AI as accessibility

AI has split opinion amongst my friends more than any topic. I've really struggled with this for the past year. If we're doing brain types, mine is AuDHD: Autism and ADHD mixed. In an introvert / extrovert world, that maps to ambivert. I'm undiagnosed, but I have started diagnosis for both autism and ADHD. The autism screener recommendation was: continue to diagnosis. The ADHD screener was: continue to diagnosis. ADHD Ireland has a questionnaire that reads like an obvious list of attributes that I assume everyone has. Apparently they don't.

One of the attributes of this brain type, so I'm told, is a strong sense of social justice. AI cuts that sensibility right to its core: a technological marvel that promises to put great power in everyone's hands. Wow! Amazing! And in the background, already wealthy people are rubbing their palms together as dollar signs light up their eyes and they scratch thousands of pesky workers off the payroll.

The problem for me with the above is ADHD. If I look back, ADHD has been fucking me over my entire life. It fucked me over when I convinced my classmates when I was 7 to be the main character in a role-play, but I never showed up to the rehearsal. It fucked me in school when I was able to coast through classes, but never "learned how to learn" and though I did well never lived up to the potential that others saw in me. It fucked me in college again when book learning was a struggle, and when I went to ask for help I didn't know what to ask for. It fucked me in my early business endeavours when colleagues would say: "don't give that idea to Paul, he'll just go off and start building it". It fucked me in my later business endeavours when I hyperfocussed on the wrong things, burned myself out, and burned a lot of money on the process. It fucked me today when a late meeting ran into another meeting on my calendar, and I completely missed it.

ADHD, over and over, has fucked me, fucked me, fucked me.

And yet I'll still not admit that there's anything "wrong" with me. I don't want to medicate. I don't want to be different. I don't want to change. I wan't the world to change.

I wrote last week about my experience with AI as augmentation, but my early attempts to justify my use of it despite the criticism I'm aware of were that it was the first time in my life that I was experiencing what it was like for a system to pull the things I see in my head and articulate them in a way that I could share with others.

I've always considered myself a good communicator. I think overall that has been a bit of an illusion. I've had conversations with colleagues and folks where I would say things in as plain English as I thought I could, and yet the response would be "but I still don't know what you want" or "I don't know what it is". The frustration levels at being able to simultaneously feel like I could see something so clearly in my mind, yet not be able to transfer that vision to another human is a recurring one I've felt year over year.

At some point, the AI tools out there allowed me to type a few ideas into a box and the machine simply joined the dots without my having to articulate every one of them. It felt like for the first time in my life I've been able to communicate effectively, without the need to slow down my thinking or very carefully unpick my admittedly messy mind.

I've spoken to others who I believe have similar brain types to me. "It's like being on drugs" is the consensus, and I think an apt analogy, because it both feels like I'm medicated, but also addicted. People describe AI prompting as being akin to a slot machine where you drop a coin and pull the lever. I'm choosing to reject the analogy when it comes to the valuelessness aspect, but as a dopamine-collecting analogy, it's right on point.

As I dabbled and experimented with this stuff over the last year, I tried to pick an analogy that worked for me. "A bicycle for the mind", "A powertool for productivity", "plastic for software", "a killer weapon like a gun". The problem is that AI is all of the analogies, all at once. The one that I settled on that brought me any kind of moral equilibrium was that AI is an accessiblity tool the like of which we've never seen, because it allows expressing ideas as artifacts.

A friend put it this way: "it's the only tool I've ever used that can keep up with my mind"

That, indeed, has been my experience, and while I wish the technology didn't exist and potentially had never been invented, so that I wouldn't have to think about it, while it does exist, it appears to be an effective way for me to pull potential out of my brain that I otherwise wasn't able to access. That, for me, is a lot.

AI has split opinion amongst my friends more than any topic. I've really struggled with this for the past year. If we're doing brain types, mine is AuDHD: Autism and ADHD mixed. In an introvert / extrovert world, that maps to ambivert. I'm undiagnosed, but I have started diagnosis for both autism and ADHD. The autism screener recommendation was: continue to diagnosis. The ADHD screener was: continue to diagnosis. ADHD Ireland has a questionnaire that reads like an obvious list of attributes that I assume everyone has. Apparently they don't.

One of the attributes of this brain type, so I'm told, is a strong sense of social justice. AI cuts that sensibility right to its core: a technological marvel that promises to put great power in everyone's hands. Wow! Amazing! And in the background, already wealthy people are rubbing their palms together as dollar signs light up their eyes and they scratch thousands of pesky workers off the payroll.

The problem for me with the above is ADHD. If I look back, ADHD has been fucking me over my entire life. It fucked me over when I convinced my classmates when I was 7 to be the main character in a role-play, but I never showed up to the rehearsal. It fucked me in school when I was able to coast through classes, but never "learned how to learn" and though I did well never lived up to the potential that others saw in me. It fucked me in college again when book learning was a struggle, and when I went to ask for help I didn't know what to ask for. It fucked me in my early business endeavours when colleagues would say: "don't give that idea to Paul, he'll just go off and start building it". It fucked me in my later business endeavours when I hyperfocussed on the wrong things, burned myself out, and burned a lot of money on the process. It fucked me today when a late meeting ran into another meeting on my calendar, and I completely missed it.

ADHD, over and over, has fucked me, fucked me, fucked me.

And yet I'll still not admit that there's anything "wrong" with me. I don't want to medicate. I don't want to be different. I don't want to change. I wan't the world to change.

I wrote last week about my experience with AI as augmentation, but my early attempts to justify my use of it despite the criticism I'm aware of were that it was the first time in my life that I was experiencing what it was like for a system to pull the things I see in my head and articulate them in a way that I could share with others.

I've always considered myself a good communicator. I think overall that has been a bit of an illusion. I've had conversations with colleagues and folks where I would say things in as plain English as I thought I could, and yet the response would be "but I still don't know what you want" or "I don't know what it is". The frustration levels at being able to simultaneously feel like I could see something so clearly in my mind, yet not be able to transfer that vision to another human is a recurring one I've felt year over year.

At some point, the AI tools out there allowed me to type a few ideas into a box and the machine simply joined the dots without my having to articulate every one of them. It felt like for the first time in my life I've been able to communicate effectively, without the need to slow down my thinking or very carefully unpick my admittedly messy mind.

I've spoken to others who I believe have similar brain types to me. "It's like being on drugs" is the consensus, and I think an apt analogy, because it both feels like I'm medicated, but also addicted. People describe AI prompting as being akin to a slot machine where you drop a coin and pull the lever. I'm choosing to reject the analogy when it comes to the valuelessness aspect, but as a dopamine-collecting analogy, it's right on point.

As I dabbled and experimented with this stuff over the last year, I tried to pick an analogy that worked for me. "A bicycle for the mind", "A powertool for productivity", "plastic for software", "a killer weapon like a gun". The problem is that AI is all of the analogies, all at once. The one that I settled on that brought me any kind of moral equilibrium was that AI is an accessiblity tool the like of which we've never seen, because it allows expressing ideas as artifacts.

A friend put it this way: "it's the only tool I've ever used that can keep up with my mind"

That, indeed, has been my experience, and while I wish the technology didn't exist and potentially had never been invented, so that I wouldn't have to think about it, while it does exist, it appears to be an effective way for me to pull potential out of my brain that I otherwise wasn't able to access. That, for me, is a lot.