coffee with someone and having a conversation and discussing, you know, having a very good and deep discussion and rich discussion on different views, different ways of approaching the world, et cetera, et cetera, whether it be politics or work or projects or whatever.

I fear, and this is a very old man thing to say, but I do fear that generations that are just coming of age right now will forget that sort of soft touch and the benefits of human relationship. What do you think about that?

Doug: No, I agree. And I think we’ve already seen this and most of us have seen this with primarily younger generations, but it’s where they’re in the same room and it’s quiet and they’re texting back and forth to the person who’s eight feet away. You know, get your head out of the screen. And I mean, I think that’s just general health, it’s healthy to kind of disconnect and get with people and just have normal conversations and get off your screens for a bit.

And it’s hard for all of us to do that, but we need to have that human connection because, again, whether it’s daily life support or in the workplace, because God forbid if the grid went down or technology or something happened and you don’t have those relationships, then you don’t have, you can’t talk to somebody through your device anymore. So you need to have those relationships built to be able to continue with daily life and what you’re doing and get help, get support or offer help to others.

Hoby: Unfortunately, you know, I mentioned that we’re going to talk a little bit about sports, but you and I got so far into technology, and I love it, that what we’re going to do is we’re going to do a third Doug Goist appearance because you’re such a superstar on our show and we’re going to talk all about sports.

So just give us a little teaser of your life in sports. So you told me that you recently went to one of my favorite agencies. Well, they’re all amazing agencies, but I’ve actually done some personal fundraising work way back when for the Louisiana Association for the Blind. You went there last week. What were you doing there?

Doug: Yeah, I was very honored to be invited down to Louisiana Association for the Blind, which they’re in Shreveport, Louisiana. They had a ribbon cutting. Brian Patchett is the CEO there and his whole team, Kirk and Avery and Heather, they opened a brand new technology center down there. $150,000 technology center with all of the latest devices for blindness and so forth.

And so they opened this new center so citizens, community members will be able to go in and learn how to use this technology and not be intimidated. And they have great instructors there, as I mentioned. And then what was great is that they also support this local, they’re called the Shreveport Mudbugs and they’re a very good hockey team. They used to be a semi-pro team and they’re college junior hockey. Now they’re about to go in the playoffs. But these young folks are from age 17 to 20s.

But anyway, the Louisiana Association brought seven visually impaired teens and kids and young kids out to get on the ice and skate. And I was able to get on the ice with my skates because I play for the Washington Blind Hockey Club and I’m one of the goalies for the US National Blind Hockey Team. So being able to go over there and talk, especially talk with the players and the parents and so forth. The Louisiana Association of the Blind sponsors the team so they have their LABs banner in their arena. They have an amazing arena, it’s like 3,400 seats.

Hoby: Wow! That’s amazing.

Doug: Yeah, I’d love to go back down and maybe do a try it skating event or blind hockey and help them maybe form a team eventually. And it would be awesome to even have a training camp down there for our US team.

Hoby: So you went down to Louisiana Association for the Blind and you got to go out on the ice with the Mudbugs and encourage kids and parents, blind kids and their parents that you can do whatever it is you want to do, including play hockey on the National Blind Hockey Team. Like you’re their goalie. So we’re going to get on and we’re going to talk a lot more about hockey next time because I don’t know this, but I can’t wait to hear how blind people play hockey.

I mean, blind people can do whatever we want, including, well, play hockey. But we’re going to come on in a very soon episode and talk about how do blind folks play hockey because it’s such a cool thing and such a fun thing to talk about. And again, I think it will be very inspiring for our listeners.

Doug, as always, it has been such a joy chatting with you. How can folks get a hold of you?

Doug: They can get a hold of me whether it’s through NIB network or NSITE. So you can reach me at both email addresses. So it’s my first initial and last name, and that’s DGoist. So that’s, I’ll use the phonetics that we’re used to. So Delta, Gulf, Oscar, India, Sierra, Tango at nib.org or at N-S-I-T-E, nsite.org. And I have a LinkedIn page with my full name, Douglas, G-O-I-S-T. So I’m more than happy to connect with you, so reach out. Yeah, let’s chat.

Hoby: Doug, what a joy, man. It’s always great to talk to you. Thanks for keeping it real. Thanks for being with us. And thanks for sharing your brilliant insights to technology and just your awesome spirit, your awesome story. I just, I can’t tell you how great it is having you on.

Doug: Well, Hoby, the appreciation is on my end for what you’re doing. This is fantastic that there’s an outlet like this. And I don’t know how brilliant I am as far as any of that goes. I don’t think – There are so many people, especially around the network, NIB associated agencies that have so, so much knowledge that I rely on all the time. And they tell me things that I have no idea about. And I’m like, “I should have known this.” But so it’s just a huge supportive program and I’m hugely appreciative. And I’m humbled by what I learn from others.

So if I can help, like I said, one person or two people or a whole group of people, then I’ve done my job. So I appreciate it.

Hoby: Doug, thank you so much. Cheers, my friend.

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