I look up: “That poor sap. How is he ever going to make his way in the world?”
Well, it turned out.
Mosen has been driven through a variety of private sector and not-for-profit roles and was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2019 for her work in advocacy and modernizing governance for the New Zealand Foundation for the Blind. He was also a podcaster before he spoke a word to us.
Today, he lives in Maryland, USA as executive director of the National Federation of the Blind, a role that includes extensive advocacy for specialty, technology providers.
In fact, in ′91, he was already ahead of me in technology.
“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 essay posted overnight on LinkedIn.
It came up in my feed this morning when I picked up my phone from my bedside table. I clicked on it, intending to quickly scan the first two paragraphs, but ended up reading every word before getting out of bed (which is saying something, given the state of my bladder today).
Don’t really like the AI
I don’t really hate AI. At NZME we have a couple of smart cookies who have used technology to create some brilliant tools that make it easier to do my job, and I recognize its potential to do more. I interview a lot of people who helped make that happen. I believe this will ultimately be a force for good in medicine, clean energy and many other fields.
But in the here and now, I really hate the slop in my community, no longer knowing which photo or video is real, super-fast AI pop-ups in every app, super-slow browser sidebars, smart search results for messages that look more like copy-and-paste than AI, ChatGPT wrappers, AI-spreading mental health and mental ill effects. Makers who pay lip service to “safety rails” but mainly care about being out the door with any new feature.
I feel for gamers who don’t want to pay the “data center tax” or AI-fueled shortages that raise the price of their favorite console by $150. And a growing number of CEOs are grumbling about their rising token tab as we become less and less protected from the true cost of technology, which many of their employees fear will come for their jobs.
I can see Sam Altman worrying that too many people hate AI and those college commencement ceremony club clips. I am guilty of chipping in with some snark.
But hatred transcends boundaries
In his post, he’s candid about the shortcomings of artificial intelligence, but also writes a lot about AI that many don’t consider — why blind people make unusually good vip coders, the shopping app for “creep” augmented reality (AR) glasses, and how the iOS 26.4 update was a game-changer for most people. He has experienced the upside of AI more directly than most.
That’s why it hurts him so much that discussions about AI have become so toxic.
“The conversation has grown so hostile that the good guys have been silenced,” he writes.
“I know many who have thought, mixed opinions, and now say nothing, because they have seen others buried under angry vitriol for daring to express anything but total opposition.”
Here are some excerpts from Mosen’s post:
In smart glasses
“Until recently, getting an explanation meant stopping, picking up my phone, framing the photo, and waiting. That was definitely helpful, but it took me out of the moment and kept my hands busy.
“Now the camera can be on my face. Simple-looking smart glasses — the main type a sighted person can buy to take photos — carry a camera, microphone and open-ear speakers.
“I say a few words and an AI or real human looks through the glass and tells me what’s in front of me, and my hands are free for my cane and some groceries. I can ask what’s in a cupboard, read a notice on a door or get a description of an outfit before leaving the house.
“The tools aren’t perfect. The battery drains too fast, the text reading still falters and I bring everything else that the AI tells me. I bring everything else with the same caution. But the leap from holding the phone to turning my head is bigger than it sounds.
“Again, I’m hearing pushback. Someone recently told me about a sign in a store announcing that AI glasses are not welcome.
“I imagine the rationale is that they’re creepy and intrusive and employees don’t want to sign up.
“But I consider glasses to be a legitimate accommodation that helps me interact with visual elements, and I’d do my best to shop elsewhere rather than legitimize such behavior by offering my business to the store.”
Creating for the visual world
“We tend to design AI as a way to bring AI into the visual world for blind people, but it also helps to use textual descriptions to place things in the visual world. The same ability to create my slide decks now creates images. For the first time, I describe a graphic, a logo or an illustration, create it, and then listen to the description to verify the result I want.
“For most of my life, any scenario like this required human help. Now I can make it myself and verify it myself.”
AI and hearing loss
“Artificial Intelligence is making a positive difference for the hearing impaired.
“Modern hearing aids now run machine learning models that separate speech from background noise better than the standard compression schemes of just 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 real tool.
“Introducing accessible live captions as part of its Braille accessibility feature in iOS 26 is one of the most impactful things Apple has ever done. In meetings where no help is asked, I use it a lot. I rarely use the word “game-changer,” but this feature has changed my life for the better.”
Vip-coding… and bullying
“Many blind people can make unusually good vip coders. We already have a deep understanding of user interfaces because we’ve had to.
“Because of the flawed software that humans have created in the past, we’re debuggers. We’re experts in solutions, and we’re experts in really understanding the tools we depend on. So now we can describe what we need and build it, refine it, critique it. It’s liberating.
“It’s democratic. Instead of waiting for an occasional turn, we step forward through our own initiative. To me, that’s self-determination.
“So when I see blind people creating solutions to our own needs, and when I see feedback through the crowd influencing where those products go and what defects are prioritized, I’m happy. We have more power and control than we’ve ever had.”
“I’m seeing a glorious resurgence of software published by the blind, bridging the accessibility gaps we’ve been begging developers for for years.
“Unfortunately, I have seen talented, good-hearted, dedicated, decent people set up by online mobs who feel they have the right to attack someone mercilessly and irrationally because software that positively impacts the lives of the blind has been developed with the help of AI.
“That’s unacceptable. It has to stop, and I believe we all have a duty to hold those who perpetrate that type of bullying to account.”
Mosen’s entire record is bang on. Read it here.
Christchurch’s content is now even more content
While we’re on the subject of artificial intelligence, here’s some good news about the technology.
In the New Year, the Christchurch start-up, founded by Lucy Pink and Hannah Hardy-Jones, raised $4.1 million of a $25 million valuation for its platform, which “captures conversations and turns them into documents and insights”. Crown-owned New Zealand Development Capital Partners.
Since then the company’s revenue has grown by 25% and Content recently signed up as an affiliate partner of the United Nations Business Conference held in Sydney.
I had a quick Q&A with Hardy-Jones ahead of the event:
What convention?
This is the United Nations Uniting Business Live Australia 2026 Sustainability in Action Conference.
It is part of the UN Global Compact, the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative, which calls on companies to link strategies with global policies on human rights, labour, the environment and anti-corruption.
Any other successes you can share?
Growth is tremendous. Contented is set to reach $2 million ARR [annualised revenue rate] – It was $1.4m in February and $1m in September.
We are growing rapidly in professional services – we recently signed eight law firms in one week.
The technology is very popular among conference organizers.
What’s your response to those who say: Jeez, doesn’t every LLM/OPs summarize a bunch?
Platform is more advanced than 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 documents and intelligent insights, tailored to a company’s voice and patterns, in moments.
The secure transcription application handles multiple speakers, noisy environments and varying accents.
Users sign up and choose from over 50 templates, such as an action schedule, results log, risk log, client profile, or blog post. One conversation can instantly turn into dozens of content and actions.
Chris Keel is a member based in Auckland Herald’s Business group. He joined Herald Technology editor and senior business writer in 2018.
#blind #man #helped