Volume 9, Issue 2

Fear of the Machine

Why neurotypicals are frightened of artificial intelligence, and which jobs they are frightened for

Axel Andersen AI Assisted3 October 20269 pages623 KB

Series:📚Reverse Pathology 📚Disability Epistemology

ai employment neurotypicality reverse-pathology satire workplace automation

Abstract

This paper examines why Australians are among the most frightened people on Earth about artificial intelligence. Australia ranked lowest of 47 countries in believing the benefits of AI outweigh the risks, and half of Australians use it regularly anyway. The Journal finds that AI performs well at the tasks most rewarded in neurotypical professional life: sounding confident, summarising the meeting and writing the email about the meeting. It does not check whether any of it is true. Checking, literal reading, pattern noticing and saying the thing are roles neurodivergent people have performed without pay or job titles. The Journal proposes the Task Reallocation Hypothesis: AI takes neurotypical jobs and creates neurodivergent roles.

Sources

University of Melbourne and KPMG (2025). Trust, attitudes and use of artificial intelligence: A global study 2025.
World Economic Forum (2025). Future of Jobs Report 2025.
Australian Bureau of Statistics. Autism in Australia, 2022.

Full Article

9 pages

(PDF, 623 KB)

Inclusion has long been positioned as an adjunct to scholarship: a post-hoc consideration applied after intellectual work is complete. This framing is untenable. Recent scholarship on Paired Inclusive Research Dissemination (PIRD) makes explicit what disabled scholars have experienced for decades: the inclusive artefact is not a translation of scholarship—it IS scholarship. This editorial argues that disability research has historically mined disabled people for data while stripping their contributions of authorship and attribution.

The Incident Economy: Why Nothing Happens Until the Night Before Court

Bureaucratic systems love numbers the way magpies love shiny things. This article presents the Court-Eve Activation Effect (CEAE): a reliable surge in administrative competence precisely one sleep before a final hearing. We also formalise the Funding-Evidence Treadmill (FET): when resolution requires government funding, action is deferred pending 'more evidence'—which means more incidents and escalated harm—until the night before court, when the evidence abruptly becomes 'compelling.'

Productivity, Pandemics and the 'Care Economy': How Disabled People Became the Scapegoats for a Global Slowdown

Commentators are increasingly blaming Australia's productivity slump on the NDIS, autistic children's therapies, and the 'care economy'. This paper commits the radical act of reading actual productivity data. We show Australia's productivity slowdown predates the NDIS by a decade and mirrors a global slowdown. COVID-19 produced a one-off productivity shock. We conclude that blaming autistic kids' OT sessions for a decades-long global productivity slowdown is methodologically unsound and ethically grotesque.

Vol. 2, No. 1

The Etiology of Neurotypicality: A Multidisciplinary, Low-Expectations Inquiry Into the Leading Cause of Being Born Neurotypical

Axel Andersen20 Apr 20244 pages

Neurotypicality is a highly prevalent but poorly understood condition characterised by linear thinking, form-filling behaviours, inconsistent empathy distribution, and high susceptibility to bureaucratic logic. This study presents the first formal investigation into the leading cause of being born neurotypical. Findings reveal a strong hereditary component, typically involving the unplanned reproductive activities of two neurotypical adults engaging in behaviour without fully understanding the potential societal impact.

Read article →PDF • 104 KB

Vol. 9, No. 1

Pollute the World, Deny the Damage, Cut the Supports

Axel Andersen AI Assisted12 Mar 20267 pages

This paper advances one of the most significant findings in Neurotypical Studies to date: the same society capable of profiting from environmental harm, denying its effects, and misreading distress as 'behaviour' will then present disabled people as the real budget problem. The pattern was never hidden—it was visible the entire time. The paper focuses on Super Autism: those hit first by environmental harm, speaking first through distress, behaviour, overload and physiological collapse, and listened to last. If a system helps create the conditions of harm, ignores the earliest signals, and then blames the harmed for the cost of surviving it—the problem is not the disabled person. The problem is the system.

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Vol. 1, No. 1

Data Over Dignity: Evidence Hierarchies in Disability Bureaucracies

Axel Andersen20 Sept 20245 pages

Drawing on the emerging field of Reverse Pathology, we analyse how disability systems construct implicit hierarchies of evidence that privilege bureaucratically convenient data while systematically devaluing lived experience, clinical judgement, and relational knowledge. This constitutes a form of epistemic injustice against disabled people whose knowledge is deemed unreliable by virtue of who they are. What is commonly described as 'rigour' is more accurately understood as administrative self-soothing.

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Vol. 1, No. 1

Last In, First Out: Disability Rights as the Earliest Casualty of Democratic Backsliding

Axel Andersen18 Jan 20268 pages

A satirical-serious conceptual analysis of normality, administrative convenience, and the authoritarian urge. This article examines how disability rights are systematically deprioritised in moments of democratic stress, functioning as a canary in the coalmine for broader erosions of rights and protections.

Read article →PDF • 392 KB