Cheaper than couples counseling!
You think the war of the sex's is bad now? Just wait until a man or woman can literally buy a human-like android which never says no.
I anticipate things like the marriage rate, partnership rates, dating rates and similar to further crater compared to where they are now. Human based marriages will be the minority by the end of the century, likely far before it.
Almost no policy makers consider this, but it's clearly staring us in the face. Go see civit.ai to see de-facto what people learned how to use adapter/lora models for. The overwhelming majority of text-to-image content and plurality of text-to-video created today by AI is hardcore NSFW.
I don't think that's what people want. They want a robot/AI that loves them or agrees to the desired relationship status (girlfriend or wife), because dating and finding a partner who reciprocates your feelings is hard.
That's not the same as indulging in the most depraved fetishes. For whatever reason, there is a lot of misandry in the context of male sexuality, where it is selectively reinterpreted to be as evil as possible.
Self proclaimed anti sexbot feminists fear that men will use their companions to practice rape, so they suggested that sexbots should refuse to give consent, which paradoxically gives rise to the possibility of rape, because rape is not defined by the severity of the outcome/consequences, but by a simple yes or no "question". This is especially ridiculous in the case of affirmative consent, where unprovable positive consent must be given or it is rape nonetheless.
So back to my original point. A lot of men just want to live out a relationship with someone who loves them back, something that is in short supply these days. This is in no contradiction to regulations making AI girlfriends or robots or whatever a positive influence in a man's life. Let them be happy and they'll be productive members of society.
And, fwiw, their encephalization quotient is just behind one species--us.
Since they're aquatic mammals (given the requisite mass for thermoregulation), that severely under-represents their effective brain/body-mass ratio too.
But that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with my brain, just different.
I can imagine a world where none of these problems exist.
There are many things in our build up, where evolution have been outcome from viruses. However I do not like your comparision to cancer - cancerous cells are generally shredding cells from the unity of your organism - they might be making new organism, but that organism is not part of your evolution anymore. Changes that are happening in autistic brains are not destroying brains, but is part of the processes that are changing and optimizing them for the environment they have to exist in and the reasons for those changes are evolutionary - those changes started long time ago. Do you like that or not or can it be worded better - it does not really matter here.
>>>This is just a hypothetical counter-argument. More connectivity could be better, "more intelligent", and autism seems to be "cool" among nerds for this reason. But maybe it's just a fallacy, just a way to pretend to be something better.
You might be new. The mainstream argument and a direction for autistic people where it was going for a very long time has been, that autistic people were mentally disabled(not only intellectual but also emotional), which clearly is not the case. I mean, yes - that attitude might be helpful for purposes to suck out government support, but that leaves autistic people treated like deficient people, that are not contributing to society and telling a talented and intelligent person, that he is mentally disturbed would yield different results than telling that the person is very intelligent. And frankly, the issue is not hypothetical, like you have classified it but autistic people that they are smarter(at some things) stands out in the crowd. Genius and NT at this point in time is oxymoron.
>>>Yesterday I listened to a podcast episode about bird brains [0]. That some birds have a way more efficient brain than ours, even if they are not as intelligent as we are. They are smarter than other primates, but their brain just weighs around 10g, while the one of chimps, which are about as intelligent as some birds, weighs 400g and consumes a lot more energy. They have an underdeveloped cortex, so apparently it isn't as important as one might think. That it could be that the cortex is more dedicated to sensing, than to thinking. Birds, for example, don't have such complex sensory inputs like our hands or our entire skin surface, that "memory mapping" all those inputs requires such a big cortex.
You seem to have somewhat lack of knowledge and mixing things together based on what you know. Bird brains also have "cortex" - they have evolved some parts of brains, that are important to their evolution while we have massivelly developed cerebral cortex even compared to other primates, which is not what you are comparing here. Primates are much more inteligent than birds and if you realy want to go the route of comparing brain size, which you have got wrong, then brain weight to body mass comparision in birds is much lower than that to primates. As for energy that is used to operate brain, I would really need to know what is the evidence of that claim that birds are smarter than primates. It is assumed, that higher energy consumption of brains is because of amount of calculations that are happening in brains and birds brains are no more efficient than human brains - you can't use ostriches as a replacement of a very simple tasks for programming, that even dumb student can do.
