Yeah that would be a literal and very modern translation but one that pays no mind to the era that Asperger wrote the text in and more importantly, it completely dismisses the context in which he used to word "automaten". Admittedly, Asperger had his own eccentric way with words that does take some to get used to.
Today, Automaten would usually translate to the robot-like automaton, a machine.
Automaten has another meaning that's rarely ever used today anymore - and I assume most young/middle-aged people wouldn't think of it before looking it up - but one that describes the way of act of automatising/learning something by root/intuitive stuff and is derived form the root of the word, meaning something like "happening/moving on it's own/by itself" - or something very similar to that, at least. It's really old-fashioned though. Maybe what added to it getting out of fashion is that the term became massively popular for machines and comparing anyone to a machine is kind of rude according to most people.
But Asperger didn't talk of machines, he meant that we're lacking (social) instinct and can only automatise by use of our intellect all those things that normal people automatise intellectually. Almost all the social rules and adaptive skills that normal people pick on intuitively we can only manage to pick up intellectually. That's the context he uses that word in and how he explains our impaired social intuition.
Why it was sort of rude even back then anyway is that Intelligenzautomaten is an oxymoron. Automatic behaviour (you know, spontaneous + intuitive/subconscious/unconscious behaviours) cannot possibly be acquired and performed intellectually as that would automatically make any such behaviours non-automatic behaviours. That's why calling us that is crude even if it's not meant to compare us to machines. It makes our (social) intuition/instincts sound defective... which they might very well be but that's besides the point now.
We're intellectual "automatise-ers" and Asperger thought that was a core feature of the disorder. Well, I don't know about that at 2 am on the morning but that's what he talked about in length when comparing autistic people to normal people in respect to instinctual and intellectual automatising. Not about machines.
(Of course, my genius idea of calling normal people Instinkt-automaten doesn't work either because the two words represent the same concept (one of intuitive social ability) which makes this a tautology but it's fun anyway because of how that relates to oxymorons.)
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Autism + ADHD
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The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. Terry Pratchett