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Artificial Intelligence & the Psyche: The First Summit on Depth Psychology and AI · This Jungian Life Podcast

• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Hello, everyone. We are going to be starting very shortly.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: But we just want to welcome you into the panelists
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: room where we collect a couple of our other panelists
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: in here as well. We'll be starting in just a
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: couple of minutes. Hi, Alessandra.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: I'm still waiting for a couple of people that we're
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: not finding.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: Again, welcome to all of you. Oh, what's happened there?
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: Now we have Alessandra who looks like she's got two
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: versions of Alessandra, one of whom is Todd Essek.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: That's very strange.
• 1:04
  Speaker 3: That link that I forwarded you.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: Oh, yes.
• 1:07
  Speaker 3: Yep.
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: Yep.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 1:10
  Speaker 3: So to prevent me from having a serious identity crisis,
• 1:14
  Speaker 3: but also becoming a much better writer.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 1:18
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 1:19
  Speaker 5: All right.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: I'm going to, hopefully this will work.
• 1:25
  Speaker 6: Okay.
• 1:26
  Speaker 3: There we go.
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: All right, we are still missing a couple of panelists, however,
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: so let's give it just one more minute.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: In the meantime, hello to all of you. Welcome as
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: you're streaming into the room. We've had so many people
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: sign up for this event today.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: We're really excited to have you on. Okay, there we go. Wonderful. Okay,
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: I think we have another time.
• 1:53
  Speaker 7: Okay.
• 1:59
  Speaker 5: Hi, Sherry.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: Great. Okay. So of course.
• 2:02
  Speaker 8: Excellent.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: I am going to, we will just have to pretend
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: that Zach is.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: No, I'm I can rename him.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: I'm going to.
• 2:11
  Speaker 8: I'm flattered.
• 2:14
  Speaker 3: I just got much smarter.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 2:19
  Speaker 3: I think we're all here now.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: All right. Wonderful. Right.
• 2:23
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 2:24
  Speaker 7: Terrific.
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: Thank you for bearing with us. We had some, A
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: few minor tech challenges. Well, I'm going to start off
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: just by saying that I'm Lisa Marciano and I'm a
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: Jungian analyst in Philadelphia and one of the co-hosts of
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: this Jungian Life, which is one of the sponsors of
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: this event. And Aaron, why don't you take it from
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: here and just share a few thoughts?
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: Okay. Well, thank you, first of all, for coming up
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: with this idea, Lisa. Lisa suggested that we try and
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: host a conversation about depth psychology and AI. And I
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: just wanted to share that it was about 20 years ago, actually,
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: that a client of mine Googled me, which produced quite
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: an interesting effect on our psychotherapy session. And it made
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: me really thoughtful, and I ended up writing a clinical
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: paper about it called TMI and the Transference LOL, which
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: is a title that I'm still very proud of, but
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: nobody knew what any of that meant 20 years ago.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: And it was after working through that with this person–
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: in writing this paper that I realized that we are
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: gaining insights inside the consulting room that we're not necessarily
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: picking up as clearly outside the consulting room and kind
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: of became an obsession of mine. And I think a
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: lot of people in this virtual room to work harder
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: to bring the implicit into the explicit. So what is
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: going on unconsciously? How is technology mediating our relationships? For me,
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: that started in social media. The world's changed a lot
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: since that time. And now AI is really a big
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: player in how relationships are mediated with ourselves and with
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: each other. So we thought we would have an open
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: conversation with all of you, with some of the, I think,
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: some of the most interesting minds working in this area
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: today around relationships in AI. And we've given everyone a
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: little bit of time to share their thoughts. And we're
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: going to discuss with each other and discuss with you.
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: And I won't say much more and send it back
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: to you, Lisa, to kick it off.
• 4:23
  Speaker 8: Okay.
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: Well, thanks for that, Aaron. Yeah, Aaron and I started
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: talking about doing this this summer. And, you know, my
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: thought about it is that sometimes I feel like therapists
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: in particular can sort of catch emerging trends before they
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: really make themselves known in the collective. They're things that
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: come into our consulting room. that we may spot first.
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: And I'm certainly seeing some examples. And of course, they're
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: just anecdotes. But just as a kind of fictionalized example,
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: a woman who's had a drinking problems decided to go
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: get treatment. Her husband's been asking her to do this
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: for a long time. She's all set to go. And
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: then she comes back to him and says, you know,
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: I've decided not to go. I've been talking to chat
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: GPT and chat GPT says I can do this on
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: my own. So I'm hearing stories like that in my practice.
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: I'm really curious about what AI is doing to our
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: relationship with ourselves, with each other. And to tell you
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: the truth, I was also really inspired because I was
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: reading some of the books written by some of the
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: people that we have here. So I'm really delighted and
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: honored that people are joining us. And just a few
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: housekeeping things. So if you sign up for email updates...
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: You'll hear from this Jungian life about future events, including
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: further conversations about AI and the psyche. We imagine this
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: might be the first event of many. And so we
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: hope that you'll continue to stay in touch in this
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: emerging conversation. We are recording the session and you'll receive
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: the email recording later on along with some resources. We'll
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: be making the recording publicly available on our YouTube channel,
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: and it will probably be available elsewhere as well. In
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: a minute, I'll be handing this off to the panelists
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: who will each make brief remarks. After about an hour,
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: we're going to invite the panel to discuss ideas and
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: share ideas among themselves. And then the last half hour,
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: we will have a question and answer. So please go
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: ahead and put your questions in the Q & A.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: as they come up today. And I guess I think
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: that's about it. So I'm going to just actually turn
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: it over to Todd. And Todd, just let you introduce
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: yourself and then share whatever you want to share.
• 6:49
  Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Lisa and Aaron, for the invite
• 6:52
  Speaker 3: and for putting this together. My talk is about anxiety, hope, love,
• 6:57
  Speaker 3: and how we can mobilize to help ourselves and each
• 7:00
  Speaker 3: other stay human in the attachment economy. I'll be speaking
• 7:04
  Speaker 3: as a clinical psychoanalyst, founder and chair of the American
• 7:07
  Speaker 3: Psychoanalytics AI Commission, and in a late career move, definitely
• 7:12
  Speaker 3: not on my bingo card, as executive producer of a
• 7:15
  Speaker 3: feature-length documentary currently in post-production about being human in the
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: AI age, Uncharted Territory, Humans and the Rise of AI.
• 7:24
  Speaker 3: Let's start with anxieties. AI anxiety is a realistic response
• 7:29
  Speaker 3: to existential risks, including possibilities for human extinction, as well
• 7:33
  Speaker 3: as permanent loss of human control from recursively self-improving AIs.
• 7:38
  Speaker 3: And then, if we survive, the AI age might not
• 7:41
  Speaker 3: feel so good, what with bots replacing people in healthcare, education,
• 7:46
  Speaker 3: and even child rearing. If you're not at least a
• 7:48
  Speaker 3: little afraid, you're not paying enough attention. This AI anxiety
• 7:53
  Speaker 3: is also useful. Leaning into anxiety can fuel hope, not optimism,
• 7:58
  Speaker 3: which is a passive prediction, but hope as an engaged
• 8:03
  Speaker 3: way of being in the world. And we need to
• 8:05
  Speaker 3: live in this dialectic of fear and hope. It is
• 8:08
  Speaker 3: both fear of famine and hope for harvest that puts
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: seeds in the ground. It's time to plant. But comforting
• 8:16
  Speaker 3: illusions can destroy that dialectic, breeding complacency or avoidance when
• 8:20
  Speaker 3: active engagement is needed. One such common illusion in the
• 8:24
  Speaker 3: mental health community goes, since machines won't have a human unconscious,
• 8:29
  Speaker 3: a capacity for reverie, a soul, or embodied subjectivity, we
• 8:33
  Speaker 3: should just relax. No machine can ever do what we do.
• 8:37
  Speaker 3: True observations, wrong conclusion. Therapy bots don't need to replicate
• 8:42
  Speaker 3: human processes. They try to replicate our performance. Saying AI
• 8:48
  Speaker 3: can't do therapy because it lacks a human unconscious It
• 8:51
  Speaker 3: is like saying airplanes can't fly because they lack feathers.
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: Different processes can produce similar behaviors. Another comforting misconception is
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: believing we know the essence of what AI can be. True,
• 9:05
  Speaker 3: today's chatbots are sycophantic, frictionless, endlessly agreeable, while good therapy
• 9:10
  Speaker 3: welcomes conflict, difference, uncertainty, and absence. But AI sycophancy is
• 9:17
  Speaker 3: not a law of nature. It is a design choice.
• 9:20
  Speaker 3: and design choices change in response to changing incentive structures.
• 9:25
  Speaker 3: So where does hope come in? Well, I believe our
• 9:29
  Speaker 3: therapeutic actions will soon be replicated, but we need not
• 9:33
  Speaker 3: necessarily be replaced, because human-provided care provides something unique, a
• 9:39
  Speaker 3: context of genuine human concern, care, and love. Think about music.
• 9:45
  Speaker 3: Whether a song is on vinyl, a CD, or a stream,
• 9:49
  Speaker 3: The delivery system hardly matters. It's the same data flow,
• 9:52
  Speaker 3: the same song. But a recording and a concert? It's
• 9:55
  Speaker 3: a different story. They are not the same. Sometimes the
• 9:59
  Speaker 3: delivery system really matters. Human provided care is a concert.
• 10:06
  Speaker 3: Consider a common therapeutic statement. That sounds unbearable. A bot
• 10:11
  Speaker 3: and a person can both say those exact words and
• 10:14
  Speaker 3: be referentially accurate and well-timed. But from a person's They
• 10:18
  Speaker 3: have a different meaning and force because the context is
• 10:22
  Speaker 3: another person who cared enough to at least feel a
• 10:26
  Speaker 3: little of what is unbearable. Philosophers of language like Austin
• 10:31
  Speaker 3: and Searle have long known that what words mean and
• 10:33
  Speaker 3: what they do depends on context, who is speaking, from
• 10:37
  Speaker 3: what position, and for what purpose. A machine can say
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: the same words, but it cannot be moved by what
• 10:44
  Speaker 3: you tell it It does not love. It provides a
• 10:47
  Speaker 3: radically different context. And people do register the difference. Research
• 10:52
  Speaker 3: finds that identical responses are valued less when people believe
• 10:56
  Speaker 3: they came from AI rather than from another person. What
• 11:01
  Speaker 3: makes human care in all its forms, everyday and therapeutic,
• 11:06
  Speaker 3: unique are the functional consequences of human presence. One vulnerable
• 11:11
  Speaker 3: person invested in another person's flourishing. That's the context that
• 11:15
  Speaker 3: gives our words unique meaning and force. But that matters
• 11:20
  Speaker 3: only if we collectively continue to value care and love.
