Thank you for an honest and raw piece on autism. As the mother of a 32 year old on the spectrum who can’t keep a job and stopped trying before the pandemic, I appreciate it. I am so tired of the autism is cute crowd and specials like Love on the Spectrum who make it appear as though this is a lovable and easily manageable problem for most people. My heart goes out to you and your family.

My autistic son, another Jonathan, is 28, and I agree completely about the autism is cute image. 10 years ago, the DSM eliminated Aspergers Syndrome as a diagnosis and folded it into Autism Spectrum Disorder. This gave the public a distorted image of what autism actually looks like for the overwhelming majority of families. And it created the identity politics neurodiversity movement. Because people with Aspergers can speak for themselves and people with more profound autism cannot, this spread…

agreed. i keep having people ask me if my 8 year old son is a genius, whether i've seen any extraordinary tendencies emerge. Is he the next Elon......I'm honestly just excited that he used a fork correctly today. Little things really

I have a 22 yo who still struggles with utensils, he has poor fine

motor skills. But boy oh boy, can he ever hit a golf ball.

I have a 32 year-old son living with me. When he was tiny, I called him, "Sunny Jim." Absolutely no fear of anyone, no night terrors, always so very happy and well-behaved, loved by everybody instantly. He seemed quite precocious and dearly loved any machinery; I still have a video of him digging a giant hole with my backhoe on my farm, three years old and alone on the machine - so small that he had to stand behind the levers to operate them, rather than sitting on the seat.

Once he reached scho…

I can see a use for AI here. Let's say the autistic person has a job like flipping burgers. The AI is hooked up to the incoming orders list, and can prompt the autist what to make. For a normal person this would mean displaying the orders list as is, but depending on the various ways the autistic person can become distracted or lose focus, they may need steering along various paths to get back on track. Steering inputs might include a generated voice talking continuously in their ear, visual cu…