Is Autism too inclusive?!

Seems to me Autism is basically 2 or 3 things, at root.

If you treat a person as a system:

1. Input differences. You experience the world through your senses, differences to these inputs will have an effect.

2. Processing differences. Your brain processes the inputs and decides on outputs. Run the same software on a different CPU and you get different behaviour. It run it on the same hardware with a different OS and you get different behaviour. You can hide this with an emulator, which is basically masking.
But your brain is also plastic so will.learm and accommodate what it can over time, although there are limits.

3. Outputs are dependent on 1 and 2. They are also dependent on your environment and history.

Linking 1 and 2 is your nervous system. Your brain and nerves are basically the same stuff, neurons. Differences can make the system more prone to overload, deadlock or problems. Layered on top of this is the same spread of intelligence (for want of a better word) as the normal population.

These are not defined by age, so I see no reason to constrain diagnosis to a specific age. Effectiveness of small changes is probably also not age specific. 

Humans are quite complicated systems and each person has a unique background, so the range of symptoms, problems, behaviours and issues is diverse. The consequences of input and processing differences being dependent on environment, learned behaviour, coping strategies, support and how overloaded you are at the time 

How to categorise it all seems quite difficult. Likewise, interventions, particularly later in life would be predicted to be highly variable as the cumulative cost of problems will be larger.

It would perhaps be better to ask where limited public resources for support should be most effectively directed, which is the underlying point, rather than trying to exclude some people from understanding themselves. That is different framing. But a better level of categorisation is most likely required.

It would almost certainly be better to treat the person holistically rather than symptom by symptom, but that requires more effort to know the person and requires more customised help. But this is precisely where AI could prove invaluable, as it can spot patterns more effectively than people. I think it will cause a big change in understanding if it is embraced. 

Seems to me Autism is basically 2 or 3 things, at root.

If you treat a person as a system:

1. Input differences. You experience the world through your senses, differences to these inputs will have an effect.

2. Processing differences. Your brain processes the inputs and decides on outputs. Run the same software on a different CPU and you get different behaviour. It run it on the same hardware with a different OS and you get different behaviour. You can hide this with an emulator, which is basically masking.
But your brain is also plastic so will.learm and accommodate what it can over time, although there are limits.

3. Outputs are dependent on 1 and 2. They are also dependent on your environment and history.

Linking 1 and 2 is your nervous system. Your brain and nerves are basically the same stuff, neurons. Differences can make the system more prone to overload, deadlock or problems. Layered on top of this is the same spread of intelligence (for want of a better word) as the normal population.

These are not defined by age, so I see no reason to constrain diagnosis to a specific age. Effectiveness of small changes is probably also not age specific. 

Humans are quite complicated systems and each person has a unique background, so the range of symptoms, problems, behaviours and issues is diverse. The consequences of input and processing differences being dependent on environment, learned behaviour, coping strategies, support and how overloaded you are at the time 

How to categorise it all seems quite difficult. Likewise, interventions, particularly later in life would be predicted to be highly variable as the cumulative cost of problems will be larger.

It would perhaps be better to ask where limited public resources for support should be most effectively directed, which is the underlying point, rather than trying to exclude some people from understanding themselves. That is different framing. But a better level of categorisation is most likely required.

It would almost certainly be better to treat the person holistically rather than symptom by symptom, but that requires more effort to know the person and requires more customised help. But this is precisely where AI could prove invaluable, as it can spot patterns more effectively than people. I think it will cause a big change in understanding if it is embraced.