I think most of autism and AS can be explained by sensory processing issues.
For instance, social problems can be a result of difficulty with visual processing. Human faces are very complex and if we are hyposensitive or hypersensitive, we may have a hard time "reading" people. If we have trouble with this from birth, we are missing out on a huge part of how NT's learn to interact with people.
Here's a fabulous book on the subject:
Sensory Perceptual Issues in Autism and Asperger Syndrome : Different Sensory Experiences, Different Perceptual Worlds
Author: Bogdashina, Olʹga.
This is a paragraph from the book:
In recent decades, different conceptions of autism have appeared, which
highlight sensory perceptual abnormalities as the basis of core features of
the disorder. Some researchers describe autism as a disorder of the senses
rather than a social dysfunction,where each sense operates in isolation and
the brain is unable to organize the stimuli in any meaningful way
(Hatch-Rasmussen 1995). It has been hypothesized that all symptoms of
autism are simply a consequence of the brain injury that makes brains of
autistic children perceive inputs from the world differently from
non-autistic brains. Autism is sometimes defined as sensory dysfunction
(Delacato 1974), a sensory integrative disorder in which the brain is not
able to attach meaning to sensations and organize them into percepts and
finally into concepts (Ayres 1979), etc. Unusual sensory experience is
claimed by some authors to be a primary characteristic feature able to
account for the basic symptoms of autism, considered to be essential
according to DSM-IV and ICD-10. Thus, abnormal perceptions might
give rise to high levels of anxiety, this in turn results in obsessive or compulsive
behaviours, thus making the more commonly accepted criteria, in
fact, secondary developmental problems (Delacato 1974).