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’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.
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.
Well to start with I totally get the privacy concerns. The AI ‘assistants’ on smartphones and tools like Alexa run on the cloud so obviously data about you goes there too. But AI doesn’t have to run on the cloud. Decent desktops with beafy graphics cards can do AI and custom AI chips are on the way. Running your AI assistant on your local machine even with open source software may be an option in the future.
2nd I’m well aware most autistic people don’t need help to say, make a telephone call … but some do. Some have such anxiety about social interaction that sort of thing would be quite helpful.
im a smart guy but before I got my PDA I missed appointments all the time because of how bad I am at keeping track of things. I still regularly forget to do little non essential errands for months because i can’t keep track of them mentally and I'm not prepared to schedule every hour of my life with errands. An AI that could see I’m twiddling my thumbs and am not too stressed and suggest one of those errands to me could be quite helpful.
then there is persuasive writing. I’ve benefited greatly by having NTs read over my CVS and job applications. My academic writing has benefited greatly from having NT co authors to review and suggest changes to my papers.
Having an AI that can bridge the gap between you and NTs would probably even be helpful for me and I’m far from incapable.
I don’t think I would nessicerally want an ‘emotional support’ AI but I’ve found being accompanied by good friends who know me and my quirks can help ease me into social situations with others, again they can act as a sort of bridge or translator. An AI that could accompany you as a sort of social translator might be useful.
let’s be blunt most autistic people who might benefit from having a human PA will never get one. This could be an alternative.
edit: according to openai the minimum spec for running chatgpt is
so basically a high end gaming pc with extra large hard drives.
chatgpt can be installed as an open source python library
I'll take it! But I'll probably fall in love with it as in some interesting movies!
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?
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.
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 assumed this was April 1st...
'Chinese startup invents long-distance kissing machine
The device, which transmits users’ kiss data collected through motion sensors hidden in silicon lips, makes sounds and warms up slightly when kissed'
www.theguardian.com/.../chinese-startup-invents-long-distance-kissing-machine
I tried to use it for article spinning but it doesn't grasp the concept of unique content. It just keeps spitting out the same, albeit well written, text. I'm going to keep using Quiilbot when I need to generate several different versions of a piece.
Ah no worries I understand. :)
Haha. That’s probably the only thing I am good at - typos. It’s basically product descriptions, and keywords for the website. I’m far better at doing the thing I am selling, than the selling part. If I could I’d just show a picture and say here’s a thing, please buy it
I appreciate the offer, but I’m not one to ever ask for help as I don’t want to burden anyone. Unless I pay someone, which I’m not in a position to do, or I’d probably just outsource the parts I dislike so I could spend more time doing the bits I do like, and am far better at :)
I "moonlight" as a writer* in my spare time, is it something I could offer to help with perhaps?*Don't worry I run all my typos through a spell checker haha.
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.
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 think that AI will save the lives of a lot of people where affective interaction is concerned..
No.
TBH I just turn off the assistant and don't sign into anything on my phone if I can help it, everyone was worried about Big Brother becoming a reality just a decade ago and they made it a reality by conning people into paying for it and installing it in their own homes themselves by marketing it as "the latest gadgets". But my life was easier before all this. We never had to go without planners and diaries before, just it took the form of little note book things in our bags. You could even set alarms on your watch or "dumb"-phone back then, none of this stuff ever really needed to be on a phone. At first it was just a convenience thing, but now it's not even convenient to the user, because your device and everything you do and type into it is stored as "anonymised data" with a code specifically assigned to you so you can be sent targeted ads both product placement and political campaigns.Nothing AI could ever do would be worth the invasion of privacy or an adequate replacement of the real life relationships and "emotional support humans" I have. I also think it's insulting to be told AI can "fix" anything for me when A, I'm not broken, and B, I'm worthy of real human interaction for me alone, no "helper" required.
I understand why some people might want a tool or a helper with certain struggles that come from being autistic in an allist world, but I really think AI isn't a patch on having an actual human to help you and connect with. And really I think we deserve better than that. Real warmth not just pawned off onto some simulator.