Artificial intelligence and mute autistic children

Abstract

Children use drawing as a primary means of communicating. Not all children have this ability and, therefore, do not benefit from the drawing and use of symbols. This seems to be a major deterrent to their communicating with other people. However, autistic children and, perhaps, other intellectually handicapped children sometimes have seemingly inherent skills that we find difficult to understand and even more difficult to develop. And yet, just as deaf children benefit from the use of hearing aids, autistic children—who seem to have an inherent ability in mathematics but often not the use of symbols to benefit from it—can use microcomputers as a means of gaining satisfaction from it and, perhaps, communicating with and, hence, integrating into the society of which they are not normally an integral part. However, software development, to date, has aimed at satisfying the needs of non-autistic people. If software is to be developed to enable autistic people to join the human tribe, it will have to be artificially intelligent. It will have to respond to them in the way that we respond to one another with one major exception. It must not be illogical. Further, it will need to be available in microcomputer-run form.