Inspiring children at an early age is key, and perhaps we need to put technology in a more social context.
Empathy is about two people - two people meeting, getting to know each other and tuning in to what the other person is thinking and feeling.
In the person with autism, the brain may already be seeing the part and be less distracted by the whole, and in the person without autism the brain may have to set aside its picture of the whole to analyze the detail.
People with autism flourish in domains where the information is consistent and predictable, and struggle most in domains where the information is ambiguous and unlawful.
I'm not satisfied with the term 'evil.' We've inherited this word... and we use it to express our abhorrence when people do awful things, usually acts of cruelty, but I don't think it's anything more than another word for doing something bad.
Difficulty empathising translates into a whole set of hurdles. You might be last person to get the point of a joke, which can leave you feeling like an outsider. You might end up saying something that another person finds hurtful or offensive, when that was the last thing you intended.
It is possible that by studying autism we'll learn about the nature of talent. Supposedly there's no connection between scientific talent and autism, but if we look closely, we find a very basic connection.
Autism typically means a person may not be fully aware of the consequences of their actions, or understand the consequences of their behaviour on others.
If we think about the autism spectrum as involving a very strong drive to systemize, that can have very positive consequences for the individual and for society. The downside is that when you try to systemize certain parts of the world like people and emotions, those sorts of phenomena are less lawful and harder to systemize.
Because people with autism are also strongly obsessional, meaning that they pursue their current interest to extraordinary detail and lengths and in great depth, they can develop 'tunnel vision' that prevents them from seeing the bigger picture, including the repercussions of their current actions.
When I first started in this field there were all kinds of stereotypes about autism, as if these were children from another planet, or children who had been brought up by wolves, that they weren't part of our population and were somehow separate.
We've done fMRI scans of people taking the 'Reading the Eyes' test, and what we've found is that the amygdala lights up in trying to figure out people's thoughts and feelings. In people with autism, they show highly reduced amygdala activity.
My theory is that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, and that the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.
Everyone recognises that genes are part of the story but autism isn't 100% genetic. Even if you have identical twins who share all their genes, you can find that one has autism and one doesn't. That means that there must be some non-genetic factors.
What we want is that one day every workplace will be diverse - we already encourage that with gender and ethnicity, but the next frontier is neurodiversity and it will become ordinary. People won't think twice about it.