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?
The potential advantages for autistic people Peter mentioned are great. The sheer scope of these, though, leads me to wonder if we'd become almost superfluous to our own lives if AI was effectively doing our living for us.
Also, and nearly as important: it's a massive existential question for autists if all the helpful advantages resulted in us becoming pseudo-neurotypical. Personally, I'm not in any rush to fit in with the NT world despite my struggles - I think its values and priorities are evidently and frequently wrongheaded. In truth, I'd feel like it was a weak surrender to those who are often far too ready to dismiss and denigrate us. I'm neither a rebel or a maverick...but I don't need to be to have concerns at being forced into a mould of convention, let alone willingly hammer my supposed square peg into society's round hole. No, that's not a euphemism.
It's ironically apt that I see an analogy between our status in society and that of Artificial Intelligences - maybe that's one reason of several why I can't rid myself of the habit of thinking of 'bots' as actual fellow humans; and not merely because they are artfully designed to resemble human beings in various ways.
Point taken re pseudo neurotypicality. I agree with you and have a great personal distaste towards doing so.
I guess my perspective on this.. Rather than seeing the ability to neurotypicalify our communication as making our uniqueness less.. I see it as actually making the NT communication have zero value. Those NT rules will have zero impact within society, because they are completely abstracted away and handled by automation.
Right now, the ability to communicate in a way that "hits the spot", for the majority has immense value. It makes huge material difference for both NTs and NDs. Similarly to how in a world where nobody can perform arithmetic, being able to add has huge value. Small talk (or text) is just a quaint tradition to me, but it has value, that I can't argue with.
The equivalent of a calculator just appeared, for NT communication. Literally ai predicts the next word. That reduces the value of that capacity to 0. We can't use it for real world communication yet, but we can for text.
So it's dependant on perspective. Sure, we might end up communicating in an NT way, to NTs, but that communication has 0 value, because everyone can do it perfectly.
For written communication at least, I, an individual who is the equivalent of someone struggles to add, just got handed a calculator.
I see this eventuality. Upon meeting a human with ai whisperer, we lazily outsource the smalltalk to the ai's. Its trivial now. As soon as we do that, the machines just drop it, because its fucking pointless.
Now, it's interesting / disturbing as hell, for all kinds of reasons (since a huge volume of NT communication is now valueless, what will they talk about?), and does all communication become valueless now, or just smalltalk?