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Comment by famouswaffles | Hacker News Reader

Strictly speaking, Just because the app had excess helpers doesn't necessarily mean the visually impaired users wouldn't like assistance more often, just that they wouldn't bother others about it.

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Probably plenty of times you might want to ask the question specifically to something as impersonal as a machine. ie: how's this itchy spot I've had look?

There is tremendous dignity in being self-sufficient. It can be painful and humiliating to depend on others for simple tasks 'normal people' can do.

This is completely relatable, but also, it’s sometimes sad that our brains make us feel this way even at times when it’s truly no burden to help.

I've noticed that people like to ring up their private purchases at the pharmacy using the self-checkout. I wonder if purchases of such items have increased since the self-checkout option was opened, as people shift their purchases from other pharmacies to this one.

> just that they wouldn't bother others about it.

Considering how often I’ve seen the complaint from your parent post, it’s quite clear people don’t mind. Quite the opposite, they’d embrace the opportunity. Maybe the people who need assistance don’t realise that, but again, that complaint is quite common. I’d like to help but never signed up specifically because of that surplus.

So they had a solution based on humans who are eager to help and are replacing it with an automated system which when mistaken can have disastrous results and cause personal injury. Seems odd to me. A humanised approach is often seen as a positive and this cuts it out without necessity.

All that said, I don’t have any insider information. Perhaps the people who need assistant do prefer talking to a machine.

I would personally feel pretty guilty about making use of the tool knowing i'm using someone else's time. Also privacy reasons I guess, it feels like there's a difference between a person seeing your photo and an ai seeing it.

Human assistants might also just be worse than AI assistants.

When I received my first (and only) BeMyEyes request I spent the first minute or so figuring out how to work the app and the video delay.

“Let me turn the volume up” “Oh wait it’s on my AirPods” “Could you move it more to the left?” “No your left.” “No; not that far”

I’m quite confident that I was a less than optimal assistant and an AI might’ve well done better than me.

It sounds like as part of the sign-up they should ask an experienced helper to make an "artificial" request of the new signee, to give them a chance to see the workflow and to provide an opportunity ask questions of someone who's been in the role that they've signed up for. If there's really an excess of helpers, generating one extra request per new future helper seems reasonable.

I’d guess that they have a rating system and prefer assigning request to helpers who reliably perform well… which might be why I didn’t get repeat requests after my initial fumbling.

Sure, and that's an important tool for improving quality in the face of different skill levels / levels of effort. But that's independent of investing a bit in improving the skill level across the helper base; as you experienced, it's something where experience helps, and if your first time in the real flow is with an actual request, there's no way to avoid the helper needing to deal with both helping and learning simultaneously.

And that's just one more thing that blind people don't want to have to deal with when they just want to go about their lives.

Humans are slow and unreliable. AI is fast and consistent.

Both are imperfect. You shouldn't rely on either one for something life-or-death. Nobody is using them to decide if it's safe to cross a street.

There's a blind person upthread who concurs that they avoid using it unless absolutely necessary [0]. I sympathize: Even if someone assures me that they're happy to do something for me, it's hard to believe they're not acting out of a sense of duty. This is probably especially true for someone who has a specific disability that they know breeds sympathy.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675095

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