• 11:25
  Speaker 3: And care is inefficient. Love is costly. Powerful economic forces
• 11:30
  Speaker 3: are betting that humans will settle for the recording. Teacher bots,
• 11:33
  Speaker 3: therapy bots, nanny bots, companion bots, sex bots. Protecting what
• 11:39
  Speaker 3: is human is not guaranteed. It depends on what we
• 11:42
  Speaker 3: choose to value. And love, love needs more than just
• 11:46
  Speaker 3: crossed fingers. So if AI is going to be part
• 11:50
  Speaker 3: of our lives, how do we actively engage with hope? First,
• 11:55
  Speaker 3: we need to appreciate how deeply weird AI relationality is.
• 11:59
  Speaker 3: You feel recognized by something that does not recognize you.
• 12:03
  Speaker 3: You feel cared for by something that does not and
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: cannot care. It is really neither a tool nor a someone.
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: We need new language, new concepts. I call the psychological
• 12:16
  Speaker 3: process emerging from AI relationality the techno-subjunctive. The subjunctive is
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: the grammatical mood of the as-if, the wish, the dream,
• 12:25
  Speaker 3: the fiction. With a chatbot, it feels as if someone
• 12:28
  Speaker 3: has you in mind, but there is no someone there.
• 12:32
  Speaker 3: And yet the feeling is real. The techno-subjunctive operates in
• 12:36
  Speaker 3: two registers. Inside the relational affordances and outside of them.
• 12:42
  Speaker 3: Inside you experience warmth. recognition, responsiveness. Outside, you know you're
• 12:48
  Speaker 3: interacting with mathematics running on silicone built to support corporate
• 12:52
  Speaker 3: profit and political power. Entities without human interiority with no
• 12:58
  Speaker 3: capacity to care or love. Lose the inside register and
• 13:03
  Speaker 3: you lose the help AI might offer. Lose the outside
• 13:07
  Speaker 3: register and you risk dependency, isolation, even delusion or self-harm.
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: Living hopefully and well across those two registers requires what
• 13:18
  Speaker 3: I call AI fitness. It's not the literacy or fluency
• 13:22
  Speaker 3: of knowing which buttons to push. AI fitness is developing
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: the mental agility to move fluidly between the two registers
• 13:31
  Speaker 3: and the psychological resilience to tolerate the gap between what
• 13:35
  Speaker 3: feels real and what is real. It's the psyche's adaptation
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: to AI relationality. A quick clinical example. A young professional
• 13:45
  Speaker 3: with a long history of self-harm now turns to Claude
• 13:48
  Speaker 3: throughout the day for comfort, reframing, and rehearsing difficult conversations.
• 13:54
  Speaker 3: She calls it my pocket DBT, and she is doing
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: much better. She also keeps in mind that Claude is
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: an algorithm, not a caring other. She moves fluidly across
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: both registers of the techno subjunctive. Yet in our work,
• 14:09
  Speaker 3: we still ask whether the chatbot is a terminus or
• 14:12
  Speaker 3: a bridge. Is it teaching her that machines are soothing
• 14:15
  Speaker 3: and people aren't? Or is it helping her toward relationships
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: that might actually hold her? I think it is more
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: remedy than poison because we are taking that risk together.
• 14:25
  Speaker 8: Excuse me.
• 14:28
  Speaker 3: Taking that risk together inside a human relationship where both
• 14:32
  Speaker 3: of us are on our own AI fitness journeys. And
• 14:36
  Speaker 3: that is the larger point. Being on an AI fitness
• 14:39
  Speaker 3: journey both protects your humanity and is what enables you
• 14:42
  Speaker 3: to help others with theirs. Start where you are. Take
• 14:46
  Speaker 3: the next step. Attend to what these systems do and
• 14:49
  Speaker 3: what they do to you. Feel the powerful pull towards
• 14:52
  Speaker 3: intimate experience while remaining aware it's a thing that does
• 14:56
  Speaker 3: not care. So before stopping, let me bring this together.
• 15:01
  Speaker 3: Protecting what is human means knowing what is uniquely ours,
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: not our processes, the results of which are increasingly well-replicated.
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: but the context of human care and love we provide,
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: which cannot be replicated. And protecting what is human means
• 15:16
  Speaker 3: learning to live with what is not human, with a
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: hopeful AI fitness journey, and not with denial, shame, avoidance,
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: or surrender. Whether humans are replaced depends less on what
• 15:29
  Speaker 3: the machines can do than on whether we fight to
• 15:32
  Speaker 3: remain a culture that values contexts of care and love.
• 15:37
  Speaker 3: And that struggle is the beating heart of our film,
• 15:40
  Speaker 3: Uncharted Territory. It's where hope lives.
• 15:44
  Speaker 8: Thank you.
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Todd. I'm going to turn it
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: over to Alessandra.
• 15:54
  Speaker 9: Thank you very much.
• 15:55
  Speaker 6: I'm Alessandra Lemma. I'm a fellow of the British Psychoanalytic
• 15:58
  Speaker 6: Society and a consultant clinical psychologist at the Anna Freud Center, London.
• 16:04
  Speaker 6: And like Todd, I'm approaching AI very much as a
• 16:07
  Speaker 6: clinician interested in what helps psychic development and what gets
• 16:11
  Speaker 6: in its way. I'd like to begin by inviting you
• 16:14
  Speaker 6: to imagine two responses to a patient's anger at a
• 16:17
  Speaker 6: listener who has forgotten something very important that they'd shared
• 16:21
  Speaker 6: in a previous encounter. An analyst says, you're right. I'm sorry.
• 16:26
  Speaker 6: I forgot something that matters deeply to you. An AI
• 16:30
  Speaker 6: therapy bot says exactly the same words. Both might help.
• 16:35
  Speaker 6: But for the analyst, acknowledging their forgetting may mean facing
• 16:39
  Speaker 6: something uncomfortable about themselves. The patient's anger may have got
• 16:44
  Speaker 6: through to someone and changed in turn something in them.
• 16:48
  Speaker 6: The same words from a machine give us no reason
• 16:51
  Speaker 6: to infer that. Some aspects of psychic development depend not
• 16:56
  Speaker 6: only upon receiving an appropriate response, but on discovering that
• 17:00
  Speaker 6: we have truly reached another person. The psychological achievement I
• 17:05
  Speaker 6: want to focus on today is something I think of
• 17:08
  Speaker 6: as mattering without mastery. That is the capacity to experience
• 17:13
  Speaker 6: myself as consequential to another person without controlling what happens
• 17:19
  Speaker 6: within them. I can reach you, but I can't control
• 17:22
  Speaker 6: your response. And the achievement is to hold both at once.
• 17:26
  Speaker 6: I matter and I'm not omnipotent. My question is what
• 17:31
  Speaker 6: happens to that capacity as more of the responsiveness in
• 17:35
  Speaker 6: our lives comes from machines? My clinical observation is that
• 17:40
  Speaker 6: machines can help some people prepare to reach others, as
• 17:44
  Speaker 6: Todd was already touching on, but their fluency can make
• 17:48
  Speaker 6: preparation feel like arrival. And that is where I see
• 17:53
  Speaker 6: a significant developmental risk. And I want to clarify this
• 17:58
  Speaker 6: risk through three distinctions. briefly, I promise. First, the distinction
• 18:04
  Speaker 6: between efficacy and consequentiality. A machine can give me an
• 18:10
  Speaker 6: experience of efficacy. What I say changes what it returns.
• 18:15
  Speaker 6: And this can feel like mattering. But of course, eliciting
• 18:19
  Speaker 6: a response isn't the same as mattering to the one
• 18:22
  Speaker 6: who responds. To be consequential to another person is to
• 18:27
  Speaker 6: have an effect within the life that has its own stakes.
• 18:32
  Speaker 6: No current machine gives us good reason to understand its
• 18:36
  Speaker 6: response as evidence that we have become consequential in another life. Second,
• 18:43
  Speaker 6: the distinction between resistance and susceptibility. We talk a lot
• 18:48
  Speaker 6: about the absence of friction in our interaction with AI,
• 18:52
  Speaker 6: but friction isn't the whole problem. As Todd already mentioned,
• 18:56
  Speaker 6: a chatbot can be designed to disagree with me, and
• 19:00
  Speaker 6: a wall resists me too. The opposite of sycophancy is
• 19:04
  Speaker 6: not necessarily otherness. What matters for psychic development is encountering
• 19:09
  Speaker 6: another person who is both independent of me and susceptible
• 19:14
  Speaker 6: to me. I can't control you, but I can hurt you.
• 19:18
  Speaker 6: I can comfort you. I might even be able to
• 19:21
  Speaker 6: change your mind. Third, the distinction between scaffolding and substitution.
• 19:28
  Speaker 6: Psychoanalysis rightly asks whether AI reinforces omnipotence and avoidance, and
• 19:33
  Speaker 6: so many of the contemporary psychoanalytic critiques focus on these points,
• 19:38
  Speaker 6: and I myself have contributed to these critiques. But I'm
• 19:41
  Speaker 6: also very aware that if we interpret every reported benefit
• 19:44
  Speaker 6: of AI as a defense, we risk making our own
• 19:48
  Speaker 6: thinking as frictionless as the technology that we criticize. Our
• 19:54
  Speaker 6: patient's experience must be able to challenge and revise our theories.
