AI – Autistic Intermediary

How AI is becoming the ultimate assistive tool for navigating a neurotypical world.

Walkway underneath a trainline in Berlin

AI – Autistic Intermediary

In Apple’s 27 OS update, they will better integrate Siri into the operating system on your phone, laptop, and iPad. I’ve tried the beta and found it genuinely useful. While shopping, I couldn’t remember what soya milk my wife liked – sweetened or unsweetened. I asked Siri AI on my phone, and it gave me the right answer. This is all powered by a local LLM (Large Language Model) running securely on your device with access to your message and email history. As an autistic person, tools like this are incredibly helpful. I should know that the shopping list needs to have full details, not just “Soya milk”, but we make mistakes. When standing in the store presented with the chance of making a mistake, failing and wasting money, my brain shuts down. I know I can’t contact my wife, and that just compounds the issue. While it’s possible to search my message history, I would still need to find the right reference and context. So, being able to simply ask my phone helps immensely. It’s like having a personal digital assistant who has your back.

Aside from Siri AI I also use Claude to respond to emails. The process is a bit clunky, though. I have to ask it to access the latest message from Random Person, and figure out how best to respond. We chat back and forth, and eventually I ask Claude to save a draft response in Gmail, which I then open in my email app of choice. It’s entirely possible this will be a smoother experience if I switched to using Siri AI in macOS 27 and Apple’s Mail app. But I’m not sure if Siri AI has the same memory features that Claude has. Claude knows me quite well, whereas Siri finds information on my devices quite well.

Not only do I use AI for emails, I can also use it to actually be productive. For example, I can ask Claude to search my Gmail emails for any Purchase Order numbers from this financial year and create a list of tasks in my task manager, Todoist. It’s impressive and so helpful for me as an autistic person with executive function issues. I *could* sort my emails every morning, and I *should*, but I can’t. But I can ask an AI to find what I’ve missed and organise it for me in the time it takes to type out the message. That is useful.

All of this is what is known as Agentic AI. A utility rather than Generative AI, which is what your local community group uses for flyer making and is... not to my taste. Generative AI feels like the tool companies use to market AI to the masses. A trend photocopier, so you can always be trendy. It’s not for me. Agentic AI that helps me get things done, that’s for me.

It makes me wonder about a future where my phone is a real sci-fi-like AI that I can chat to and have it deal with tasks for me. Furthermore, what about a future where my AI is how I connect to the world? An intermediary. The world connects to my AI, and I connect to it, thus reducing chances of autistic overload leading to shutdown. An AI that’s really an AI (Autistic Intermediary). What if a future where I could trust an AI to run my social media accounts because it’s been trained on my own data and can replicate my voice well enough? I might check in from time to time, but it could handle the daily posting of photos and monotony in ways that currently overwhelm me. It could run social media, respond to emails in a timely fashion, and basically be an assistant for me. If I had the money, I could hire an actual human assistant to do these things for me, and ideally I would, but I can’t.

I wondered if I would use such a tool to interact with friends? I’m currently trying to get a question answered on WhatsApp and it is causing me a stupid level of stress. Why? Autism! Yay... I have the pressure of responding to someone I don’t know, about a subject I can’t find the answer to, so I’m having to ask people for clarification. So far, no clarification. That stress means my replies will be potentially badly constructed because I’m not getting what I need, and why can’t I make the thing give me what I need? Stress! It all makes me feel like a tiny child asking a grown adult for a biscuit, then being laughed at. Why wouldn’t I send an AI to do an autistic’s job? Because it’s better for me to develop my social skills? I’m 2 months from 48, and 2 years from 50. That boat sailed, sank and no one survived. I have two ways of interacting with people. Dopamine fuelled talk at them about the special interest of the day, and hide. An AI could handle human interaction better than I could, leaving me to play with cameras and avoid social anxiety.

It’s entirely possible that everything I’m currently doing is problematic, and everything I’m considering doing is also problematic. But you try living in this world as an autistic person. I have glasses to help me see better and hearing aids to, on a good day, help me hear properly. Occasionally I use a walking stick to get around, and wear a Hidden Disability lanyard to let people know I’m autistic. What if we can develop social interaction AIs to help us? I’ve been at disability events where I’ve seen some autistic people have support workers helping them through the day. Not visitors, but the artists who are great at art but, like me, struggle with everything else that gets them in the room. Why not use an AI to offload these tasks so I can better focus on what I’m technically good at? Obviously, in this sci-fi future of mine, we’ve made environmentally friendly data centres and solved privacy concerns by taxing the hell out of billionaires.

So why not have some bot act as a translation layer between myself and everyone else? I wear glasses, have hearing aids and occasionally use a walking stick. They help with physical disabilities, so why not use AI to help with a non-physical disability like being autistic? You could argue that I simply need to try harder. If I only applied myself more to these problems then maybe I would overcome them. Just like if I only walked more I wouldn’t need a walking stick, or if I only paid more attention when people spoke I wouldn’t need hearing aids. I am disabled and there are tools available to help with that. Is AI becoming one of them?

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