Autism is a problem with cognitive empathy (understanding and recognizing emotions in one self and others). Versus sociopathy and other dark triads which have a problem with affective empathy (experiencing an mirror emotion to the emotion of others). The latter makes sociopaths able to exploit people around them (recognizing emotions and no bad feeling exploiting it). You can also miss both but these will be severely ineffective interacting and being accepted by society (in extreme low functioning sociopaths like serial killers and mass murderers). Highly intelligent and/or sensitive people have the ability to process large amounts of information ("detailism" in a negative tone). They have complex emotions, mixed with their environment whereas less sensitive people have more control of how to filter the input of their environment. So highly sensitive and intelligent have a lot of input from technical information but also complex social situations (over thinking it). This makes it highly tiring to work in large social groups (vs extraverted people) and leads to isolating to small social groups (introversion) and diving deep in a limited subject of interest to limit this input. I posit that so called high functioning autists are not socially blind but actually very receptive for all kinds of information including social cues and emotions of their environment, overwhelming them. See the work by Simon Baron-Cohen.
In fact sociopaths are often exceptionally successful in society because they're very good at manipulating people. It's in some sense the opposite of autism: the actual emotion is not there but they are very natural at feigning it.
