Asteroid mining for rare earth metals won't solve the disposal problem. There's just too many people on the planet.
I was riffing on your joke. I got it. I guess where I was going was that in the future this will get a lot of blame for autism whether it deserves it or not. First, we need to wait and see if this research is replicable. And second, the odds ratio of the highest dose group was like 1.23 ish, so (simplifying) there was a 23% increase in autism rates in kids born to those mothers. That's not a smoking gun, and it suggests that the large majority of of cases of autism can't be explained by lithium in drinking water (and conversely that the overwhelming majority of mothers even in the high dose group will not have children with autism). But good luck getting a battery recycling facility built anywhere where there are people who can afford to sue. Recycling or disposal of batteries is already a huge forward-looking problem in the EV industry, and these data aren't going to help. I guess it's not that funny when you have to explain it :D
hot take? I think in the future we'll care a lot less about autism. I think we cared a lot less about autism in the past. And I think our whole "whoa, she's not weird she's wired different" is just another symptom of our painfully-slow escape from the Dark Ages of Mental Health wherein anybody who isn't a straight white practitioner of missionary sex on Saturday nights followed by protestant church on Sunday mornings is obviously an ICD-10 code in shoes.