Some of my blog posts here might read like a giant shrug. AI might or might not get subtext — it’s complicated. It has a spiky profile a la lots of autistic humans, but it WON’T go get psychoeducational testing for some reason (which, yes, I get is not an actual thing for AI)… so boo. On the other hand, it would be REALLY great if it would get its reference lists in order so I could respond to it properly. Insert pretend dog journal reference.
The thing is, we are in a moment of hype where we don’t know a lot of what this new blob of constantly-changing technologies that are being called “AI” can and can’t do. And to a large extent, we are not meant to know that. I do not have access to proprietary industry data or companies’ marketing or comms strategies. All I know is what I see before me and the patterns I have stored in my brain from decades of living on this planet and being autistic.
My young child did a thing the other night, and my (very autistic-friendly) friends and family were roundly split on What It Meant… aside from being adorable, I mean, which they all agreed on. Here it was:
Child, after dinner: Do we have Twix?
Me: I can’t remember. Maybe.
Child: *goes to kitchen, sniffs* HEY! What’s that smell? I think I smell Twix!We then proceeded to establish through sight and touch that Twix was, in fact, present in our kitchen, though she ultimately chose a different candy for her after-dinner treat (she wanted to establish the existence of Twix, not immediately consume it).
Anyway, what my friends were split on was Whether She Actually Smelled The Twix. I was on the side of no, probably not, actually, BUT it was really cute and sometimes she likes to pretend her nose is like a dog’s, which led me to an elaborate mental scenario where you train dogs to sniff out Twix for you because people are hiding them and like, you need them immediately or something. Okay but the point is, no heightened senses here, just a kid being cute and dramatic to show that she knows that you have the thing she wants1.
Other friends, meanwhile, were like, oh hey, yay heightened autistic senses! Because, yeah, autistics do sometimes have keen senses in ways that non-autistics can find quite surprising. And… I would not put that past my child actually. I just didn’t think it was the most likely possibility, all things considered.
But I didn’t really push back on my friends who did or argue with them or try to establish a definitive answer to the question of Whether She Actually Smelled The Twix. I thought that it was a worthwhile possibility to consider — does she have a smell map of our kitchen that she isn’t telling me about, and does that smell map have a special chocolate-caramel-biscuit category? Her sensory sensitivities can align with mine and then not align in interesting ways, so, it’s certainly possible! On the other hand, her deciding to pretend that she’s a dog in terms of ocular capacities is equally possible, because, well, she’s six.
Moreover, while my friends are largely quite chill in that they have autistic friends, family, or acquaintances whom they don’t segment like nobody’s business, NOT everybody is like that. There are plenty of places in our world where you have a surprising “useful” sensory, or other, capability, and as soon as you let on about it — goodbye privacy; goodbye childhood. You’re labeled a savant, is what I’m saying, and ain’t no coming back from that. Your BEST hope is to be wrung like a washcloth until all the impressive-usefulness is squeezed out of you, and then flung aside. (Worst is to be wrung out and then left there to see if you will somehow rehydrate, and when that doesn’t happen because all the water on the planet is being sold for $100 a bottle now, you are discarded entirely.)
So the point is, you can be Schrödinger’s Cat in terms of Whether You Actually Smell The Twix. But unlike that cat, we can’t just open the box and observe you and thereby force you into one state or the other. We are prohibited from opening the box, or it’s entirely too well-sealed in the first place.
Image source
Image adapted from from Dhatfield, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
I am interested in asking why we can’t open the box, and thinking about who is keeping us from doing so and why they might be doing that, not speculating about what is Actually In The Box (because that is simply not useful at this point; it’s both and neither). Furthermore, since in this scenario uniquely, my own thoughts and ideas are actually feeding and thereby creating whatever is in the box — alive, dead, Twix-smelling, whatever — I am actually pretty interested in the patterns of those thoughts, and how they are and aren’t changing as a result of this whole situation. If I am co-creating whatever is in the box, I damn well want to be aware of my own part in that co-creation.
There was a time in my life when I would have been entirely intimidated by the thought that my child, or any other close relative of mine, had such a keen sensitivity as to smell Twix in a kitchen when I could not. I would have thought deeply about what it meant for me to be related to such a person, and whether this implicated some of my own odd sensory capabilities and sensitivities in any way. I would have been embarrassed and awed by it; I would have wanted to simultaneously cleanse my kitchen of any Twix and stock it with so much Twix you wouldn’t have room for anything I could actually smell, with my comparatively puny ocular faculties.
And, yes, I would have treated that Twix-smelling person pretty terribly, ultimately, failing at the basic job of treating them as a human. I would have sought to commodify them and thereby mollify any implication that it was I who should be displayed, should be commodified.
I realize you are probably tired of hearing the abilities, or lack thereof, of AI compared to Twix and alive-but-dead cats. I am too. But the hype and lies are only going to ramp up from here on out. And the cat in that box, which we are forbidden to open, will continue to be both alive and dead.
Don’t let them distract you by which one it “actually is.” And remember that you are and always will be a key part of what it keeping it alive, if it is alive — and that which has killed it, if it is dead.
- You might ask, “But why don’t you just ask her whether or not she actually smelled the Twix?” and I must inform you, dear reader, that that is not possible for reasons that have to do with how I do and don’t, and can and can’t, meaningfully communicate with my autistic child. Yes, she uses mouth words, but no, she does not use all mouth words in all ways that you might want or expect her to. That being said… she is learning to share, including Twix. ↩︎
Leave a Reply