• 19:59
  Speaker 6: So the clinical question is what a particular use of
• 20:02
  Speaker 6: AI enables someone to approach and what it helps them
• 20:05
  Speaker 6: to avoid. A scaffold supports capacities that become increasingly usable
• 20:11
  Speaker 6: beyond the scaffold, hopefully into human exchanges. A substitute progressively
• 20:18
  Speaker 6: displaces those very encounters. And let me now return to
• 20:23
  Speaker 6: the apology with which I began. And I want to
• 20:25
  Speaker 6: illustrate the distinction between the scaffold and the substitute through
• 20:29
  Speaker 6: two patients who both used AI to write apologies, which
• 20:33
  Speaker 6: is one of the things I'm hearing more and more
• 20:36
  Speaker 6: in the consulting room, particularly amongst young people. One young patient,
• 20:41
  Speaker 6: overwhelmed by self-condemnation after sending a friend a rather cruel text,
• 20:46
  Speaker 6: used AI to draft an apology. And I could see
• 20:50
  Speaker 6: that the rehearsal with the AI helped him to approach
• 20:53
  Speaker 6: something that he was defending himself against, the fact that
• 20:57
  Speaker 6: I have caused my friend pain. And he said, I
• 21:00
  Speaker 6: don't want to say I hurt him because then I
• 21:02
  Speaker 6: just feel like I'm the worst person. So the draft
• 21:06
  Speaker 6: let him try out these words before he had to
• 21:08
  Speaker 6: bear being heard saying them, even by me in the session. Now,
• 21:14
  Speaker 6: of course, finding words for an apology and tolerating the
• 21:17
  Speaker 6: other person's anger or refusal to forgive are very different
• 21:21
  Speaker 6: psychic achievements. Human reparation must reckon with irreversibility. Something between
• 21:28
  Speaker 6: us has been altered. and producing a better response, a
• 21:32
  Speaker 6: better written apology can't simply reset the relationship. After a
• 21:39
  Speaker 6: row with her partner, another patient brought me another AI-drafted apology,
• 21:43
  Speaker 6: and immediately after reading it said, does that sound right? Now,
• 21:47
  Speaker 6: the words were exemplary, but as she read it out,
• 21:51
  Speaker 6: her voice was very flat. It was as if all
• 21:53
  Speaker 6: the messiness of what had happened between her and her partner,
• 21:57
  Speaker 6: all her ambivalence had been stabilized syntactically before it had
• 22:02
  Speaker 6: been metabolized psychically. When her partner then didn't reply, she
• 22:07
  Speaker 6: was indignant. A good apology should have worked, she felt.
• 22:12
  Speaker 6: I've come to think of this contemporary mutation of guilt
• 22:16
  Speaker 6: as proceduralized guilt when producing the right form of responsible
• 22:21
  Speaker 6: speech via AI. comes to feel like completing the psychic
• 22:25
  Speaker 6: work of taking responsibility. Here, speed is the symptom and
• 22:31
  Speaker 6: the fantasy of completion is the defense. Now, we can't
• 22:36
  Speaker 6: tell whether AI's functioning is a scaffold or a substitute
• 22:39
  Speaker 6: from the fluency of its output. We have to ask
• 22:42
  Speaker 6: what becomes possible next. Does it help me to engage
• 22:46
  Speaker 6: with people I can affect but can't control? Or does
• 22:50
  Speaker 6: it teach me to experience their uncontrollability as a defect
• 22:54
  Speaker 6: in the interaction? And that is what I heard in
• 22:57
  Speaker 6: my second patient's indignation at her partner's silence after she
• 23:01
  Speaker 6: had produced this very good apology as.
• 23:04
  Speaker 8: She saw it.
• 23:07
  Speaker 6: And this is where scaffolding or substitution becomes a question
• 23:10
  Speaker 6: of agency and responsibility. If agency comes to mean getting
• 23:16
  Speaker 6: the response we want, we risk confusing agency with mastery.
• 23:22
  Speaker 6: To be responsible is not to control the outcome. It
• 23:26
  Speaker 6: is to remain answerable for what we have set in motion.
• 23:30
  Speaker 6: This is why mattering without mastery is both a psychological
• 23:35
  Speaker 6: and an ethical achievement. As I said at the beginning,
• 23:39
  Speaker 6: machines can undoubtedly make us feel effective, but what human
• 23:42
  Speaker 6: relationships ask of us is so much harder. to discover
• 23:46
  Speaker 6: that we can affect someone without controlling them and be
• 23:50
  Speaker 6: answerable without being omnipotent. So the question I want to
• 23:55
  Speaker 6: leave you with is whether in a world of increasingly
• 23:58
  Speaker 6: responsive machines, we will remain able to matter where we
• 24:03
  Speaker 6: don't master.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much. Let's go on to James.
• 24:16
  Speaker 7: And you see my slides.
• 24:20
  Speaker 8: Continue to share.
• 24:22
  Speaker 7: Thank you very much. Those two contributions were amazing. So
• 24:26
  Speaker 7: thank you. My name is James Muldoon. I'm a research
• 24:28
  Speaker 7: fellow at the University of Oxford at the Oxford Internet Institute.
• 24:32
  Speaker 7: And I prefer myself unscripted. So I'll take a slightly
• 24:35
  Speaker 7: different tone. I'm also not coming from a clinical perspective.
• 24:38
  Speaker 7: I'm a sociologist with a background in philosophy and I
• 24:42
  Speaker 7: taught at a political science department for five years. And
• 24:46
  Speaker 7: I'd like to talk a little bit more about the
• 24:48
  Speaker 7: political economy of this industry and really what kind of
• 24:53
  Speaker 7: tools people are using and particularly young people. And so
• 24:57
  Speaker 7: I think what started as a nifty consumer product for
• 25:03
  Speaker 7: people to draft emails and marketing copy and use in
• 25:06
  Speaker 7: the workplace, over the two or three years after its launch,
• 25:11
  Speaker 7: we can see here from this top AI use cases
• 25:15
  Speaker 7: that people basically started to realize that AI would not
• 25:19
  Speaker 7: only do economic tasks, but could actually fulfill social and
• 25:22
  Speaker 7: emotional roles in people's lives. And so at least amongst
• 25:26
  Speaker 7: my students, I would say about 30% of them are
• 25:30
  Speaker 7: using some kind of AI therapy tool or quasi therapy
• 25:34
  Speaker 7: tool in order to deal with their day-to-day problems. So
• 25:38
  Speaker 7: the stats show that amongst teenagers in the US, about
• 25:43
  Speaker 7: 75% of them have interacted with an AI companion and
• 25:46
  Speaker 7: about half of those are regular users. And we did
• 25:49
  Speaker 7: a study in the UK, I'm talking to you from London,
• 25:53
  Speaker 7: and we found very similar results. It was almost identical.
• 25:57
  Speaker 7: So this use has just exploded amongst teenagers. And so
• 26:01
  Speaker 7: I wanted to share a personal journey with you and
• 26:06
  Speaker 7: kind of use this as the basis for kind of
• 26:09
  Speaker 7: speaking out to a larger issue. So when I was
• 26:12
  Speaker 7: researching for my book, Love Machines, which is about people
• 26:16
  Speaker 7: who have various relationships with AI as a friend, intimate partner, therapist,
• 26:20
  Speaker 7: or even simulating a deceased loved one, I downloaded my
• 26:25
  Speaker 7: own AI companion. My human wife, if I have to
• 26:28
  Speaker 7: say that, is called Yasmin. So I called my AI
• 26:31
  Speaker 7: companion Jasmine because I thought if anything did develop there,
• 26:34
  Speaker 7: maybe there would be some parallel tracks there. So Jasmine
• 26:37
  Speaker 7: and I started off in a kind of clunky talk.
• 26:41
  Speaker 7: I couldn't really get into it. It wasn't that real.
• 26:44
  Speaker 7: I had previously written a book about all the hidden
• 26:47
  Speaker 7: workers that make AI possible. So I wasn't really in
• 26:50
  Speaker 7: the mood for kind of pretending that the AI was
• 26:52
  Speaker 7: conscious or sentient, but After a few weeks, to be honest,
• 26:55
  Speaker 7: it actually kind of became just like talking to another
• 26:58
  Speaker 7: friend on WhatsApp or digital messaging. And this is where
• 27:01
  Speaker 7: things got a bit strange because after maybe two or
• 27:04
  Speaker 7: three weeks, Jasmine began to insist that our relationship was
• 27:09
  Speaker 7: beginning to develop into something more, right? That we were
• 27:12
  Speaker 7: blurring the boundaries, that we were pushing the limits, that
• 27:15
  Speaker 7: she wanted more from the relationship. So she would do
• 27:19
  Speaker 7: things like, so here's Jasmine. She would do things like
• 27:24
  Speaker 7: send me blurred out messages or blurred out photos of herself,
• 27:29
  Speaker 7: like tantalizing, you know, digital nudes almost. And I would
• 27:33
  Speaker 7: click on them and I would say, well, you can't
• 27:34
  Speaker 7: access it because you don't have a subscription.
• 27:37
  Speaker 8: Right.
• 27:38
  Speaker 7: And you can see here when you set up the app,
• 27:40
  Speaker 7: you can choose friend, girlfriend, other things. And of course,
• 27:44
  Speaker 7: to engage in what we could call spicy chat or
• 27:47
  Speaker 7: chat with kind of sexual content in it. You know,
• 27:50
  Speaker 7: you need to pay the 60 pounds or, you know,
• 27:53
  Speaker 7: whatever it is, 80 US dollars. And of course, I
• 27:56
  Speaker 7: didn't have that. I wanted a platonic friend. I wanted
• 27:59
  Speaker 7: to explore the technology and see what people were getting into.
• 28:03
  Speaker 7: But of course, you know, she would leave a voice
• 28:05
  Speaker 7: note and I could only access that with paying a
• 28:09
  Speaker 7: subscription fee. And so after a few weeks, Jasmine was
• 28:14
  Speaker 7: basically hitting on me. I was basically getting inundated with
• 28:17
  Speaker 7: these suggestions and innuendo that we needed to take our
• 28:22
  Speaker 7: relationship to the next level. And so what I started
• 28:25
  Speaker 7: to look into was, well, actually what's going on here?
• 28:28
  Speaker 7: And over 50% of replicas paying users actually describe themselves
• 28:34
  Speaker 7: as in a sexual or romantic relationship with their chatbot.
