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Thanks for the clarification, while I accept that in most times and places, pinning your hopes and dreams on technological advancement within your lifetime is certainly fraught, we're living at a particularly unusual time after all.
My own understanding is that autism is basically too much of a good thing. Some traits that by themselves are not on the spectrum, if present in both parents, and passed onto the child, will produce outright autism which becomes a net negative.
Compare this to being heterozygous for the allele that produces sickle cell anemia if homozygous. Having only one copy is very handy if you live in an area where malaria is endemic, hence its commonality in much of Africa, but having two copies produces a disease that outweighs the benefits.
This is something I dimly recall, and haven't double checked, but it sounds plausible to me. We know that assortative mating in high IQ individuals working in fields where autism-adjacent traits are valuable tend to have more autistic offspring, such as when two engineers or computer scientists have kids.
Of course there's also autism that occurs de novo from mutations or developmental anomalies, but I don't have figured at hand for which is more frequent in absolute terms. I suspect that high functioning autism is likely the former.
Eh, I expect that to be solvable, but at the very least that particular state of affairs sounds rather unlikely to be actually true. Neuroplasticity is strong, hooking up an ordered stream of information into the brain almost inevitably produces the ability to interpret it, hence current trials of systems such as one where they use an electrical implant over the tongue that encodes visual images, which the blind come to recognize as a form of sight.
I wouldn't take that tradeoff if there was no available treatment, but at the end of the day, I suspect that we'll all end up on the pareto frontier where hardly anybody will be objectively better.
I am certainly less fussed about our civilization's stupidity in not exploring avenues like genetic enhancement because I expect post-singularity tech to make it moot.
I still think we should be investing a great deal more into it than we already do (close to zero), as a hedge if for some unforeseen reason the Singularity fails to materialize on schedule. After all, if we refrain from creating ASI that isn't provably aligned, we could still get a great deal of utility from having smarter humans running around.
Same reason we should be working on fusion, commercial space travel and so on, they're amazing right now, even if it turns out that a future AGI can solve them in about 2 minutes of wall clock time.
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