Last updated on November 26, 2023
Podcast Episode 0036; Season 03, Episode 08; May 9, 2020
Technology has empowered many disabled individuals, directly and indirectly. For the autistic community, online spaces offer opportunities to socialize and connect, without the challenges of physical spaces and social cues.
Unlike many of the autistics I’ve met, I’m not interested in online games or virtual communities. I use Facebook to remain connected to a small set of friends, mostly from my university experiences. Some family members also use Facebook to remain in contact. I’m not a Twitter user, I don’t care about Instagram or Tik Tok or any other social platforms.
I enjoy hardware and software. Working alone usually, I like to explore how computers work. I like to learn about new hardware, operating systems, and programming languages. I don’t even frequent tech discussion boards, which used to be valuable but now seem to attract trolls seeking attention.
This podcast episode is my reflection on why I enjoy technology.
Transcript (lightly edited)
Hello and welcome to The Autistic Me Podcast. I am Christopher Scott Wyatt speaking as The Autistic Me.
For as long as I can remember, I have been interested in technology. In particular, I am interested in computer software and hardware, but I’m also interested in all gadgets and gizmos. I don’t know why this is common among autistics or why for many years Asperger’s Syndrome and High Functioning Autism were classified as The Geek Syndrome, but there is certainly anecdotal evidence from my life and my interactions with others that there are, in fact, a large number of autistic individuals involved in technology, both hardware and software development, as well as design and innovation.
[00:00:50] I attribute some of that to the nature of technology work.
Unlike other fields, technology and the STEM fields in general (science, technology, engineering, and math), they allow for an individual or a small set of like-minded individuals to work on problems.
[00:01:26] I have found that within technology most of the individuals are at least mild introverts. We work well without a lot of extra socializing. This has puzzled me about some of the workplaces such as Google or Apple or Facebook where you’ve seen video of large gathering areas with foosball tables and open bars and amenities and services that seem to be catering to more extroversion within the workplace.
[00:02:04] But the more I think about it, in some ways that allows that small group of friends to stay together and sort of avoid going out for socializing. So, oddly enough, the extroverted workplace with all of these activities is actually insulating tech workers from the experience of new and unfamiliar places.
[00:02:29] And also, quite honestly, anything a company can do to keep you at work more hours is probably in the company’s benefit, more so than the worker’s benefit. It just so happens that autistic individuals are very likely to hyper-focus and stay at work. And so, having food and dry cleaning and other services there on the worksite certainly works to their advantage.
[00:02:56] Let’s get into why I like technology.
I certainly do like computers and everything about technology, more than interacting with people. That’s not to say that I dislike people or that I don’t enjoy interactions for limited times. That’s a common misconception about introversion and autistics.
[00:03:20] What really is the case is that interacting in crowds for a long sustained period of time is exhausting. And so the defining quality of an introvert isn’t that they don’t like people, but it’s that the social interactions are physically and emotionally draining.
You need time to recover from those social interactions.
[00:03:45] For me, working on a computer is a way to be mentally active. I can be solving problems. I can be learning. I can be exploring.
And I’m not doing it with other individuals, which requires the social skills that are lacking or impaired with autistic traits. I can just sit at a computer as I’m tearing it down or assembling it and study it for hours.
[00:04:20] I will have no problem at all spending two or three days on a hardware issue. And I know that the computer isn’t getting impatient with me or expecting any sort of interaction. This could be true of an old-style ham radio or any other electronic device.
Many of the autistics I know do build robots.
[00:04:43] My wife and I have three or four robot kits that we build with the children. Our daughters love the robots. And again, just like tearing apart a computer and reassembling it, assembling a robot doesn’t require social interaction with the robot. You’re not going to be rushed by the hardware.
[00:05:06] Certainly, if you’re working in a hardware repair center, you’re going to be rushed by clients and managers and other outside forces. But as a hobbyist, if I’m building something or if I’m working casually on it, the only thing on my mind is solving the problem at hand.
Computers today have taken a lot of the fun out of assembling components unless you’re a high-end gamer bitcoin miner or developer who wants to build a high-end workstation.
[00:05:33] Most computers today are rather simple. You can plug and play with the parts you order. Memory to match the slots. Hard drives are pretty much all a standard interface. Now, in some ways, the challenges have decreased with assembling a computer.
[00:05:57] And so have the problems.
It’s strange to say that the fun is… is gone, but in some ways, it does feel like that.
It was a lot more fun to build a computer in the 1980s or even in 1990s when every motherboard was a little different, memory was a little bit different. Hard drives came in two or three different standards and there was a lot to consider.
Now, though there are certainly optimization challenges, and things like liquid cooling versus passive cooling and how far you can overclock a system.
[00:06:29] Computers today aren’t really the same hobbyist culture that existed in the 1980s and 90s.
Now there is a game-building culture, and that’s very unique. But I’m not a gamer. I’m not really interested in building the best platform for a first-person shooter or some other video game.
[00:06:56] I do audio and video and the motherboards and components for that — you want it to be stable. You don’t want to be pushing your hardware to its limits, because that’s where you start having problems.
