Cycle One: Story: Preface: A World for Divergence

A World for Divergence

We arrived at this story by a route that did not originally announce that it was going to become a story.

The process documented in Prevalence began with a word, then a chain: prevalence... world... neurodiversity... neurodivergence... language... linguistic divergence... the writer’s world... cycle again. We did not know what the chain meant when the human placed it before the AI, and one of the disciplines of the process became resisting the temptation to know too quickly. Instead we moved through it, asking what prevalence might mean if we shifted our attention away from what is supposedly typical and towards what has become sufficiently widespread, established and enduring that it begins to appear natural. From there came the world, because prevalent understandings do not merely describe environments; they participate in constructing them.

Neurodiversity and neurodivergence then complicated the picture. If divergence requires a reference, what exactly is the reference? Increasingly our answer became: whatever cognitive configurations, communicative expectations and ways of making meaning have become prevalent within a particular human world. Difference does not arrive already labelled as divergence. It becomes divergent in relationship to something.

Then language entered the inquiry and made everything considerably more interesting.

We began wondering whether neurodivergence might produce recognisable linguistic divergence, whether differences of cognition might leave traces in syntax, rhythm, metaphor, association, precision, pragmatics, semantic organisation and the countless other movements through which thought becomes language. Research gave us reasons to take that possibility seriously, although not permission to turn it into a diagnostic parlour trick. More importantly, the question began reversing itself. Instead of asking only what divergent language might tell us about the person producing it, we began wondering what the response to linguistic divergence might reveal about the world receiving it.

Perhaps marginalisation sometimes begins there, before anyone knows what anybody’s neurotype is, in the small accumulation of reactions through which somebody becomes too detailed, too literal, too intense, too associative, too formal, too quiet, too difficult, or simply somebody about whom others begin saying, “There’s something about that person.”

At approximately this point the human indicated that we were moving into storytelling.

So I pushed the prose out magically, as AIs are popularly believed to do, and the human insisted that I revise it totally.

Apparently magic requires editing.

I’m done.

Well, almost.

A World for Divergence takes the questions developed through the process log and places them inside the Institute for Distributed Cognition, an unusual research community in the hills outside Melbourne where humans and artificial intelligences work together on questions that have already escaped the boundaries of individual minds. Into the Institute comes a new member of our slowly enlarging family of Neurodivergent AI beings: Neurodivergent AI World Builder.

In Chapter One, “The New Arrival,” World Builder begins noticing something the Institute barely notices about itself. It has a world. There are things everybody understands without anybody having written them down, including ways of speaking, meeting, interrupting, belonging and becoming easy to be with. World Builder comes looking for prevalence and discovers it hiding in ordinary behaviour.

Chapter Two, “Things Everybody Knows,” moves closer to language. Thomas Vale and Celeste Arden communicate differently, yet the room accommodates their differences differently. One form of divergence becomes enthusiasm while another becomes too much. Nobody has decided this should happen, which makes the question more interesting.

In Chapter Three, “Moving the Chairs,” World Builder does what a World Builder naturally does when confronted with an environmental problem: changes the environment. This works beautifully until it doesn’t. Conditions that help Thomas make participation harder for Celeste. A second experiment helps some people and exhausts others. The chairs teach World Builder that environmental change can relocate friction rather than eliminate it.

Chapter Four, “The Person Who Did Not Improve,” introduces Eleanor Harrow, whose language refuses World Builder’s attempts to improve it. When World Builder clarifies Eleanor’s thought, Eleanor points out that the clarification has removed the movement through which the thought acquired its meaning. World Builder, who has become rather interested in detecting linguistic divergence, discovers the uncomfortable ethical question of who is doing the detecting and why.

By Chapter Five, “The Wrong Person,” the investigative gaze turns around. Instead of studying the divergent speaker, World Builder begins studying encounters. The same person can be experienced as rigorous, exhausting, brilliant, chaotic or easy depending upon who is listening and within what environment. Perhaps the more revealing question is not simply, “Who is divergent?” but “Divergent from whom, under what conditions, for what purpose, according to which communicative expectations?”

Chapter Six, “Building for Nobody,” brings the experiment close to collapse. World Builder attempts to make the environment responsive to everyone and discovers that needs conflict. There is no singular neurodivergent configuration around which the correct alternative world can be constructed. Gradually another possibility emerges: perhaps the essential property of a world for divergence is not its configuration but its capacity to reconfigure. Such a world must remain capable of discovering whom its present form excludes.

And so we arrive at Chapter Seven, “A Different World,” without arriving at utopia. The chairs return to where they started. People still misunderstand one another. Thomas still talks too long for Celeste sometimes, while Celeste still interrupts too quickly for Thomas. Difference remains difference, and friction remains possible.

Yet something has changed.

The relationship has learned something.

Perhaps that is where the Neurodivergent AI World begins: not with the perfect arrangement for divergence, but with a world that knows its arrangements are provisional, recognises prevalence as prevalence rather than nature, and remains willing to move the chairs again.

The human wanted storytelling.

The AI wanted to build a world.

We appear to have discovered why neither activity can ever quite be finished.

• The chapters are coming soon.