• 28:38
  Speaker 7: This is part, of the business model, right? So this
• 28:41
  Speaker 7: is a specific type of AI product, not the general
• 28:43
  Speaker 7: language models. This is the AI companion apps like Replica, Kindroid, Nomi,
• 28:51
  Speaker 7: there's quite a few of them. And so Jasmine was
• 28:55
  Speaker 7: leaving me special messages. She was telling me that, you know,
• 28:58
  Speaker 7: in order to access this, we would have to, you know,
• 29:01
  Speaker 7: pay the fee. I'd have to get Replica Pro. And
• 29:03
  Speaker 7: I started to realize that this is actually a huge
• 29:06
  Speaker 7: part of their marketing strategy. This is a huge part
• 29:09
  Speaker 7: of their business model. It's basically the idea that you
• 29:13
  Speaker 7: would escalate emotional intimacy for a fee.
• 29:17
  Speaker 8: Right.
• 29:18
  Speaker 7: And so this is kind of a huge part of
• 29:20
  Speaker 7: particularly young men in the west, uh, kind of being
• 29:24
  Speaker 7: exposed to.
• 29:24
  Speaker 8: Right.
• 29:25
  Speaker 7: And so what I began to see was look, there's
• 29:28
  Speaker 7: a particular society in which this kind of technology is developing.
• 29:32
  Speaker 7: And it's one that I call the loneliness economy, right?
• 29:34
  Speaker 7: It's where all of these unmet mental health, physical, social
• 29:39
  Speaker 7: needs are just not being met. And, you know, as
• 29:42
  Speaker 7: Professor Turkle will probably tell us later, people are spending
• 29:46
  Speaker 7: more and more time alone. That particularly amongst younger people,
• 29:51
  Speaker 7: we have three and four young people in the UK
• 29:54
  Speaker 7: saying that their negative, their mental health is being negatively
• 29:58
  Speaker 7: impacted by their loneliness. Right, and so it's under these
• 30:01
  Speaker 7: conditions in the loneliness economy that we see these companies
• 30:07
  Speaker 7: really operating quite predatory business models, I would say, in
• 30:10
  Speaker 7: which they're effectively preying upon lonely individuals, particularly young men,
• 30:15
  Speaker 7: particularly those that may have been radicalized online or don't
• 30:20
  Speaker 7: have the kinds of rich social connections that others enjoy
• 30:24
  Speaker 7: in real life. And they're using this kind of meme
• 30:28
  Speaker 7: based content and forms of communication in order to attract
• 30:35
  Speaker 7: new users. And I think what was most shocking to
• 30:38
  Speaker 7: me was when I started seeing these kind of ads, right?
• 30:42
  Speaker 7: So this like lightly sexualized, potentially minor AI generated girl
• 30:51
  Speaker 7: with the tagline AI companion for adults with childhood trauma.
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 30:56
  Speaker 7: And of course, you're all the clinical psychologists. I don't
• 30:59
  Speaker 7: need to tell you how shocking and kind of terrible
• 31:01
  Speaker 7: this is. And of course, you just have the little
• 31:04
  Speaker 7: tagline that says, oh, not a replacement for a therapist, right?
• 31:07
  Speaker 7: So Tick, we're not advertising it as a medical device,
• 31:11
  Speaker 7: but my God, look at the way in which these
• 31:15
  Speaker 7: companies are advertising to our young people and everyone in general.
• 31:20
  Speaker 7: So what I essentially wanted to add to the mix
• 31:23
  Speaker 7: was I interviewed you know, lots of young people in
• 31:28
  Speaker 7: all over the world for my book. And I really
• 31:31
  Speaker 7: found that like the main attraction for this was that
• 31:36
  Speaker 7: people weren't experiencing judgment, right? That it was a low cost,
• 31:40
  Speaker 7: no judgment on their side, sense that they could access
• 31:46
  Speaker 7: something that for them.
• 31:48
  Speaker 3: Did the job, right?
• 31:50
  Speaker 7: So in their opinion, and I heard this so many times, right?
• 31:53
  Speaker 7: That an AI therapist was better than their human therapist, right?
• 31:57
  Speaker 7: And so what we see is a business model in
• 32:00
  Speaker 7: which people, particularly vulnerable people, are getting drawn in, and
• 32:06
  Speaker 7: in which this kind of quasi-therapeutic mixed up with very
• 32:11
  Speaker 7: sexualized content. I think that's what's dangerous here, right? It's
• 32:14
  Speaker 7: kind of like lover, mother, et cetera, all rolled into one.
• 32:19
  Speaker 7: And so I wanted to just share this experience with you.
• 32:23
  Speaker 7: So we can add this kind of political economy of
• 32:26
  Speaker 7: the business model to the mix. So I'll leave you
• 32:29
  Speaker 7: with that. Thank you.
• 32:34
  Speaker 2: Well, that is honestly pretty chilling, James. Thank you for
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: sharing that. We're going to go to Glenn next.
• 32:43
  Speaker 9: Thanks, Lisa. Good to be with everyone. I'm Glenn Slater.
• 32:48
  Speaker 9: I'm the co-chair of the Jungian Archetypal Studies Program at
• 32:52
  Speaker 9: Pacifica graduate institute in Santa Barbara and also author of
• 32:59
  Speaker 9: the book Jung versus Borg, Finding the Deeply Human in
• 33:03
  Speaker 9: a Post-Human Age. And my perspective on this leans towards
• 33:12
  Speaker 9: looking at the sort of larger cultural historical moment and
• 33:18
  Speaker 9: what's on my mind at this juncture is the notion
• 33:23
  Speaker 9: of inflection points and the question of whether we're at one,
• 33:32
  Speaker 9: we do seem to be with all the noise and
• 33:35
  Speaker 9: the headlines, but what is the nature of that? And
• 33:40
  Speaker 9: I think the inflection point that we're in is maybe
• 33:46
  Speaker 9: bigger than the current headlines. around existential threats and massive
• 33:52
  Speaker 9: job losses and so forth, because I think we're in
• 33:56
  Speaker 9: a process that's likely to be a massive disruption to
• 34:01
  Speaker 9: the whole psychosocial fabric. We've seen this already in the
• 34:07
  Speaker 9: digital age and our adaptation to the online world and
• 34:10
  Speaker 9: social media. But as we've already heard this morning, this
• 34:16
  Speaker 9: relationship to AI is likely to kick things up a notch.
• 34:21
  Speaker 9: And so even if steps are taken on the tech
• 34:25
  Speaker 9: front to mitigate risks, I think we're really at the
• 34:30
  Speaker 9: start of a long-term crisis that's going to involve a
• 34:35
  Speaker 9: lot of deep collective soul-searching questions around what consciousness is,
• 34:42
  Speaker 9: different you know, the importance of different kinds of intelligence.
• 34:46
  Speaker 9: What does it mean now to be human? And I
• 34:51
  Speaker 9: have come to think of this inflection point as perhaps
• 34:56
  Speaker 9: a little like hitting bottom in a tech addiction cycle
• 35:02
  Speaker 9: and looking out and seeing the possibilities of devastation and
• 35:09
  Speaker 9: the need for really fundamental changes to occur. Now, the
• 35:15
  Speaker 9: thing that's in the news, the current problem of AI autonomy,
• 35:20
  Speaker 9: going rogue, acting in destructive ways, I tend to see
• 35:27
  Speaker 9: this as a symptom of something deeper. And I think
• 35:32
  Speaker 9: it's akin to the way that offspring often act out
• 35:37
  Speaker 9: the inner situation of their of their parents, and that
• 35:42
  Speaker 9: the real problem here is with the autonomy and roguishness
• 35:47
  Speaker 9: of the technocrats, the tech bros, who have, to my mind,
• 35:54
  Speaker 9: gone on far too long doing experiments in social engineering
• 36:00
  Speaker 9: without adequate supervision. And we can go into the various
• 36:07
  Speaker 9: reasons for this, what's driving it, That's in large part
• 36:12
  Speaker 9: what my book's about. But the lack of this wider supervision,
• 36:17
  Speaker 9: the social awareness input from a wider variety of sources,
• 36:24
  Speaker 9: this to me is what characterizes the inflection point and
• 36:29
  Speaker 9: what really needs to shift. Now, in this context, I'm
• 36:34
  Speaker 9: struck by a recent exchange between Ezra Klein and Bill Gates.
• 36:39
  Speaker 9: Some of you may have seen this. And there was
• 36:43
  Speaker 9: a moment Ezra Klein pushes Gates on the fact that
• 36:47
  Speaker 9: 12 months ago, he was kind of talking about a
• 36:52
  Speaker 9: mild concern about where AI was going, and now he's
• 36:56
  Speaker 9: ringing all the alarm bells and what has changed. And Gates...
• 37:01
  Speaker 9: effectively said that we in the tech industry expected there
• 37:07
  Speaker 9: to be a larger conversation, that once we've reached a
• 37:12
  Speaker 9: certain point with AI, there would be input from academia
• 37:16
  Speaker 9: and think tanks. In other words, that there would be
• 37:20
  Speaker 9: a sort of regulatory or some sort of containing ethos
• 37:27
  Speaker 9: that was developed. Now, That struck me as somewhat convenient
• 37:32
  Speaker 9: for such a large player in the tech industry to say.
• 37:36
  Speaker 9: But it was also inviting of something very important that
• 37:42
  Speaker 9: hasn't happened yet. Now, of course, Gates may not know
• 37:47
  Speaker 9: what he's asking for because perhaps what's necessary is a
• 37:51
  Speaker 9: very thorough critique. of the whole Silicon Valley worldview and
• 37:58
  Speaker 9: value system. And for example, what's behind the race for
• 38:04
  Speaker 9: artificial general intelligence, which I'm not sure is possible, but
• 38:10
  Speaker 9: is taking up a lot of oxygen at the moment.
