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THis is where rubber meets the road. Show me how AI can make life easier for autistic people and their caregivers , mentally challenged people and their caregiver and I will believe in the promise of AI.
It has infinite patience as a teacher in an infinitesimal number of detail oriented specific areas where others would fail. It can maintain perspective on longer term goals and repetition and such through proven autism treatment pathways like CBT/speech therapies where humans be prohibitively expensive or would tire. That's surely something? It can reinforce bringing detail out to generalities. That helps for some. I'd say pedagogy and communications therapy are therefore both clear areas of promise.
These are viable for the population as a whole, not just people with autism or identified learning difficulties.
in a better world your vision would be very promising. in our world, ill bet 'different' people are gonna get lumped in with old people, to be placated by robots instead of being allowed community engagement.
Don't blame others. Inaction is the only thing between you and a better world. Go do something about it.
The neurodivergent community thoroughly and resoundingly rejects AI and for damn good reason.
That's cool, but what about the actual neurodivergent people?
I'm neurodivergent, you do not speak for me.
I'm neurodivergent (got all the proper stamps and papers and everything) and I think it's very useful in the right places
One low hanging fruit is that it can file their taxes. Boom, that'll save a few hours and like $100 a person. After that, it's just a matter of your creativity.
We have a marvelous thing in developed countries where the IRS (equivalent) already knows how much your tax should be paying[0] and you basically have to just look at a few numbers and click "That seems right". They even have a form where you can change things that aren't correct! Marvelous, I know... we've had that for 15+ years in Denmark.
EDIT: To add, if you get it slightly wrong... you're fine, it'll be adjusted for in next year's taxes.
[0] ...because it has to, in order to investigate evasion.
Tax filing in the US being so deeply intertwined with proprietary software is extremely unfortunate. I actually emailed Richard Stallman the first time I had to file to see what he does. He basically recommended grabbing the forms as PDFs, using xournalpp to edit/sign them, then print and mail them the old-fashioned way. I did do this but I found the process clunky and upsetting. I would kill to have some official government thing that's free software and covers all the common cases, or to have it automated like in other countries. I simply should not have to do this myself, it's ridiculous. I don't care about a tax refund either, just don't make me do this at all. Maybe leave the process optional for those who want to try to game the system and get some money back.
I don't see AI as a solution here as it's all rather murky and proprietary.
Where life does not come with an instruction manual, I've found it useful to ask AI, "hey, I got kicked out of a social group (again), what happened?", and AI is able to tell me what it is I did wrong and what to do differently next time. There is a danger of AI psychosis, and autistic people I've discussed this with have had varying levels of luck with this strategy, depending on how honest they are able to be with themselves and the machine, but AI has helped facilitate difficult conversations for me. Eg Say I want to tell someone they "fucking suck and to go kill themselves". Obviously that's not very nice. My caregivers don't deserve to be told that. AI is able to help me find the words that aren't that, while helping me figure out the words I need to communicate the underlying issue. My human therapist is only available one hour a week and doesn't come cheap. Friends only have so much patience. AI is available 24/7 and is much more affordable.
I think Claude is not autistic enough
You may be insufficiently autistic to recognize Claude’s power level.
What kind of vibeslop title is that, it's triggering my 'tism.
Autism is genetic but we cannot do genetic testing and prove that you have autism. Seems like a very circular reasoning.
can't wait until large scale datasets and LLM powered studies either debunk or confirm and quantify the effects objectively.
not sure why the downvotes?
I predict it would be possible to quantify the effects objectively, as a thought experiment: assuming functional proteins, gene regulation is about binding affinities of cellullar chemical species to promoter regions, so 200k promoter regions x number of chemical species present in humans give us the number of binding affinities that describe the behavior of human cells (essentially all cell types excluding some germ-line cells, but including brain cells).
the thought experiment: apart from ethics nothing prevents humanity from going to all the remaining wild-type or near wild-type humans (when did 5% of the local population start wearing glasses? as a measure of wild-type-ness), and collecting as many individual genomes as possible, for a reference data set for the table of binding affinities. For each individual genome there is 1 table of binding affinities. Now we start averaging the value of each location in the table by averaging this table over all the collected genomes.
