Published on 12, July, 2020
One of the things that you hear autistic people complain about frequently is what might be loosely termed mental / organisational load. The stress of juggling appointments, dealing with pushy bureaucrats, keeping track of jobs that need doing, making telephone calls, job hunting itself. The kinds of things a good PA could handle for you.
then there is the social load. Knowing what to say in social situations, reading body language. Having a friend to go with you so you don’t seem so out of place in introductions.
it occurred to me that to some extent AI could help. Google has already been working on an AI personal assistant built into phones. An AI that can track your calendar and to do list. Make entries in them for you based on what you tell it. Take and make phone calls for you and use the info it knows about you to do things like make doctors appointments. I’m even aware of someone who made a dumb computer program to scroll the jobcenter website and make job applications based on a filter, more for the sake of satisfying the benefit police than actually getting a job but still. And there are AIs that can tailor CVS. Modern AI like chat GPT could read complicated documents and summarise them for you, could compose letters or emails to you for your doctor, councillor etc.
The level of sophistication is now such that it isn’t immediately obvious chatbots are chat bots. And with AI generated images and voices they could seem quite lifelike and interactive on a zoom call. Which of course means you could have an AI that maybe sits in on a zoom call and interjects asking the questions you ought to but can’t think of when stressed out.
or your AI could accompany you to social online events. Help you break the ice on discord or in vrchat. More to the point work on AI that can read body language and voice patterns and put it together with subtext have been worked on. Imagine an AI that could read and display non verbal cues as text on smart glasses for you. That could suggest conversation openers, jokes, even pickup lines, based on the non verbal cues of those around you.
if this AI assisted technology existed would you want it?
It's amazing at emails and written communication.
ChatGPT is trained on writing. Writing is, by definition, NT writing (98%). ChatGPT is a NT writing simulator. I try to wrote my own stuff, put it through chatGPT, and in NTifies everything. Slowly I am learning. Written communication difficulties just vanished.
In the future, expect all NT smalltalk bs to be ai'd away, once its piped directly into our skulls lol.
I don’t think I’d want it ‘in my skull’ but I’d be happy to have it in the palm of my hand or on a funky cyberpunk visor.
I was playing around with this yesterday, mainly to describe things for my business as I’m not very good at that. The main problem I found was no matter how I asked the question and how many times, the lengthy answer was almost exactly the same as the previous answers. So it doesn’t really work for me, as if others in my field do the same we’ll all have websites that say the same thing which won’t work well. Though that aside I could never have written anything as well as that. I was impressed though it did include one part that was false so I did add feedback.