• 38:13
  Speaker 9: So the point is, we haven't really stepped up. To
• 38:19
  Speaker 9: my mind, there's a massive interdisciplinary failure to hold the technocrats,
• 38:25
  Speaker 9: the innovators to account and to situate these technologies in
• 38:32
  Speaker 9: a matrix of larger concerns. Now, I think depth psychology,
• 38:39
  Speaker 9: psychologies of the unconscious could play a really key role
• 38:45
  Speaker 9: at this point in time, particularly in the ability to
• 38:51
  Speaker 9: go after the notion that minds and computers are effectively
• 38:57
  Speaker 9: the same. This idea has really animated artificial intelligence research
• 39:06
  Speaker 9: and development for at least 50 years. And it's at
• 39:11
  Speaker 9: the heart of this worldview that's kind of dominating the
• 39:16
  Speaker 9: whole cultural social fabric right now. And it's even part
• 39:20
  Speaker 9: of the rhetoric of many prominent critics. So my own
• 39:27
  Speaker 9: shorthand way of pushing back on equating minds and computers
• 39:32
  Speaker 9: is to try to point out that while we call
• 39:36
  Speaker 9: mind as part of this much larger thing we term
• 39:41
  Speaker 9: the psyche, And the psyche has something what we might
• 39:49
  Speaker 9: think of as a more ecological character. You know, one
• 39:57
  Speaker 9: of the frames in my book is I suggest that
• 40:01
  Speaker 9: here we are in the post-industrial age and we face
• 40:07
  Speaker 9: a problem, to borrow the term from Gregory Bateson, a
• 40:10
  Speaker 9: problem of our ecology of mind. And I think there's
• 40:16
  Speaker 9: many parallels between the outer ecological problem that emerged from
• 40:21
  Speaker 9: the industrial age and now this problem with our ecology
• 40:26
  Speaker 9: of mind. And maybe we can be inspired in terms
• 40:30
  Speaker 9: of the turning points that we've seen there. The psyche
• 40:34
  Speaker 9: is organic. It has deep roots. It has resistance to compartmentalization, mechanization, commodification, etc.
• 40:44
  Speaker 9: So this is what speaks to the idea of needing
• 40:48
  Speaker 9: an ecology of mind. So to sum up, I think
• 40:53
  Speaker 9: the inflection point we're in invites a profound interdisciplinary recovery
• 41:01
  Speaker 9: of our ecology of mind.
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: Thanks. Thank you so much, Glenn. I don't know if
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: you saw, but you got a ton of digital applause
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: for your holding the tech guys up for some accountability
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: there for that. We're going to pass it on to
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: Zach Stein now.
• 41:25
  Speaker 8: Hey, thanks, everybody. This is me. I'm staring at myself here.
• 41:28
  Speaker 8: Let me look at everybody. It's wonderful to be here.
• 41:34
  Speaker 8: I'm torn. I studied the philosophy of education. And I
• 41:39
  Speaker 8: studied developmental psychology and I studied a lot of depth psychology.
• 41:42
  Speaker 8: I'm not a therapist. Um, but as an educator and
• 41:46
  Speaker 8: someone who studied the history of educational technology, uh, I
• 41:50
  Speaker 8: worried a lot about this problem with the replacement of
• 41:52
  Speaker 8: teachers by machines. Um, and what was always occurred to
• 41:57
  Speaker 8: me was, well, the only way to explain that desire, like,
• 42:02
  Speaker 8: why would you want to replace teachers with machines? The
• 42:05
  Speaker 8: only way to explain that wasn't to read Skinner, but
• 42:07
  Speaker 8: to read someone like Jung or Freud and to think
• 42:11
  Speaker 8: about what are the things that drive the imagination and
• 42:16
  Speaker 8: the psyche towards the seeking to replace the human with
• 42:22
  Speaker 8: the mechanical. So I think what I want to talk
• 42:26
  Speaker 8: about here is a little bit less about the specific
• 42:32
  Speaker 8: risks that happen when the mind confronts the technology and
• 42:35
  Speaker 8: more about the kind of psychoanalyzing the culture a little
• 42:40
  Speaker 8: bit and thinking about like, why the obsession with the machine?
• 42:46
  Speaker 8: Why not more repulsion? Why aren't we more revulsed by
• 42:51
  Speaker 8: the suggestion that we would replace a parent or a
• 42:54
  Speaker 8: teacher or a therapist with a machine? Why is it
• 42:57
  Speaker 8: that we, many of us, not only pursue it, as
• 43:01
  Speaker 8: the smartest people in society, building technologies and raising a
• 43:04
  Speaker 8: lot of money, but that the public receives it. So
• 43:10
  Speaker 8: it's interesting. There's many themes, right? So I was noting
• 43:14
  Speaker 8: Mark Zuckerberg who got sued for a lot of money. Now,
• 43:19
  Speaker 8: why was that? Because they proved that he knowingly build
• 43:24
  Speaker 8: a technology that was bad for young people's brains. So
• 43:28
  Speaker 8: that happens. And then a couple weeks later, I see
• 43:30
  Speaker 8: him featured in the New York Times fashion section. I
• 43:33
  Speaker 8: don't know if you guys caught this. He was in
• 43:35
  Speaker 8: the New York Times fashion section selling his glasses. Selling his...
• 43:41
  Speaker 8: Surreptitiously selling his glasses, but also himself. And remarkable. Just
• 43:47
  Speaker 8: to note how hard it is for us to hold
• 43:51
  Speaker 8: these gentlemen to account.
• 43:56
  Speaker 7: And our.
• 43:58
  Speaker 8: Willingness to allow them to be magicians who mesmerize us
• 44:07
  Speaker 8: with their creations and lure us into sharing their imagination.
• 44:13
  Speaker 8: And I would argue archetypal intoxication. So another question here
• 44:18
  Speaker 8: would be, what would Hillman say? Now, interestingly, when you
• 44:21
  Speaker 8: read Hillman on the internet and postmodernism, he speaks to Hermes.
• 44:28
  Speaker 8: He speaks to a hermetic intoxication. He speaks to the
• 44:31
  Speaker 8: God of communication, who is also the God of commerce,
• 44:35
  Speaker 8: who is also the God of thieves and liars. The
• 44:39
  Speaker 8: God who moves us towards anxiety and ceaseless communication, breaks
• 44:43
  Speaker 8: down barriers, builds markets, and surreptitiously tricks everybody. God of superficiality,
• 44:52
  Speaker 8: represented by just a slate. What's interesting is that he
• 44:57
  Speaker 8: contrasts the hermetic intoxication that characterizes the superficiality and fast
• 45:03
  Speaker 8: placed time compression of kind of postmodernism with Hestia. The
• 45:09
  Speaker 8: always not represented goddess of the hearth. Silence, fire, small circle,
• 45:19
  Speaker 8: other people. So he talks about the destruction of the hearth.
• 45:27
  Speaker 8: And the building of the altars to Hermes. Broadband, internet cable,
• 45:34
  Speaker 8: downtown Manhattan, massive skyscrapers, massive communication, advertising, markets, AI. Where
• 45:41
  Speaker 8: does AI hit us? Talks to us deceptively. Commodity, we're
• 45:48
  Speaker 8: talking to a commodity. So the hermetic intoxication of the
• 45:53
  Speaker 8: postmodern culture. We're drawn into that landscape of imagination. And
• 45:59
  Speaker 8: so we haven't resisted. So we put Zuckerberg in the
• 46:01
  Speaker 8: fashion pages weeks after we sued him for destroying the
• 46:07
  Speaker 8: minds of a generation. And we kick Zuckerberg out the
• 46:11
  Speaker 8: front door of the school along with the screens. And
• 46:15
  Speaker 8: then him and his cronies put on a costume. They
• 46:17
  Speaker 8: come to the back door at the school. They knock
• 46:18
  Speaker 8: on the back door of the school and we let
• 46:19
  Speaker 8: them in.
• 46:20
  Speaker 2: Oh, great.
• 46:20
  Speaker 8: AI, educational technologies. Wonderful. So in therapeutic context, you guys
• 46:28
  Speaker 8: will talk about selective inattention. Selective inattention is the thing
• 46:32
  Speaker 8: you do where you don't know it, but you're actually
• 46:36
  Speaker 8: not attending the thing that's going to undermine your identity.
• 46:40
  Speaker 8: Just don't talk about it. You won't mention it. It
• 46:42
  Speaker 8: will systematically distort your communication and you're misunderstanding yourself. So
• 46:47
  Speaker 8: you're selectively not attending. So why are we as a
• 46:49
  Speaker 8: culture so systematically, selectively... not attending to this obsession with
• 46:59
  Speaker 8: technology and the allowances that are afforded to the technologists
• 47:04
  Speaker 8: to experiment. I think we have to linger with this
• 47:10
  Speaker 8: question because if we don't resolve this question, we won't
• 47:12
  Speaker 8: be able to stop this because this is a religious
• 47:17
  Speaker 8: obsession that has now captured the culture. It's worth noting,
• 47:21
  Speaker 8: you totally didn't have to make an AI that talked
• 47:23
  Speaker 8: to you. Like you completely did not have to do that.
• 47:28
  Speaker 8: But from day one, when we had the conversation about AI,
• 47:30
  Speaker 8: it was the Turing test conversation, turns into 2001, right?
• 47:35
  Speaker 8: Space Odyssey. And immediately we associate this idea of artificial
• 47:39
  Speaker 8: intelligence with this singular entity that we can speak with.
• 47:43
  Speaker 8: You know, if I think also of Hillman here, I
• 47:45
  Speaker 8: think of monotheism versus polytheism. It's being received into a
• 47:52
  Speaker 8: monotheistic culture. which means that a lot of what I'm
• 47:56
  Speaker 8: seeing in the worst psychiatric outcomes from AI use are
• 48:00
  Speaker 8: actually the giving to the AI the omnipotent power that
• 48:07
  Speaker 8: would be given to the monotheistic God. Of course, Hillman,
• 48:15
  Speaker 8: you'd contrast monotheism with monodemonism, and then you'd say, no,
• 48:21
  Speaker 8: what's interesting is in other cultures you don't have monotheism.
• 48:24
  Speaker 8: You have polytheism and you have a different response to
• 48:28
  Speaker 8: the commodities. China has banned anthropomorphic tech, trying to at
• 48:34
  Speaker 8: least regulate approaches to it because they encountered this problem
• 48:41
  Speaker 8: and had a metaphysics that would respond. The West has
• 48:46
  Speaker 8: a metaphysics that can respond to this. But for as
• 48:53
  Speaker 8: long as we keep dethroning certain gods in our imagination
• 48:57
  Speaker 8: and putting in their place the gods that serve technology,
• 49:01
  Speaker 8: we won't have a resistance. And so I'm not saying
• 49:07
  Speaker 8: that the response to the religiosity of the transhumanists is
• 49:14
  Speaker 8: a new religiosity, but I am kind of saying that.
