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 find Noam Chomsky's thoughts on AI interesting. It's quite likely that it will end up being a tool of the powerful which will be utilised in order to retain social strata. We've already seen the internet change from what it initially was. I expect AI to develop along similar lines.
It's further dumbing us down, making us dependent. A reflection of a society which focuses on weakness, as opposed to strength.
Do you know what I am old enough to remember when we didn’t all carry electronic devices in our pockets with our calendars on them. And I tell you before I had a device to manage my calendar for me I was late to things and I missed things all the time. The electronic device didn’t rob me of my ability I never had that ability in the first place. I expect it will be the same for AI.
Ai is just a tool and can be used in any way. But some humans are malign and will use the tool in malign ways.