The issue that you have declared that cortex is not needed is that it does not change the fact, that the cortex as part of human brains is not going to go away - cerebral cortex have developed over long time and it seems to be going to be foundation for future developments of human brains and also autistic brains. We could even get larger cerebral cortex, but expecting that some other brain regions would develop more than they are(as they also are constantly changing), compared to cerebral cortex is going against the topic, as while there are some changes in other parts of brains, the ones that are in celebral parts are more important to brains of austistic people.
We have wasted so much time in getting over your nonsense, but the information flow of human eyes is massive - the "thinking", that brains are doing is basically in discarding most of information for later processing. Autistic people have overflow of that information because their brains are not behaving "normaly"(like other human brains) and are not discarding as much information as other human brains does but tries to process it all. That is very much evolutionary change and very clearly processing more information has advantages compared to those that does not have them. Generally the things that some people are freaking about overstimulation will go away, as it is part of how changes are happening, but changes that will wire brains differently are there to stay - for all humans eventually.
> Brain hyperconnectivity may limit flexible resource allocation, resulting in the rigidity and need for sameness that is often observed in individuals with ASD.
Hence "more (all the time) isn't always better". If I just run all programs on my computer at once, I don't get more done. Don't forget it's a spectrum, including nonverbal.
I think we don't so much discard information, but filter data (the raw sensory input etc.), and otherwise process it, in order to derive information from it. Without any filter or structure it's just raw data, or even noise. There'd be nothing to "store" either, you can't store a full resolution reality feed at "full frame rate". I know nothing and still claim that :P
That said, also I'll claim most of the suffering of autistic people, way too much at any rate, doesn't come from anything "wrong" with them, but the friction with societies that mostly ranged and ranges from ignorant to outright cruel. So please don't take my insistence that the article does indeed describe problems, not superpowers, as denying the amazing things many autistic people do, or saying even those who don't achieve anything special or struggle are lesser for it.
It is the nature of most real life signals that they are sparse when represented in certain domains, and what the neocortex does is that it finds these sparse domains, which has at least three consequences:.
1. Simplicity. As mammal thinking doesn't deal with the world directly, but only through this latent space of sparse data, it only needs to deal with the meaningful values. This results in great simplicity, and allows previously overwhelming problems becoming manageable, then simple, and later trivial, as the neocirtex succesfully finds their sparse representation.
2. The representation in which the signal is sparse is its theory. By engaging only with the meaningful values, a mammal's thinking and creativity gets restricted to what can be relresented with those meaningful values, and so gets restricred to what is real, or realistic. Unlike the schizophrenic, which comes up with completely random nonsense that he needs to test with the scientific method, healthy people can't even conceive the theory that he's testing, as it cannot be represented within the values that they use.
Healthy people thus have very little need for science, as their brains do all the science they need in their daily lives.
The third one is reconstruction. This is what in its most extreme for allowed for various seers, oracles, visions and premonitions, and other such things, and what is already used in practice in MRA machines, once its nature is known, its sparse representation can be used to reconstruct a shockingly clear and accurate picture from seemingly hopelessly inadequate data.
This is just a hypothetical counter-argument. More connectivity could be better, "more intelligent", and autism seems to be "cool" among nerds for this reason. But maybe it's just a fallacy, just a way to pretend to be something better.
Again, all hypothetical.
Yesterday I listened to a podcast episode about bird brains [0]. That some birds have a way more efficient brain than ours, even if they are not as intelligent as we are. They are smarter than other primates, but their brain just weighs around 10g, while the one of chimps, which are about as intelligent as some birds, weighs 400g and consumes a lot more energy. They have an underdeveloped cortex, so apparently it isn't as important as one might think. That it could be that the cortex is more dedicated to sensing, than to thinking. Birds, for example, don't have such complex sensory inputs like our hands or our entire skin surface, that "memory mapping" all those inputs requires such a big cortex.
[0] https://www-spektrum-de.translate.goog/podcast/spektrum-podc...