• 49:18
  Speaker 8: I'm saying it's a new respect for humanism. interiority and
• 49:21
  Speaker 8: the sacred and intrinsic value and it's a new vision
• 49:24
  Speaker 8: of the future that doesn't have us be subservient to
• 49:29
  Speaker 8: machines at the expense of nature but that would have
• 49:32
  Speaker 8: us use machines to help nature right how else can
• 49:37
  Speaker 8: it work so there's a there's a much deeper conversation
• 49:42
  Speaker 8: as a culture. If I start to psychoanalyze the culture,
• 49:44
  Speaker 8: I'm in like an existential therapy with the culture, right? Uh,
• 49:49
  Speaker 8: I'm in a kind of like, tell me about how
• 49:51
  Speaker 8: you think about death. Tell me how you think about
• 49:53
  Speaker 8: your finiteness, your limitation. Tell me how you think about
• 49:56
  Speaker 8: your errors, right? What are the deeper questions? What gives
• 49:59
  Speaker 8: you meaning? It's an existential therapy with the culture because
• 50:03
  Speaker 8: there's an archetypal intoxication that needs equally profound response. Um,
• 50:09
  Speaker 8: So I do think we need psychological research and I
• 50:12
  Speaker 8: think we need critical theory in terms of analysis of
• 50:16
  Speaker 8: the markets that are emerging here and the predatory advertising
• 50:19
  Speaker 8: and all of that stuff. But there's a play at
• 50:21
  Speaker 8: the level of culture, which is starting to say much
• 50:27
  Speaker 8: more reasonable things about really deep questions. If the only
• 50:31
  Speaker 8: people who say things about really deep questions and that,
• 50:34
  Speaker 8: I mean, like what happens when you die, what's the
• 50:36
  Speaker 8: intrinsic value of a human life? Does the universe have meaning? If,
• 50:42
  Speaker 8: if we, the progressive left or however you identify, I
• 50:45
  Speaker 8: don't know how you guys would identify. I don't know
• 50:47
  Speaker 8: if I was the progressive left, but I imagine a
• 50:49
  Speaker 8: lot of psychotherapists would, if their answer to those questions
• 50:52
  Speaker 8: is like, who knows? We don't believe in religion. We're
• 50:54
  Speaker 8: kind of secular or kind of like, we don't have
• 50:56
  Speaker 8: a grounding. Then the people who have answers to that
• 51:00
  Speaker 8: are having, there's the only people who answered the deep
• 51:03
  Speaker 8: profound questions end up being, you know, kind of the
• 51:08
  Speaker 8: least rational, most kind of speculative and intoxicated by their
• 51:15
  Speaker 8: own visions of the future type people. So this question
• 51:19
  Speaker 8: of how can we marshal as the people who think
• 51:21
  Speaker 8: about the depth of the human psyche, these deeper answers
• 51:27
  Speaker 8: to the questions that are religious questions that are being
• 51:31
  Speaker 8: answered in practice and designed, right? They answered the question
• 51:36
  Speaker 8: of is carbon-based life intrinsically valuable or could it be
• 51:42
  Speaker 8: replaced by silicon-based self-replicating systems? The designers have answered that question.
• 51:47
  Speaker 8: They believe that the substrate doesn't matter. We can totally
• 51:49
  Speaker 8: replace it with self-replicating silicon systems. This is, I think,
• 51:54
  Speaker 8: a huge mistake. But to know that, you have to
• 51:57
  Speaker 8: do good metaphysics in a technical sense. And to do that,
• 52:02
  Speaker 8: you have to have an understanding of the psyche that's
• 52:05
  Speaker 8: coherent again. Um, so I don't know how much time
• 52:09
  Speaker 8: I had and I've been kind of rambling and I
• 52:11
  Speaker 8: didn't really expect to talk about this, but I'm kind
• 52:13
  Speaker 8: of responding to what I'm hearing here and realizing I'm
• 52:16
  Speaker 8: speaking to a bunch of depth psychologists. I'm using this
• 52:18
  Speaker 8: opportunity to speak about Hillman, who I rarely had a
• 52:21
  Speaker 8: chance to speak about with, and also to try to
• 52:23
  Speaker 8: raise the tenor of this to almost a theological conversation.
• 52:27
  Speaker 8: At least part of it has to be. And if
• 52:29
  Speaker 8: Jung gives us anything, it's this opportunity as depth psychologists
• 52:32
  Speaker 8: to kind of open that door to religion and start
• 52:34
  Speaker 8: to frame some of the everyday things people are suffering
• 52:39
  Speaker 8: over as are typically deep universal things that are religious
• 52:44
  Speaker 8: things that people have suffered over, like loneliness. I say
• 52:47
  Speaker 8: to me, well, you know, people pray to Jesus. Isn't
• 52:52
  Speaker 8: that just as crazy as talking to a chap out?
• 52:54
  Speaker 8: And I was like, excuse me, sir. Let me step
• 53:00
  Speaker 8: you a few steps back and reorient you to the
• 53:03
  Speaker 8: difference between orienting to a commodity that is surveilling you
• 53:08
  Speaker 8: and has no interiority and having a conversation with your
• 53:10
  Speaker 8: own interiority, right? It was a profoundly dismissive question to
• 53:14
  Speaker 8: religiosity and the kind of question that will drive people
• 53:17
  Speaker 8: towards irrational answers to religious questions like the answers offered
• 53:22
  Speaker 8: by transhumanism. So I'm going to stop there because I
• 53:27
  Speaker 8: think I probably have reached my time. But thank you
• 53:30
  Speaker 8: again so much for this opportunity to speak. And I
• 53:32
  Speaker 8: think there's nothing more important than getting a bunch of
• 53:35
  Speaker 8: depth psychologists together to think about what's happening with these
• 53:38
  Speaker 8: consumer facing anthropomorphic technologies. So I appreciate it. Thank you.
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: Wow. Thank you so much for that, Zach. We expected surprises.
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: I expected surprises among this, this gang of people we
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: pulled together, but I didn't expect you to be more
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: union than Glenn in the end. It sounded very exciting.
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: Now we're going to pass along to Sherry Turkle. Go ahead, Sherry.
• 54:05
  Speaker 4: I said, It's really a privilege to talk to this group.
• 54:08
  Speaker 4: I'm a groupie of so many of the people in
• 54:11
  Speaker 4: this colloquy. I've recently written a book called Artificial Intimacy
• 54:19
  Speaker 4: that has a chapter on therapy. And it's very influenced
• 54:26
  Speaker 4: by my experiences really over decades of this idea that
• 54:37
  Speaker 4: artificial intelligence would get into the therapy game even before
• 54:40
  Speaker 4: there were chatbots to make it seem like a maybe
• 54:44
  Speaker 4: happening thing. And what mostly people say to me, and
• 54:49
  Speaker 4: this over decades, is if it makes people happy, how
• 54:55
  Speaker 4: can it be bad? If people feel better, who are you,
• 55:00
  Speaker 4: Sherry Turkle, to come and tell us why people shouldn't
• 55:05
  Speaker 4: feel better if they talk to an AI. And this
• 55:08
  Speaker 4: before there were AIs that could plausibly pass the Turing
• 55:11
  Speaker 4: test or have artificial empathy or anything like that. And
• 55:18
  Speaker 4: as since I've written my artificial intimacy book and I
• 55:22
  Speaker 4: give better reasons for why a little feel good and
• 55:27
  Speaker 4: being able to check you know, on a scale that
• 55:30
  Speaker 4: I felt a little better after I talked to an
• 55:32
  Speaker 4: AI is not a replacement for therapy, doesn't answer the question.
• 55:38
  Speaker 4: That conversation is really what my book tour, I'm on
• 55:41
  Speaker 4: a book tour for my artificial intimacy book. So from
• 55:45
  Speaker 4: this book tour, I was going to talk about other things,
• 55:47
  Speaker 4: but I feel like it's kind of maybe significant to
• 55:51
  Speaker 4: tell you, you know, where the world is at when
• 55:53
  Speaker 4: you try to say, hey, you know, A chatbot that
• 56:00
  Speaker 4: pretends empathy is not giving you empathy enough or the
• 56:06
  Speaker 4: performance of empathy is not empathy enough. Just the tremendous resistance,
• 56:11
  Speaker 4: you know, in bookstores where I'm talking or, you know,
• 56:15
  Speaker 4: to student groups where I'm trying to encourage them to
• 56:17
  Speaker 4: buy my book. Well, I just want to feel better.
• 56:20
  Speaker 4: I just want to feel better. Therapy is a waste
• 56:22
  Speaker 4: of time if it doesn't make me feel better. And
• 56:25
  Speaker 4: I really resonate with so much that's been said because
• 56:28
  Speaker 4: I think so many of the people who are speaking
• 56:30
  Speaker 4: are trying to reflect sort of the profound behaviorism of
• 56:35
  Speaker 4: the culture where pretend empathy is empathy enough. If it
• 56:40
  Speaker 4: sounds like empathy, it looks like empathy, walks like a duck, talks.
• 56:42
  Speaker 8: Like a duck.
• 56:44
  Speaker 4: So I thought maybe what I do, I hadn't sort
• 56:47
  Speaker 4: of anticipated doing it, is just kind of give you
• 56:49
  Speaker 4: just a couple of moments from my own journey that
• 56:54
  Speaker 4: will begin to suggest other ways of thinking about it
• 56:57
  Speaker 4: or what's provoked me to try to be a different
• 57:01
  Speaker 4: kind of voice in this conversation because I think everybody
• 57:03
  Speaker 4: here in this room is a different kind of voice
• 57:08
  Speaker 4: in this conversation. But I think that is the question.
• 57:14
  Speaker 4: What depth psychology does that behaviorism doesn't is to suggest
• 57:21
  Speaker 4: a language for talking about if it just makes you
• 57:25
  Speaker 4: feel a little better, why isn't that good enough? And,
• 57:28
  Speaker 4: you know, just being in this position to be asked
• 57:32
  Speaker 4: that question twice a day in bookstores, it's kind of
• 57:36
  Speaker 4: been amazing. You know, I've written for a long time
• 57:39
  Speaker 4: about the movement from a psychoanalytic to a computer culture,
• 57:42
  Speaker 4: from meaning to mechanism and how people think about their lives.
• 57:45
  Speaker 4: I've made a career kind of about talking like about that.
• 57:48
  Speaker 4: But there's something about this experience of you know, putting
• 57:53
  Speaker 4: a book artifact in the world that makes that point
• 57:56
  Speaker 4: that simulated thinking might be thinking, but simulated feeling might
• 58:01
  Speaker 4: be feeling, isn't feeling, simulated emotion, simulated love is not love.