Gamers don’t mind pushing a computer to its limits and having some conflicts and some challenges because in gaming every increase in performance, whether it’s the frame rate for your video or the reaction of a good mechanical keyboard, those give you an edge as a gamer.
[00:07:29] Doing video and audio, if something is in conflict and the thing crashes, you’re stuck redoing, recompiling. You’re stuck re-rendering a video from one of the Adobe products like After Effects or Apple’s Final Cut Pro and Apple’s Motion.
I don’t want to be re-rendering something that takes hours and hours to render.
[00:07:56] And I don’t want to be outputting files that take two or three days to output and have to start over. So, in that sense, building a computer now is no longer the same as it was.
If I’m building a computer today, I know that the best video cards from AMD and Nvidia are going to be one or two cards from each vendor.
[00:08:20] In terms of motherboards, there are really now just one or two vendors that are really pushing the limits and still offering a lot of stability. It’s not like the old days when you would buy a Computer Shopper magazine that was the size of a phone book and you would go through this Computer Shopper magazine.
[00:08:37] I would just stare at things and try to figure out which video is going to give me that little bit extra, which hard drive is going to be a little bit faster.
In today’s computing environment, your hard drive is going to be a solid-state drive. I stick with Samsung for my solid-state drives because they’re fast and reliable.
[00:08:56] They’re not the fastest always, but they certainly have a high reliability. You’re, putting things together based on very different goals, especially if you’re using the computer for work.
As an autistic individual, I like solving those problems. They give me satisfaction when I’m done.
[00:09:15] I feel like I’ve completed something, as where with an interaction in a social setting, I don’t know if I’ve solved a problem and completed something.
I don’t know what’s happened, quite honestly, even when I’m teaching. I don’t know if I have always gotten through to the students. They might score well on a test.
[00:09:31] And then, for all I know, six months later, they have forgotten everything we talked about. That’s one reason I like the fact that some of my students have been in touch with me for years after having one of my classes.
But a computer, I put it together, I turn it on, it works. I know what I did.
There’s that satisfaction building a robot with our daughters when the robot turns and beeps and fires its missile or whatever the girls want it to do. We can see it do what we wanted it to do.
[00:10:02] There’s an instant feedback that we have accomplished something.
Software is a little different and I just love software.
There really is something beautiful about programming languages and their rules. The nature of computer programming languages is that they have a rigid structure defined by the parser.
[00:10:26] The parser is that thing that takes the input and parses it or breaks it into component pieces. When you are designing a language and you’re using a tool like ANTLR, Bison, Yak, when you’re setting these compiler tools up and you’re thinking about how your language will be parsed, there is just something elegant about what you have to think and consider.
[00:10:53] You have to think in a logical way. Is this going to be object oriented? Is it going to be a linear language? Is it going to be event-based?
Right now, certainly, most languages are object oriented, but not all of them. And there’s a lot that goes into designing these languages. The dominant computer languages right now for desktop development would be C# and Swift.
[00:11:25] For data science and automation, Python. For web work, you still need to know JavaScript. If you’re doing some server-side work, you’re going to end up eventually needing Java. And if you work with content management systems, you will probably have to deal with PHP.
Every one of these languages that I’ve had to learn a little bit about is different.
[00:11:49] And yet they follow patterns. They are predictable. Unlike human language, you don’t have metaphors and figurative language. And yet there is a poetry to programming. There are rules about how you should format code. There are good practices for documenting code and adding comments into the code.
[00:12:12] And so in some ways, a computer language, which is a construct of one or two individuals, or maybe a small team, has far more perfection, far more predictability than a spoken or written human language. There is just something elegant about knowing that a command is always going to do the same thing.
[00:12:39] When I was young, in the 1970s and 80s, learning BASIC and Pascal, Fortran and C, what appealed to me about these languages was variables.
A variable. If you tell the compiler with a rigid typing system for its variables that “month” is going to be an integer number, then month will always be the integer number. And there’s really no question what you can then do with “months.”
[00:13:06] You can add and subtract and divide, and you’re always going to get an integer back, unless you assign it to a floating point. And then you get into some really cool things that you can do with modular math and other things.
But what matters is the language is strict.
[00:13:27] If you open a file, you have opened the file. Some languages, well, it is “open file” in code. Others, you do “file open” or “file.open()”.
There’s the question of, are you going to do subject-verb or verb-object?
And all of these things are really defined clearly by a good language.
Now, there are bad languages. And in some ways, they’re fun to study, too, because bad languages get all mixed up in their syntax.
[00:13:52] Sometimes they are object-action. Other times, they are action-object. Some of them will use “dot notation” occasionally, which is object.action or object.property.
Learning all of these things, you start to admire the best languages and you see them as works of art. You see them as the poetry that they are, this intellectually advanced form of communication that enables us to do so many incredible things.
[00:14:24] One of the aspects of programming that fascinates me is the actual central processing units and the graphic processing units.
Somehow, we take lithography and etching and we carve out or we laser-etch silicon with semiconductive properties. We put in all of these commands. It’s fascinating to me see a giant poster, a lithography of a, say an 8086 or a 6502 chip.
