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?
I don't like the idea of technology that thinks for itself and learns from, well, us. Human beings aren't a leading example
I also don't like how technology dependent we all are now. It's cool in some ways, like being able to chat to you awesome people but I feel it does take over in a lot of ways. My 8 year old sister has a phone and she's glued to it all day. I feel bad for her, at that age I was enjoying being a kid, having fun, she's missing all that.
I’m told 50% of people alive today owe their lives to one man. The man who invented a way to chemically synthesise fertiliser. Because about 50% of the nitrogen in living humans comes from that chemical process and by that logic if we lost the technology to chemically synthesise fertiliser tomorrow the resulting famine would probably kill 50% of the humans on earth. My point being human beings as a species lost the option of not being reliant on technology long ago. Probably around the 1st / 2nd world wars.