Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Every now and then we remember that we can allow a person to help another person and that we have the technology to enable that.

Be My Eyes is a combined application and service that helps sight-impaired people see things clearly. The impaired person points their smartphone at a thing and is connected to a fully sighted person. The fully sighted person helps the sight-impaired person understand the thing. Our software technology doesn’t understand the thing as well as a person.

This isn’t the only app in the world that employs a person to help software help another person. A key to these apps is the communications infrastructure we have and the smartphone that has a camera and a gateway to the communications infrastructure.

I think this is the near-term future of person-helping software. Of course near-term is subjective and may mean anything from one week to one century.

I believe that person-helping software is the only kind that has any value.

Video games are nice, but pale when compared to helping a blind person take medicine that will heal instead of medicine that will kill.