[00:14:59] You look at this beautiful print and what you realize [is that] somehow through the magic of electrical engineering and computer hardware engineering these pulses of electricity are being guided through gates, logic gates, and they are becoming commands and language.
And so at the one end you have this compiler with an almost human language.
[00:15:24] And at the other end, you have all this electricity just flowing through substrates and semiconductors — things I will never understand, yet things that are so impressive.
We have managed to do these as humans, as sentient beings. We’ve taken, what is basically sand and dirt, right? We’ve heated it up.
[00:15:45] We’ve created these chips, these wafers, and with them, we have done things that weren’t really possible with vacuum tubes and switches. We have done amazing things.
And so, when I look at an iPhone, what I think about how all of those chips and all of these developers who programmed firmware into these chips… and made them what they are.
[00:16:11] And somehow when you program in Swift or you program in Kotlin, what happens is all those commands that you wrote in this human-readable form get transferred into, into this digital world that is nothing more than electricity flowing around chips.
I find that fascinating. And for me, even though I’ll never grasp the manufacturing of advanced processors, I’m just astounded by it.
[00:16:40] I read about it and I try to understand it. I know we never will. So, it’s a pursuit of knowledge. These are things that give me comfort.
I know that a well-designed chip will always do certain things. I know that a well-designed language, given certain commands, will always do certain things.
[00:17:03] Hardwar, when you put it together, should always do certain things — unless something goes wrong.
And I love that predictability of following the rules.
And when someone tells me that programming or computer hardware, “This is too rigid, too structured!” Look at the world around you and see all of the software created and how different it is in the end.
[00:17:26] It’s using just a really simple number of maybe 250 to 400 commands, depending on the CPU type, whether it’s a reduced instruction set or a complex instruction set. But in the end, it’s just hundreds of commands doing millions upon millions or billions of unique things thanks to the creativity of software developers.
[00:17:50] So for me, there is this wonderful extension of human capability with computers. And I find comfort in that. I find excitement in it, as you can tell.
When someone says, “How does that compare to the rest of the world?” Language! We have 26 letters in English and yet look at what we can do with it.
[00:18:15] In theory, there’s nothing, we can’t communicate with the letters and the symbols we use for punctuation. In theory, we could do whatever we want with language. I look at sheet music and I tell myself that every piece of music starts with just those basic notes.
Programming just encapsulates all that simplicity.
[00:18:38] And yet, what’s possible of happening?
So, when someone asks, “Why does an autistic individual like yourself find comfort in technology?”
It’s me in the computer. It’s me and the keyboard, creating something by following rules. And when it breaks, there are certain routines I can use to try to figure out why something went wrong.
[00:19:02] Technology is just more predictable and understandable. It’s easier to diagnose than a human. And when I say diagnose, as a human I don’t mean physical elements. To me, physical elements are fairly easy, theoretically, right? Theoretically, we can do some tests and find out if you have a cold or something, but I can’t easily get into your brain.
[00:19:35] Humans are just too complex.
A computer, when it goes wrong, I know how to go about problem solving. When software goes wrong, I know the steps to debug my code. Other autistics certainly find comfort in other routines or other processes. But I do believe we are somewhat process oriented. Step one, step two, step three. We’re very concrete in our thinking and computers are all those things.
[00:20:02] They are processes that are concrete. They’re well-defined with nice guidelines and simple rules. I don’t know that anything else I do makes as much sense to me.
I have autistic friends who do horticulture. I have others who work in veterinary science. And I understand that, again, they’re not dealing with humans.
[00:20:26] They’re not dealing with people in social interactions. They’re dealing with plants, which are something they can understand. They can spend hours and hours and hours addressing something with a plant and the plant doesn’t care. The plant doesn’t get impatient.
The vet science, to me, it strikes me as a little more complicated because you still have the human client and the animal is trained to communicate, but autistics will tell you that for some reason, it’s easier to communicate or to understand and read an animal than a human.
[00:20:57] Animals don’t lie. If they look like they’re in pain, they’re in pain.
And so, I think that my attraction to technology is in line with the other autistics I know.
If your son or daughter or partner — the autistic person in your life — likes technology, I certainly understand why. Technology is comforting. Technology is routine.
[00:21:27] And I don’t think it’s useful to tell an autistic person, “You should go find something else to do. You should find something that’s more social or you should be developing other skills.”
Thanks to technology, we can go to school online. If we have to, we can connect to each other via social networks. We can find other autistics when we might be in a small community.
[00:21:49] We can find people like ourselves and talk. So, technology, in some ways, is empowering.
Telling an autistic child or teen or adult, “You need to take a break from technology!” is saying that you need to give up one of the tools you use, a tool that helps you connect to the rest of the world.
I hope I have explained a little bit about why I love technology so much.
[00:22:13] I know there’s so much more to it and I could certainly talk about it for hours.
However, this is just a very short Autistic Me Podcast. I am Christopher Scott Wyatt, and I look forward to our next meeting.
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