glumshoe:

The reasons so many neurodivergent people relate to narratives about AI are worlds different from the reasons allistic people dehumanize them with comparisons to robots. 

One comes from a place of “I don’t see you as fully human, just a flawed facsimile of one, lacking vital components of full personhood and tragically incomplete”. The other comes from a place of “the rules weren’t created with me in mind, and so narratives about alternative forms of cognition and being resonate with me deeply”. It’s less a case of people ‘dehumanizing themselves’, than it is recognizing how their differences can alienate them from other people.

Robot stories, pretty much by definition, explore concepts like empathy, emotions, affect, and, more generally, “social instincts”. I can’t provide statistics for this claim, but for the most part, robot stories are about being sympathetic and accepting of ‘otherness’ in these respects. Sometimes…. this isn’t executed very well. At all. Which is why I write two-thousand word rants about Star Trek and emotion chips. But for people who struggle with these things, or in whom they manifest differently, stories about ‘alternative personhood’ are in some ways more accessible and relatable than stories about characters whose personhood is never questioned. 

So, rather than purge all associations between AI and neurodivergence because it’s.. inherently harmful and dehumanizing or something, I would rather see autistic and other neurodivergent people encouraged to explore these narratives from their own perspectives.