Autism is not something that will be resolved by transhumanism. It's a biological condition and adding technology to the treatment will most likely, IMO, only serve to cover the source of the condition further. Much like genital mutilation and hormone treatments only cover the source of the 'transgenderism', this 'machines can fix everything' movement is currently in vogue right now and using it on children, especially those with limited communicative abilities, should be looked at with heavy scepticism or outright disdain until we have a better understanding of exactly what we are dealing with.
I apologize if I broke any rules about the title matching the article. I'm new around here and still learning.
It's a biological condition and adding technology to the treatment will most likely, IMO, only serve to cover the source of the condition further.
It's neurological, a collection of disorders lumped into a common name with varying degrees of severity.
A lot of the existing treatments help, most of it being more similar to training and conditioning than clinical treatment. My wife works with them as a job (adults, not 100% autism) and has a family member with autism. The company she works at teaches them life skills and coaches them through social interactions and takes them out into society in an attempt to make them as self sufficient as possible. They make good progress even though they'll never be neurotypical.
A lot of people treat autism with dietary restrictions as well, ketogenic diets being probably the most common that I've heard of. There are medications trying to treat it chemically, but they're more or less standard psychotic medications.
I think there could be room for technological tools, as the author of this suggested with the Google Glass experiment, to help them to understand things about interaction that they normally cannot. It's not modifying the person directly, is there really a difference between direction from a person or a machine? Human interaction is stressful enough as it is for autistic folks.
As for actually modification of the body, I think we should avoid that for a while. I'm not convinced anybody has any effective methods at this point anyway.
I apologize if I broke any rules about the title matching the article. I'm new around here and still learning.
Definitely try to keep the headline in tact. Sometimes they get stupid long or have a lot of junk in them, like YouTube appending " - YouTube" to the end of the links, and you need to trim a bit.
What's the title got to do with the article?
It's a neat article about the ethics of technological augmentation.