The AI Utopia, Part 2: Only a Human Can Live a Human Life
This is Part 2 in a series. Read Part 1 here.
While it is true that there are no barriers to accessing AI online, and finding answers is part of what psychotherapy is meant to do, therapy should also help you explore the relationship you create with another human. In today’s climate, this exploration is needed. We need to explore things with another person.
The fact is that social media and too much screen time are causing people to look at their phones and not other people. The ability to pick up on social cues is fading.
Too much screen time is causing depression, poor social skills, poor concentration, and the inability to learn some essential life skills.
A chatbot can’t really interact with you in this way. It takes another human!
A chatbot can’t read the room. A chatbot can be programmed to meet certain parameters, but you are the one setting this up, and are you really going to want to be fully challenged? What if you need to be challenged in a way you don’t recognize? Getting called out on your reality testing is a tricky thing. Physicians should never heal themselves. We need that objective human to push us in a better direction.
A chatbot can’t be completely erased. Once there is a history, it is out there—forever. Don’t forget the “Wayback Machine” and its ability to find stuff that has supposedly been removed from the annals of the internet. Do you want your life questions to be permanently stored in that way?
The more I think about all of this, the more the answers I get are no, no, and no.
The uses of AI for mental health are being discussed. AI as a research tool will be a helpful way of using this technology. Could AI help on the medical end of things? Yes. It would be wonderful to see a “cure” for schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, and depression. Relieving someone of severe anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders would be life changing for so many in the human population. The research applications are wonderful to think about.
On the other hand, AI will not be able to sit with someone who is grieving or mourning a lost relationship. It can’t look a person in the eyes, witness the tears and the trauma, and offer comfort and reassurance that they are being understood. AI can “speak” the words: it fails in the human life-experience portion of things. AI can’t live a human life—only a human can.
As I write this, I’m taken back to another experience of grad school. In one of my courses, we were asked to create a utopian society where peace reigned and equality for everyone in the world existed, and oh, by the way, no Star Trek Next Generation models. Our group met, and we couldn’t do it. We may have come close in some ways, but the realization that we, as humans, were faced with diversity and the dilemma of how to give everyone a piece of the pie… Well, let’s just say it didn’t happen. I return to the question of who will live in this AI utopia that is being touted.
Emotions are what cause us to be who we are. The ability to resolve conflict and work out differences is what creates successful outcomes in our lives.
We need diverse communities and everything that comes with them to challenge and cause us to think and move forward. An example of how this is not happening right now is when people are not allowing conflicting views to be expressed and banning them from the discussion. This creates an echo chamber. Progress will not occur in an echo chamber: stagnation is born in such places. I recently heard someone describe their version of a utopia, and as I was hearing them speak, I thought to myself: But do you understand how hard everyone would need to work to make this happen? Having grown up with “flower power,” and then seeing it fade away for something else, I’m aware of how the climate changed. I’m also hopeful that the lessons of that period of time can be worked with. I hold onto hope that we can do better.
I’m not hopeful that society is wise enough or ready for what AI presents. I’m willing to embrace the use of AI for assisting us with science and related areas of study. I’m not willing to turn my life over to AI in other ways.
I believe in humanity, and I want to see it thrive. Just like you, I want to see people heal, grow stronger, and build solid relationships that will support us as human beings. I also want to be realistic. I want to see greed wiped off the face of the planet. Doing that would be very helpful to humanity. It we could wipe out greed, we could wipe out poverty. If greed and poverty were wiped out, there would be no war. That would be a type of utopia many of us could live in.
Maybe if we turn AI loose on medical issues, world hunger, and have it do some serious thinking there, we can focus on enabling each of us to deal with relating to each other on a more functional level. First, we need to fully deal with the question of being able to create such tools and taking a hard look at the ethics surrounding their usage. Yes, I can. But should I? This needs to become the question we must ask ourselves.
If we were to slow ourselves down in this way, what types of changes might we open ourselves up to exploring? Yes, I can. Should I? Yes.
