71 karma · joined April 7, 2026
Part of the confusion here is that autism isn't straightforwardly a disability. A plurality of people with autism are ASD-1, which is the kind requiring the least support needs while, purely empirically speaking, conferring lots of well-documented benefits. The sort of elephant in the room in these conversations is that there are lots of replicable studies which show that autistic people outperform non-autistic people in a variety of areas. The idea of attempting to engineer the removal of a class of people from society-- people with unique strengths which are necessary for the functioning of that society-- has consequences that are significantly less well-understood than proponents of this idea make it out to be.
I don't agree with railing against capitalism either-- it's not clear to me that there's any other system I would do better in, given my disability-- but the idea of, "if you do everything right, nothing bad will happen to you" is basically a comforting lie people tell themselves to feel safe. I believe in the value of hard work, and I am trying my best to better my situation-- switching my entire career from humanities to IT-- but I still am not fully sure how I am going to be able to support myself, and I don't think that's my fault.
It kind of does if how they work is nothing like genuine intelligence. You can (rightly) think AI is incredible and amazing and going to bring us amazing new medical technologies, without wrongly thinking its super amazing pattern recognition is the same thing as genuine intelligence. It should be worrying if people begin to believe the stochastic parrot is actually wise.