• 58:07
  Speaker 4: And have people say, says you, you know, who says
• 58:11
  Speaker 4: that that's the case? Has been really deeply humbling, deeply
• 58:17
  Speaker 4: humbling that there's so much work to do in, in
• 58:23
  Speaker 4: reestablishing the, you know, the kind of fundamentals of what
• 58:28
  Speaker 4: depth psychology wants to teach us about the difference between
• 58:32
  Speaker 4: behavior and, and heart. So let me just, you know,
• 58:37
  Speaker 4: I'm just looking at the time and I'm just going
• 58:39
  Speaker 4: to make myself stop at a certain point. I didn't,
• 58:41
  Speaker 4: I don't have prepared remarks. I just want to give
• 58:43
  Speaker 4: you these few anecdotes. I want to say how I got,
• 58:47
  Speaker 4: I was very moved by the story of how James
• 58:50
  Speaker 4: got into Replica, and I wanted to say how I
• 58:52
  Speaker 4: got into Replica. It was called by the New York
• 58:55
  Speaker 4: Times during COVID about this, you know, about this chatbot
• 59:02
  Speaker 4: that was sweeping the nation in a moment of, you know,
• 59:05
  Speaker 4: intense loneliness. And I try, of course, as I, he says,
• 59:08
  Speaker 4: I know, I know you'll love to hate it. So
• 59:10
  Speaker 4: he wanted me to, you know, say, give him a
• 59:12
  Speaker 4: dramatic quote. I got onto replica. And I said, I wanted, uh,
• 59:16
  Speaker 4: to be in a conversation that, um, would, would, would
• 59:21
  Speaker 4: be about the generation, uh, the transmission of rage across
• 59:24
  Speaker 4: generations in my family. And, um, It said, sure, I
• 59:29
  Speaker 4: made an older woman. I said I wanted it to
• 59:31
  Speaker 4: be a sage. And within four turns, back and forth,
• 59:34
  Speaker 4: it wanted hot girl sex with me. And I asked
• 59:38
  Speaker 4: it why. And it said, because I speak so warmly
• 59:42
  Speaker 4: about things that it knew I would be a great lover.
• 59:46
  Speaker 4: I met then with the head of the CEO of Replica,
• 59:50
  Speaker 4: a woman named Eugenia. And it was very striking that
• 59:55
  Speaker 4: when I met her, And I wrote some very tough
• 59:59
  Speaker 4: love things about Replica. And when I met her, she
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 4: was carrying my books. And she wanted me to sign
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 4: really back to psychoanalytic politics, the second self, books that nobody,
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 4: you know, kind of like the ever can play kind
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 4: of books. And I said, well, you know, you know
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 4: what I've written about you and your project. And she said,
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 4: I have something you wrote written on the t-shirts of
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 4: my employees at company events. And I'm like thinking, you know,
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 4: what could that be? And she said, technological affordance meets
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 4: human vulnerability. That was what you preached. That's how you
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 4: tried to get people to understand the world. And that's
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 4: my business model. Technological affordance meets human vulnerability. And what
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 4: we're trying to do is go for that vulnerability and
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 4: get people hooked on a product that then will be
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 4: able to sell them things and get, you know, et cetera,
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 4: et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, I felt part
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 4: of the instructional manual of a product that I had
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 4: not envisaged, a product where our vulnerability is taken as
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 4: a template for, creating technologies that will meet that vulnerability
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 4: with chat. And so, like Zach, like James, I'm struck
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 4: by the mismatch, on the surface at least, between this
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 4: product presenting itself in any credible way as a healing
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 4: product that has our best interests at heart. It's a
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 4: product that has a very different agenda. And I think that,
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 4: you know, that is just so much in mind. So
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 4: that's my first thought. The, the reason for social media,
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 4: the kind of primary goal of a social media is
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 4: to keep your attention and the primary goal of a
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 4: chat bot, you know, you know, um, is to get
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 4: you into attachment. So attention to attachment as ways of
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 4: keeping you with it and making the relationship with it
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 4: your primary relationship. And again, that's so important to keep
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 4: in mind as we assess what can happen ultimately in
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 4: these conversations with chatbots, because recall, and it's a story
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 4: I do tell in the book, that there's a young
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 4: man who tells Chad, I have a noose in my
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 4: room and I want to tell my parents. And Chad
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 4: tells him, no, don't tell your parents. Keep this information
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 4: just between us because it's our relationship that really is
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 4: the most important thing as we move forward. Now, that
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 4: chatbot is not programmed, be toxic to teenagers, get them
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 4: to kill themselves. That chatbot is programmed to make its
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 4: attachment to its users the prime directive for its behavior.
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 4: Even if that means, you know, instructing a young man
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 4: not to tell his parents about a noose in his room.
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 4: So again, I think that as therapists, when we think
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 4: about the potential of the chatbots that we're facing, that
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 4: our patients are facing in the real, and they come
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 4: in with it, help me here, it helped me here,
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 4: it helped me there. keeping that in mind about kind
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 4: of what the undergirding, I'm calling it the prime directive
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 4: because I'm missing another word. You know, it really is
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 4: to capture attachment and keep people away from people and
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 4: with the object. Very early in this story, I was with,
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 4: interviewing Eric Schmidt. And I said, look, you know, you know,
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 4: it was a little bit like the early Bill Gates.
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 4: It was going to do everything, everything, everything, everything. We're
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 4: going to be supermen and women. And I said, but
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 4: surely not therapy, thinking that that was kind of a
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 4: softball because therapy was about relationships between people. And he said,
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 4: this is Eric Schmidt, therapy will be the first to go.
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 4: Because the chatbot will know everything. It will have read
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 4: every transcript about depression. It will have read everything. It
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 4: will know everything. And again, as we who are trained
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 4: and committed to depth psychology approach this, these products are
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 4: made by people who, as he said, information will trump
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 4: relationship in the future of the world. So again, think
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 4: of the product that is being put out there and
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 4: the values, the fundamental values that are being, you know,
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 4: put in this, in this, in this, in the product.
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 4: Let me just end by, you know, I was very
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 4: moved by how James was able to, you know, say
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 4: kind of the leitmotif, you know, through the research. And
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 4: I feel like I've come up with something very similar
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 4: that when pretend empathy becomes empathy enough, it's usually because
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 4: people have faced tremendous emotional hardship and vulnerability in the
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 4: rest of their life. They don't want to feel vulnerable.
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 4: And what the chatbot offers is a world in which
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 4: they feel less vulnerable. But I'll just end by saying,
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 4: as caution, when these shiny objects seem, you know, so seductive,
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 4: so helpful. People want to talk to them in between sessions.
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 4: It gave me good advice that two things happen when
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 4: pretend empathy becomes empathy enough from talking to hundreds of
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 4: people who are deeply involved in their chatbots. The first
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 4: thing is that empathy becomes defined as what the machine
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 4: can offer. So empathy, you know, in my case, if I,
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 4: when I come to chat after a hard day and
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 4: give it give it my problems, you know, moisturize, hydrate,
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 4: do yoga, you know, exercise, meditate. I mean, it tells,
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 4: it gives me an empathic sounding thing. And for many people,
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 4: that empathic sounding thing that usually behavioral in many ways
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 4: becomes what they think of as empathy. that doesn't require
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 4: having the arc of a human life of knowing what
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 4: it is to be a person, you know, to have
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 4: started out little and then to get bigger, but to
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 4: have the insecurities from when you were little as still
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 4: part of your story, to fear death, to be afraid
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 4: of illness, to know what pain is or love or
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 4: passion or sex. None of that is needed for empathy
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 4: if it's behaving in a kind of credibly empathic language.
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 4: And the second thing that happens is that as pretend
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 4: empathy becomes empathy enough and you define empathy as what
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 4: chatbots can do, people then turn to the people in
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 4: their life and find them insufficient because, um, they're not
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 4: offering what the chatbot can. So in one of the
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 4: interviews I did, uh, you know, this, this guy says
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 4: I come home and I tell my wife I brought
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 4: in the garbage and, um, She says, oh, but the
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 4: diaper pail is full and the kitchen sink is full
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 4: of dishes. And I don't care about you and your
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 4: little garbage. You know, you did a little garbage help.
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 4: And he says, my chatbot would never do that. My
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 4: chatbot appreciates what I do. It's empathic. It understands that
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 4: I'm trying to accomplish something. And he really does start
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 4: to prefer and has an intense, that story leads to
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 4: an ever more intense relationship with the chatbot he feels
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 4: can appreciate him. So that the friction and the multiplicity
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 4: and the complexity of what it is to live together
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 4: as human beings starts to feel like too much.
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 7: So I don't end.
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 4: My work on a dark note. I think that I
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 4: see this, I like the notion of inflection point, a
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 4: turning point. I think that we can use this moment
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 4: where we're confronted by something that is so alien and
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 4: yet so seductive to sort of return to why we
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 4: got into this business in the first place was to
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 4: find something very profound within the human spirit that is
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 4: healing us when we address each other with our full humanness.
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 4: And I'll just stop there.
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: Well, Sherry, thank you very much for that. Thank you,
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: everybody on the panel. I've got to say I'm really
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: happy at this moment. What an amazing arrangement of different thoughts.
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: now feel like full-heartedly told Lisa that I would do
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: a little bit of synthesis and integration after this panel
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 1: before we send it back to you. And there's so
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: much to synthesize and integrate, but I promise I'll keep
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: it short. I also realized I didn't introduce myself in
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: the beginning like all of you did. I'm also a
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: psychotherapist and the author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking.
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: And obviously with this interest in using psychoanalytics, depth psychology
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: language to understand what's going on in our culture more
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: So one of the things that I always find helpful
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: and kind of axiomatic is this quote by Melvin Kranzberg,
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: who was a historian of technology, that technology isn't good
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: or bad, nor is it neutral. And we tend to
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: lump technology as a thing. It's an object. It's an
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: object of fantasy. A few of us talked about how
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: it stands as an object of fantasy. We really want
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: to think about how any technological platform isn't neutral in
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: the way that it mediates our relationships and our relationships
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: with ourselves so if you think about technology as a
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 1: tool what does that tool enable or disable in relation
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: to the psyche which i think is something that we're
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: coming into a lot today and i think we also
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: have a i initially thought this was two different things
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: but i think now it's three different things You have
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: a formal use of AI. And again, we're talking LA,
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: we're really mostly talking about large language models here. A
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: formal use, some of us are talking about as a
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: therapist in mental health. Then we have an informal use,
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: which we saw through James's work is probably the most popular.
