Facebook thinks its AI could do amazing things for blind people

There are plenty of very clever people out there, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking among them, who think that artificial intelligence could be a threat to the future of humanity. Others, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, think it could do amazing things for a lot of people, including the blind.

The Facebook founder posted a status sharing some of the work done by the social network’s AI team on identifying and describing features in photos.

Read more: Facebook hopes to implement AI services ‘within next 10 years’

“Our AI can now look at a photo, figure out what’s in it and help explain it to you.” Zuckerberg explains. “This is especially helpful if you’re blind or can’t see the photo”.

According to the hoodied one, Facebook sees AI as “helping computers better understand the world — so they can be more helpful to people”.

I'm inspired by this video about our artificial intelligence research at Facebook.Our AI can now look at a photo, figure out what's in it and help explain it to you. This is especially helpful if you're blind or can't see the photo. We see AI as helping computers better understand the world — so they can be more helpful to people.We're still early with this technology, and you can already start to imagine how helpful it will be in the future.

Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, November 3, 2015