A blind man helped me see AI more clearly – Tech Insider

Mosen powered through various private sector and non-profit roles and was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2019 for his work in advocacy and modernising governance for the New Zealand Blind Foundation. He was also a podcaster before we even had a word for it.

Today, he’s living in Maryland in the US as executive director, accessibility excellence for the National Federation of the Blind, a role that involves extensive advocacy to technology providers.

In fact, back in ′91, he was already ahead of me on tech.

“In the late 1980s, I was already on the internet, using a shell account at my university. Those were the days. Pine, Telnet, Gopher, and Usenet, no World Wide Web,” he wrote in an epic, 10,000-word article he published on LinkedIn overnight.

It came up on my feed when I grabbed my phone off a bedside table this morning. I clicked on it, intending a quick scan of the first couple of paragraphs, but ended up reading every word before I hopped out of bed (which says something, given the state of my bladder these days).

I don’t really hate AI. We’ve got a couple of smart cookies at NZME, who’ve used the technology to make some clever tools that make it easier to do my job, and I recognise its potential to do a lot more. I interview a lot of people who are helping to make that happen. I believe it will ultimately be a force for good in medicine, clean energy and so many other fields.

But, in the here and now, I strongly dislike the slop clogging my socials, no longer being able to know if any given photo or video is real, hyperactive AI pop-ups in every app, super-slow sidebars, the board room box tickers, the ChatGPT wrappers, Wikipedia cut-and-paste speak, hallucinations, the viral spread of misinformation and the effect on mental health and democracy from AI makers who pay lip service to “guard rails” but mainly care about being first out the door with any new feature.

I feel for gamers who don’t like paying the “data centre tax” or the AI-fuelled component shortages that have inflated the price of their favourite console by $150. And the growing number of CEOs who are grumbling about their rising token tab, as we become less and less shielded from the true cost of the technology, even as many of their staff fear it’s coming for their jobs.

I can see Sam Altman is worried that many people despise AI. I’m guilty of chipping in with some snark.

In his post, Mosen is frank about the drawbacks of artificial intelligence but also essays a lot of points about AI that many won’t have considered - including why blind people make unusually great vibe coders, the shopping utility of “creep” augmented reality (AR) glasses and how an iOS 26.4 footnote for most was a game-changer for him. He’s directly experienced the upside of AI more than most.

That’s why it hurts him so much that much of the debate around AI has turned so toxic.

“The conversation has grown so hostile that good people have gone quiet,” he writes.

“I know many who hold thoughtful, mixed views and who now say nothing, because they have watched others buried under a pile of furious vitriol for daring to express anything but total opposition.”

Here are a few nuggets from Mosen’s post:

“Until recently, getting a description meant stopping, taking out my phone, framing a photograph and waiting. That’s certainly useful, but it pulled me out of the moment and occupied my hands.

“Now the camera can be on my face. Ordinary-looking smart glasses – the mainstream kind a sighted person might buy to take photos – happen to carry a camera, a microphone and open-ear speakers.

“I say a few words and have either an AI or a real human look through the glasses and tell me what’s in front of me, while my hands stay free for my cane and perhaps some groceries. I can ask what’s on a shelf, read a notice taped to a door or get a description of an outfit before I leave the house.

“The tools are far from perfect. The battery runs down too fast, the text reading still stumbles and I treat what the AI tells me with the same caution I bring to everything else. But the leap from holding a phone to simply turning my head is larger than it sounds.

“Again, I hear of pushback. Someone recently told me of a sign on a store that proclaimed AI glasses not to be welcome.

“I imagine that the rationale is that they are creepy and intrusive and staff don’t want to be recorded.

“But I consider the glasses to be a legitimate accommodation that assists me to interact with visual elements and I will do everything I can to shop elsewhere, rather than legitimise this sort of behaviour by giving the store my business.”

“We tend to frame AI for blind people as a way to take the visual world in, but it also lets us use text descriptions to put things into the visual world. The same ability that builds my slide decks now makes images. For the first time, I can describe a graphic, a logo or an illustration, have it made and then ask for a description to check the result against what I intended.

“For most of my life, anything visual like this meant seeking human assistance. Now I can produce a great deal of it myself and verify it myself.”

“Artificial intelligence is also making a positive difference for those of us who are hard of hearing.

“Modern hearing aids now run machine learning models that separate speech from background noise far better than the fixed compression schemes of even a few years ago.

“They learn to tell the difference between the voice you want to focus on and the voices behind it.

“On phones and computers, live transcription has crossed the line from novelty to genuine tool.

“One of the most impactful things Apple has ever done was to introduce accessible live captions as part of its Braille Access feature in iOS 26. At meetings with no assistive listening, I use this a lot. I use the term “game-changer” sparingly, but this feature has changed my life for the better."

“Many blind people may make unusually good vibe coders. We already understand user interfaces deeply, because we’ve had to.

“We are practiced troubleshooters because of deficient software created in the past by humans. We are experts at workarounds, and at truly understanding the tools we depend on. So now we can describe what we need and build it, refine it, critique it. That’s liberating.

“It’s democratising. We’re moving ourselves to the front of the line through our own effort, rather than waiting for a turn that seldom comes. To me, that’s self-determination.

“So when I see blind people building solutions for our own needs, when I see crowd-sourced feedback influencing where those products are going and which defects are prioritised, I feel joy. We have more power and more control than we’ve ever had.

“I’m seeing a glorious renaissance of software that blind people are releasing, plugging accessibility gaps we have endured and pleaded with developers about for years.

“Unfortunately, I’ve also seen capable, good-hearted, dedicated, decent people set upon by an online mob who feel they have the right to mercilessly and irrationally attack someone, just because the software that is having a positive impact on the lives of blind people was developed even in part with the help of AI.

“That is unacceptable. It must stop and I believe we all have a duty to call those doing that kind of bullying to account.”

Mosen’s full post is a banger. Read it here.

While we’re on the subject of artificial intelligence, here’s a good-news story about the tech.

In the New Year, Christchurch start-up Contented, founded by Lucy Pink and Hannah Hardy-Jones, raised $4.1 million at a $25m valuation for its platform, which “captures conversations and transforms them into documents and insights” through its AI recording platform, in a round led by Altered Capital and supported by Icehouse Ventures, Sir Stephen Tindall and the Crown-owned New Zealand Growth Capital Partners.

The firm’s revenue is up 25% since then and Contented recently signed as a pro bono partner of the United Nations UNiting Business Conference in Sydney.

I had quick Q&A with Hardy-Jones ahead of the event:

What’s the conference?

It’s the United Nations UNiting Business Live Australia 2026 Sustainability in Action conference.

It’s part of the UN Global Compact, the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative, which calls on companies to align strategies with universal principles on human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption.

Any other wins that can be shared?

Growth is phenomenal. Contented is about to hit $2 million ARR [annualised revenue rate] – which is up from $1.4m in February and $1m in September.

We’re rapidly growing in professional services – and signed eight law firms in a single week recently.

The technology is proving extremely popular with conference organisers.

What’s your response to those who say: Jeez, doesn’t every LLM/app summarise a meeting?

The platform is more advanced than an LLM [large language model] summary. It transforms recorded conversations from anywhere – online, around the boardroom, on a long beach walk – and turns them into polished documentation and intelligent insights, tailored to a company’s voice and formats, in moments.

The secure transcription app handles multiple speakers, noisy space and diverse accents.

Users record, then choose from 50-plus templates such as action table, decision log, risk register, client profile or blog post. A single conversation can instantly become dozens of pieces of content and actions.

Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.