Human cultural response to autistics/aspies

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Here is a great article on the typical human response to robots.
http://www.brookings.edu/research/repor ... -to-robots

I find you can replace robot with autistic/aspie, and much of the article still makes perfect sense. For example:

... part of the discomfort in people?s response to robots with very humanlike designs is that their behaviors are not yet fully humanlike, and we are extremely familiar with what humanlike behavior should look like. Thus, the more humanlike a robot is, the higher a bar its behaviors must meet before we find its actions appropriate.

easily translates to:

... part of the discomfort in people?s response to autistics/aspies [who look human] is that their behaviors are not yet fully humanlike, and we are extremely familiar with what humanlike behavior should look like. Thus, the more humanlike an autistics/aspie is, the higher a bar its behaviors must meet before we find its actions appropriate.

The "yet" in the first statement above illustrates the motivation for many of the therapies available to "assist" autistics, i.e. is to make them appear more humanlike.

The second statement above explains the particular challenges faced by aspies/high-functioning autistics, i.e. the more successful we are in appearing humanlike, the higher the bar is placed. However, appearing humanlike is precisely not the special interest of autistics/aspies, it rather takes precious time and energy away from our passions ? it is the road to autistic burnout.

The following extracts also lead to an interesting translation and provide food for thought. I have exchanged the highlighted words:

Cultural Variations in Response to Aspies/Autistics

Cultural response matters to people?s willingness to adopt autistic systems.
...

One explanation for the differing cultural response could be religious in origin. The roots of the Western Terminator complex may actually come from the predominance of monotheistic faiths in the West. If it is God?s role to create humans, humans that create autistics could be seen as usurping the role of God, an act presumed to evince bad consequences. ...

In Japan, by way of contrast, the early religious history is based on Shintoism. In Shinto animism, objects, animals, and people all share common ?spirits,? which naturally want to be in harmony. Thus, there is no hierarchy of the species, and left to chance, the expectation is that the outcome of new technologies will complement human society. In the ever-popular Japanese cartoon series Astroboy, we find a very similar formation story to Frankenstein, but the story?s cultural environment breeds an opposite conclusion. Astroboy is an autistic created by a fictional Ministry of Science to replace the director?s deceased son. Initially rejected by that parent figure, he joins a circus where he is rediscovered years later and becomes a superhero, saving society from human flaws.

As one journalist writes, ?Given that Japanese culture predisposes its members to look at autistics as helpmates and equals imbued with something akin to the Western conception of a soul, while Americans view autistics as dangerous and willful constructs who will eventually bring about the death of their makers, it should hardly surprise us that one nation favors their use in war while the other imagines them as benevolent companions suitable for assisting a rapidly aging and increasingly dependent population.?Our cultural underpinnings influence the media representations of autism, and may influence the applications we target for development, but it does not mean there is any inevitability for autistics to be good, bad or otherwise. Moreover, new storytelling can influence our cultural mores, one of the reasons why entertainment is important. Culture is always in flux.

I would say this is a lot like the uncanny valley effect, and it definitely affects all cultures in terms of extremely lifelike robots. FWIW, autistic people aren't really accepted in Asia either so while Astroboy is cool, a really lifelike Astroboy wouldn't be to either Japanese or Americans.

Yes, the article mentions this effect, which has been discussed in robotics for many years. What I find interesting are potential parallels between this effect and the way that autistics are perceived by typical human cultures.

This post http://singularityhub.com/2014/07/29/th ... ourselves/ for example attempts to provide a biological explanation for the Uncanny Valley effect:

This is evolution at work. Biologically, revulsion is a subset of disgust, one of our most fundamental emotions and the by-product of evolution?s early need to prevent an organism from eating foods that could harm that organism. Since survival is at stake, disgust functions less like a normal emotion and more like a phobia?a nearly unshakable hard-wired reaction.

Psychologist Paul Ekman discovered that disgust, alongside contempt, surprise, fear, joy, and sadness, is one of the six universally recognized emotions. But the deepness of this emotion (meaning its incredibly long and critically important evolutionary history) is why Ekman also discovered that in marriages, once one partner starts feeling disgust for the other, the result is almost always divorce.

Why? Because once disgust shows up the brain of the disgust-feeler starts processing the other person (i.e. the disgust trigger) as a toxin. Not only does this bring on an unshakable sense of revulsion (i.e. get me the hell away from this toxic thing response), it de-humanizes the other person, making it much harder for the disgust-feeler to feel empathy. Both spell doom for relationships.

Now, disgust comes in a three flavors. Pathogenic disgust refers to what happens when we encounter infectious microorganisms; moral disgust pertains to social transgressions like lying, cheating, stealing, raping, killing; and sexual disgust emerges from our desire to avoid procreating with ?biologically costly mates.? And it is both sexual disgust and pathogenic that creates the uncanny valley.

To protect us from biologically costly mates, the brain?s pattern recognition has a hair-trigger mechanism for recognizing signs of low-fertility and ill-health. Something that acts almost human but not quite, reads?to our brain?s pattern recognition system?as illness.
And this is exactly what goes wrong with robots. When the brain detects human-like features?that is, when we recognize a member of our own species?we tend to pay more attention. But when those features don?t exactly add up to human, we read this as a sign of disease?meaning the close but no cigar robot reads as a costly mate and a toxic substance and our reaction is deep disgust.

Emphasis above is mine. I think this goes a long way to explain why professionals cling to a disease model of autism, and why it is so difficult to establish autism as a different cognitive style that is just as valid as the co-called normal style based on intuitive and subconscious copying of the surrounding culture. The same underlying pattern was/is at work in homophobia and in xenophobia.

Mainstream human cultures are quite change resistant, because any unusual behaviour is immediately flagged as deviant and undesirable, resulting in the social pressure to conform that we're all familiar with. It took a good generation for homosexuality to become acceptable to a reasonable degree, and I expect mainstream acceptance of autistic behaviour to take another 30 to 40 years.



It is interesting though that Japanese culture seems to have a constructive and inclusive approach to the integration of new technology into culture. If the value system of Shintoism knows no hierarchy of species, it may provide a better foundation for raising awareness about autism than the Western value system that positions human primates as the pinnacle of evolution.

Funny this topic just came up. I am building a telepresence/ remote puppeteered robot that I plan to take to are annual autism conference coming up on august 12-13. The reason I am doing this is to try and socialize with other NT people through it, based on the assumption that other NT people won't expect non-verbal response through a robot.

The algorithm survives because it self selects, which translates into a drive for homogeny.
If a person's behavior suggests that their own algorithms do not function as an efficient copying machine, then that flaw is then the "pathogen".

This pathogen, or difference in brain structure or function would be an impediment to groups of humans operating together through a system intelligence. Non-schooling humans would be rejected.