When I watch the rise of AI, I think of autism employment initiatives. You know: very highly-extolled, sometimes even moderately-resourced endeavors from a range of companies and organizations to Hire Autistic People, which mainly existed here stateside in The Before Times. Implicit in this was often the idea that we are great at pattern matching and honest and trustworthy workers — sort of real-life, slightly less annoying (if more desperate) Sheldon Coopers^TM. Rarely were there measures in place to keep us working once hired, let alone enable us to advance; and we were pretty much on our own in staving off autistic burn-out. But, darn it, they wanted to HIRE us. Supposedly. (That’s what the press releases said anyway.)
Now you have AI, and many of those jobs — you know, the coding ones that Sheldon-lite was going to be so good at — are disappearing, or retreating behind a thick layer of AI-enabled screening, discarding, and general opaqueness. Diversity is a dirty word ‘round these parts, and we autistics are part of that whole mess, aren’t we. I mean, we talk about NEUROdiversity and stuff. Guilty as charged!
Okay, enough ranty scene-setting. The point is, those initiatives were about Extracting Value from us. Which, I mean, yeah. Blah blah capitalism. But what I think was unacknowledged was how many actual autistics looked at those and pretty much sized them up as such. If you are the type of autistic who has been coded as (Ought To Be) Fit For Work^TM, you are pretty aware of the type of self-segmentation you have to take part in in order to be palatable to employers, as well as those who purport to be experts at shining you up and getting you ready for them.
And yes, I say segmentation on purpose, and not masking or something similar. I mean consciously breaking yourself up into Useful and Not Useful/Disordered parts. I mean trying to mine your special interests for something that will get you that paycheck. This is different from how non-autistics mine their interests. Special interests are something that keep us going. They are energy. They are life. When you mine them, you obviously disturb that life; for mining is not and never has been life-sustaining (because, again, capitalism, blah blah).
I am mindful (no pun intended… okay who am I kidding) of how certain powers attempted to mine my autistic daughter’s special interests in her early years of life. They wanted to get her to do a thing, and there was the other thing she was “fixated” on. Why not use it as bait? Only they misunderstood entirely why she was after the thing, as well as what she was getting from it. They wanted to harness her energy around the thing, yes. But they went about it in an entirely clumsy, counter-productive way, a way that I as a parent had to put a stop to sooner rather than later — I had to parent her back in our home at the end of the day, after all.
Moreover, she had rights. Rights to a childhood. I might not have much control over what happens when she is an adult, but I can at least not ruin her childhood on the way there.
Gradually I came to see that her rights and mine were intertwined. In order to parent her in a good way, I had to be there for her, not aloof in a cloud of segmentation. I had to keep the parts of me that were fueled by my own special interests alive; I could not extinguish them for the “easy” paycheck. I could not even perform, for the moneyed interests, in the ways I used to.
Now with AI, you have extraction in the extreme. Anything you post, including this here, will at some point be mined for further content. It will be segmented and rearranged, reconstituted in ways you have no control over. I know that type of activity brings to mind creativity from millennia. We have always gotten inspiration from various works that come before us, broken them up and rearranged them to make something new.
What is different here is the obvious, blatant extraction, and consolidation of power from that extraction — and then the press releases extolling it. All of us, all of our thoughts and feelings and ideas, are to be broken down and tokenized — and like autistics reading those autism employment press releases from The Before Times, we are expected to be glad about it. Only we are not. We whisper amongst ourselves, and calculate carefully about what will help us avoid burnout — to survive and even to thrive, in the longer term.
You do not know how similar you are to us autistics when you do this.
I am not an AI doomer. I think there are many useful parts to this technology, to this suite of technologies, and in complex ways, not all of them are necessarily a prescription for doom. But I am not so naive as to take the press releases at face value.
Speaking of faces, I could probably never deliver these remarks in a real world setting WITH my face. I would short circuit, stumble, and not be believed. I am “verbal,” yes, as in I make mouth words and can often understand them, but that autistic “verbal” ability has not yet been brought under neurotypical jurisdiction and control (just ask the numerous people who have struck out trying to get me to make correct mouth words about my feelings over the decades).
There is only a small chance I will be believed here. But, like we autistics would whisper amongst ourselves when one of those new autism employment initiatives would come out, I whisper here. For we are all ripe for segmentation now.
I do not make a moral judgment about those who opt in, or seem to opt in, for that segmentation. But the burnout that inevitably comes after is not something I, personally, can take on again and survive. And so I am on here, rather than on the platform they all say I must be on to be marketable, to be palatable, to succeed.
I do not know what success will look like in this brave new world. But I need to be there for my child, for myself, and for the memory of those who have not survived being segmented. And since this too will be The Before Times someday, I will leave a memory of it that will aid and nurture those who come after me. Whatever that ultimately comes to mean.
For that, too, is not ultimately in my control. But like my work to nurture my child before she becomes her own person in the world, under her own jurisdiction and sovereignty, I mean to give it at least a running start.