So theoretically we could collect the bulk of the gene regulatory information / skills encoded in the genome for wild-type humans. Next we can traverse the medical literature on autism and collect all the reported or suggested features, survey answers, diagnostic indicators for the full autism spectrum, and for each population in such a separating indicator, fetch example genomes from the purported indicated and unindicated groups, and compare their averaged binding affinity tables until you resolve or exclude any genetic correlation.
Or people downvote because I can't wait for science to ... progress?
I would expect it's not caused by genes themselves, but by control DNA. That's where a lot of the subtle structural stuff happens. But that's also hard to test for. It's like how you can't test how tall someone is going to be.
I've also read ages ago in Scientific American that the difference between our brains and chimp brains is almost entirely in control DNA, not in genes. It matters a lot, but is often overlooked. (It used to be called "junk DNA", before people realised how important it was.)
I understand that they found strong enough evidence that it's a genetic condition, but at the same time it's not one single gene, it's a combination of many that combine to create the full spectrum, hence no easy genetic test. They'll get there in time as technology and research evolve. I don't see any circular reasoning.
EDIT: they have a FAQ about it: https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/about-autism/w...
If your C code causes a segfault, is it fair to reason that there's a memory management error in the code? Does that make it practical to find where, so that you can just add a check for it?
What if it only happens on a single machine?
Memory defaults can also cause segfaults.
what if segfaults only occurred when the errant path was executed in manners not initially designed for? or alternately, if that code path never got touched, would we ever have known about the segfault? should we keep focusing on segfaults or look at the ways that programs are being operated out of scope?
There are two fallacies in your analogy.
Segfaults are precise symptoms - they occur only when there's a memory issue. Autism isn't precise, is a collection of characteristics that manifest differently in each person.
Genetic is, for the purpose of this conversation, a precise diagnosis - means you carry parent genes that will cause the issue. Memory management isn't: what caused it? Code error? OS error? Processor? Is it a bad code path or a unexpected exrtenal state?
Finally, an analogy of your analogy: you measure someone temperature and it's 40C. You diagnose a fever.
Segfaults are fever, just a symptom.
Are we still talking about testing for autism?
Some of what you've quoted highlights my own belief on some of this:
Autism is also multiple things.
That may provide some insight about how there is not a "single `autism gene'" and how they hedged a bunch of these statements with "most" or "usually".
Maybe some day when we as a species understand brains better, some people will get a more precise label than "on the autism spectrum".
This rings true to me. As someone with an autistic loved one, I obviously think about it a lot.
If it were as simple as there being some simple genetic basis that gives you a single thing called autism, I would expect it, honestly, to have naturally died out long ago, just because it makes so many things harder for people that it cannot possibly have not had a disadvantage to reproduction.
My understanding is that having certain genes makes conditions like Autism more probabilistic than deterministic.
Genetics is complicated enough that both things can be true without circular reasoning.
I've studied genotype to phenotype mechanisms for a very long time (but from the lens of molecular biology, biochemistry, and biophysics, rather than genetics). The language of genetics- especially in the popular press- is extremely loose and ambiguous, and people trying to understand the genetics of autism using the popular press (or even 8th grade biology genetics) are going to be very confused.
Basically in medicine and biology in general it's best to be flexible- avoid using logical reasoning, instead adopt probabilistic mindset, and assume that the entities you're reasoning about are extremely complex and you only have a small amount of noisy, partial information that is in a highly encoded feature space. You can often measure relationships or statistical linkages that appear significant (even after multiple test correction) but rarely discern the true causal relationship between the feature vector (genome) and the outcome (autism).
One of the biggest surprises in modern genetics is that many phenotypes are determined by the sum of effects of many gene products, including many complex interactions between those gene products. Some phenotypes are linked to 1000+ genes, and there are "only" ~25K genes in the human genome. The whole thing is just crazy and our ability to test for complex phenotypes continues to be very limited.
Indeed. Thanks for the great explanation. Honestly, the complexity would be very annoying if it wasn’t also invigorating and fascinating.
The interconnections between genes has led to proposals of “omnigenic” models, the idea that all genes expressed in a cell affect every given trait of the cell, to some extent.
When it comes to something like autism, it’s a word covering a vast number of traits and behaviors of many different cells that gives rise to that set of effects as seen from outside.
And the issue with genetic testing is, we often only look at specific regions of the genome. Even when we do whole genome tests, and compare whole genomes of autistic folks, what we find is no single origin but many overlapping patterns. No definitive set is found because we are looking at complex processes that have many nodes where mutations can mildly tweak the function. Many such functionally relevant mutations can chain together to give you the signatures of autism, and no two are the same.
All these reasons also point to why we are increasingly realizing autism isn’t a “disease” with a “cure”. It’s a way in which people can be people. It’s time society accepted that and expands itself to accommodate.
Opened this link to quote that. The level of reasoning is "trust me bro". Even if some things must be simplified for uneducated reader, the quote from above should be embarassing for author to write
Height has a strong genetic component, but there's no test for height.
That seems like a pointedly naive viewpoint. You can have clearly predictive population level statistics about prevalence in family groups without clearly understanding the (very messy and unbelievably complicated) way that genetics shapes brain development.
So many misconceptions in this writeup.
Here's one: even if it were genetic, there could be triggering environmental factors that trigger the onset of autism (I'm just giving a hypothetical example, not making a claim here).
They specifically said there are environmental factors, and not all of them are known. A few are known though: older parents for example.
Wouldn’t susceptibility to those environmental factors be dictated by your genetics?
For example, 45% reduction in symptoms from fecal transplant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158494
Incredible! Sure, there could be a genetic component to what flourishes, or ever seeded, in one's microflora, but there's definitely some external complexities involved here.
Of all the misguided, abusive studies. It beggars belief that a board somehow approved this.
What happened here is simple: the autistic kids got better at masking in order to placate the researchers who were shoving poop up their butts. In the hope of making it stop.
to be honest I doubt people were masking in response to poop shoving, poop shoving is not the worst and presumably the control group just had non-poop
what seems more plausible to me would be ~<<poop helped something, something made life easier, autistic life is less obvious and disruptive to non-autistics when life is easier>>
I feel like this is a willfully confusing article. So autism may involve disrupted genetics, but you may not have inherited those genes from your parents, they may be what are called "de novo mutations" which are mutations to the sperm or egg cells in the parent. This is evidenced by autism being more prevalent when the parents are older and those mutations are more common.
Also it clearly must be to some degree mutations if you believe the rates are going up, which even the government is no longer disputing (though that may not be conclusive proof, to me it seems evidence leans to more likely than not currently).
De novo mutations can also be caused by environmental factors, this is very well established and called "genotoxicity"[1] and certainly some people have been exposed to known genotoxic chemicals to varying degrees over time (formaldehyde) and who knows what undiscovered ones there are, newer standards of pesticide testing are starting to look for reproductive health effects but many chemicals that have been in use for a long time haven't been held to the highest standard.
Another reason you might think it would be "de novo" mutations is that this could be any sorts of random errors in the genome. If autism is an umbrella label for various genome errors (which it very well may be, since it correlates with other conditions very often), that may explain why it's so hard to pin down a few genes and why symptom expression varies so drastically.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genotoxicity
I wouldn't characterize it as "disrupted" genetics. Autism makes the world go round, if there were no autism we'd lack most of the innovations we take for granted today. There are other differences that can co-occur with autism to cause issues, but autism itself feels like a normal and beneficial genetic variation.
"They think" autism is genetic and that would be fine as a title, but they have not proven it is (only or even mostly) genetic
If you read the article it says they don’t know what genes influences autism. That means they don’t know. They established correlation but not causation. Could be the causative factor is environmental and genes simply makes a person more vulnerable to that causative factor.
I would encourage anyone interested in autism to take a look at this paper, "Decomposition of phenotypic heterogeneity in autism reveals underlying genetic programs": https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02224-z
It's, I believe, the peer-reviewed version of this preprint from a couple years ago, "Decomposition of phenotypic heterogeneity in autism reveals distinct and coherent genetic programs": https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.08.15.24312078v...
Essentially, there are four types of autism! I think they deserve to be known more individually rather than having only one "autistic spectrum". Ever since seeing the preprint I've practiced telling the different types apart, it's been very interesting.