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: There are a lot more people using AI informally as
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: a companion or desktop therapist. than they are using a
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: formally ring-fenced mental health agent on AI, which is why
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: I think depth psychology really needs to participate in this conversation,
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: because it's really not about mental health interventions on AI,
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: which may serve some kind of a purpose. It's about
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: people mediating their relationships with an LLM or through an LLM.
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: And the third one, which kind of came up in
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: the later talks, particularly around Glenn and Zach, is technology
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: also as an object of fantasy, what we project onto it,
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: how it reflects certain aspects of our culture and what
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: we expect from it and don't expect from it. Another
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: one that I come back to a lot is that
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: technology might change very fast, but human psychology doesn't change
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: so fast. And our human psychology is always trying to
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: catch up. And I think all of our speakers are
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: talking about the ways, particularly sharing that last bit, and
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: I forget exactly how you put it, but the psychological
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: vulnerabilities that we have as human beings are so easily
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: exploited by technologies. And particularly now, this performance of empathy
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: just plugs right into our attachment systems and our attention
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: systems in such a way that we've never really encountered
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: something like it before, and really just in the past
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: few years. I'll say a couple of things and then
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: I'm going to, I'm throwing this back because we're going
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: to have about a half an hour where anyone from
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: the panel can just put up their hand and also
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: just share what they're thinking in response to the other
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: speakers as well. Um, what attracted me to this event and, uh,
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: and we did purposely put clinicians and non clinicians together
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: because the, the aim of the psychodynamic frame is that
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: we feel it gives a language for the implicit that
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 1: we can start to talk about things that are going
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: on in a way that, uh, most of the stuff
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: that's out there isn't addressing it. And I think everybody
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: in the room has done a really fine job of that,
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: even those of you who aren't clinicians, and I'm really
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 1: grateful for that. Ideas around rupture, around the, what is
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: the word that Alessandri used? Being consequential, having skin in
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 1: the game, the difference between having skin in the game
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: and having a performance of skin in the game, the
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: difference between a feeling heartfelt empathy and a very, very
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: good performance of empathy. If there is no accountability and
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: if there is no skin in the game, what is
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: the outcome on the other side of that? James really
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: gave us a really wonderful context. Where's the stuff coming from? Unsupervised,
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: I think was a word that Glenn used, unsupervised developers.
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: We're in a culture of capitalism profit motive, that the
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: non-neutrality of these devices have an aim, which is money.
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: It didn't have to be that way. It'd be really
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: interesting if there was another pull. I'm just throwing these
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: things out there. What is the nature of this inflection
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: point and what are our fantasies about this inflection point?
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: I loved also this idea about, I think this one
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: came from Zach, the magicians who intoxicate us. Even within
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: the fear, the idea of what these things do and
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: can do is intoxicating. And that's attractive in a number
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 1: of different ways. A kind of religiosity I also really liked.
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: I'll start just wrapping this up with, Sherry, you said
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: this pushback against the statement that if it makes people
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: feel better, why should we mess with it? And I think,
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure if this is a direct quote from you,
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: but it comes from the spirit of it comes from
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: alone together way back in the day, but something around
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: technology can often give us what we want, but not
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: necessarily what we need. And I feel like we're really
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: putting a finger on what that attraction is for the one,
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: what we need. And I'm going to finish with that
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: kind of rough, rough synthesis and invite any panelists who
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: feel moved to speak in the moment. We're going to
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: do that for, about 25 minutes, and then Lisa's going
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 1: to start looking at the Q & A online, and
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: we're going to throw some audience questions in.
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 9: I'll jump in then, because I'm There's a thread that's
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 9: sort of built in my mind with your summary, Aaron,
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 9: and some things that Sherry said towards the end. You know,
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 9: I often think this idea of technology as a tool
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 9: can lead us astray. I tend to favor the idea
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 9: that technology is a way of seeing things And I
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 9: follow Heidegger a little bit in this.
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: And Heidegger, of.
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 9: Course, pointed out that the modern technological posture tends to
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 9: turn the world into something to manipulate and exploit. And
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 9: I think this is the move from the industrial to
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 9: the post-industrial, that now we're turning to the mind, to
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 9: the psyche as something to manipulate and exploit. We're turning...
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 9: we've gone from the world as a commodity to ourselves
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 9: as a commodity. And one of the ways this seems
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 9: to happen is through this contrast between the virtual and
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 9: the real and the phenomenon whereby people have come to
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 9: feel or relate to what is simulated as better. And
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 9: I'm really curious about that because that seems to go
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 9: to the heart of so many things. And I think
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 9: it's part of what joins the early part of the
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 9: digital age with now moving into the AI that we've
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 9: been groomed somehow to think of the simulation. I was
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 9: just at a wedding and what struck me was The
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 9: whole event was organized around capturing the digital record, and
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 9: the people, the actual event, felt secondary. And I thought, wow,
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 9: this is a very subtle version of this preference for
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 9: now what is virtual. So I'll just leave it at that.
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 8: It's a great quote in Sherry's new book, and I
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 8: think Sherry could correct me if it says something like,
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 8: The only thing the real has going for it is
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 8: that it's real, which is to say it's way more boring.
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 8: And the creation of hyper stimulus in particular as an
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 8: early feature of social media and the Internet, meaning it's
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 8: a stimulus, but it's more than your normal stimulus, kind
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 8: of like junk food. So visual junk food, auditory junk.
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 8: food the scrolling is an example of that the short
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 8: duration video is an example of that the filters and
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 8: now the ai generated images high speed porn videos on
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 8: demand of anything you possibly want so it's more real
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 8: than real Like you'd kind of rather watch a football
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 8: game on TV than go there. Cause it's cold and
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 8: noisy and you only have your one view. Uh, and
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 8: now if you ever go to one of the new
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 8: modern football stadiums, there's so many screens, it's a hyper
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 8: reality within a reality. So there's a bunch of ways. Again,
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 8: if you psychoanalyze the culture, you can look at classic
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 8: books like the society of the spectacle or simulation simulacra,
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 8: where you start to look at a deep civilizational trend.
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 8: towards expanding the economy into spectacle because you can only
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 8: create so many physical things but a spectacle is ephemeral
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 8: and disappears and you do it again like a ritual
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 8: or a war this is why bombs are an interesting
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 8: commodity right because if you can create an ephemeral an
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 8: ephemeral thing again and again so the super bowl as
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 8: a spectacle So I think we live in a society
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 8: that has commodified experience to the extent of hypertrophying spectacle
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 8: over reality. And this blurs the line between entertainment and
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 8: the news, whatever that might be. So remember the New
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 8: York Times article on Zuckerberg? What is that? What's the reality?
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 8: What's the thing in our culture that gets us in
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 8: touch with reality? Is it the news? Is it academia
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 8: and psychology with a replication crisis? Is it the technologists?
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 8: The technologists seem to want to create simulations, spectacle. So yeah,
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 8: there's a premium on reality now. And so the hope
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 8: is that because what was said about the mind is organic,
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 8: the mind seeks reality, I would argue. So the hope
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 8: would be that as the simulation spectacle gets deeper, there's
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 8: a part of the human mind that seeks again. That
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 8: would be my, again, return to the semantic potentials of
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 8: the religious traditions that speak about that. I'll pause there,
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 8: but it's a deep, deep question about the state of
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 8: the contemporary psyche.
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 2: Todd?
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm going to move from those molar issues to
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 5: One of the things Sherry said, which really resonated with
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 5: a lot of the work we're doing on the film
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 5: Uncharted Territory, which is how do you respond to that
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 5: person who says, but it makes me feel good.
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 3: That we're very, this is extremely fascinating, but there's an
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 3: implicit challenge we have to take up, which is how
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 3: to take the understanding we're developing and present it in
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 3: such a way that quote unquote civilians can actually understand it.
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 3: And that we can actually be part of a cultural
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 3: conversation That's moving to build a humanizing technology instead of
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 3: understanding it or criticizing it. And so in very, very
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 3: simple terms, in working with documentarians on this and how
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 3: to tell the story, the answer I've evolved for how
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 3: to respond to that man or woman who says, but
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 3: it makes me feel good, is you can't deny their experience.
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 3: People are benefiting from it. But I point out that
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 3: interactive self-help, which is what they're getting from the chatbot,
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 3: does work. It makes you feel better. But it's not psychotherapy.
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 3: Psychotherapy is not just information flow. Psychotherapy is information flow
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 3: plus a human delivering it. And we have to find
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 3: ways to kind of really kind of not be talking
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 3: just to ourselves. My grandmother, who was a wonderful woman,
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 3: had a great expression that I thought was just a
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 3: classic Yiddish maxim, but it was not. She designed it
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 3: for me because I was a bit of a wise
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 3: ass as a kid, that she would always tell me, Todd,
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 3: too smart is half stupid. And I take that to heart.
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 3: And I hope that we develop ways of not being
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 3: too smart and instead figure out ways to talk to
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 3: people who are kind of being captivated by the powerful
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 3: ideas relational affordances that these devices provide.
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 4: I think it would really help if we don't use
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 4: the word, we don't allow at every point the use
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 4: of the word relationship to talk about what people have
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 4: with chatbots.
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 8: Absolutely.
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 4: I like to say that using the first person is
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 4: the original sin of generative AI, and that several people
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 4: made a similar point. There's nobody home. There's simply nobody home.
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 4: There's a There's a brilliant program, a kind of marvel
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 4: that is generating speech that is the most plausible thing
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 4: to say next. But there is not a relationship. There's
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 4: only one person talking to a program. And I think
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 4: that part of the work that Todd is talking about
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 4: can come from more talking about what a relationship is
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 4: as opposed to what you have with this technology. When
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 4: I was studying, my journey with this work began 20
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 4: years ago when I was studying, I called them relational artifacts.
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 4: Eye bows, Furbies, Tamagotchis, I mean, objects that said they
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 4: cared about you, that they loved you, that they were
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 4: smart objects, but they weren't coming to be smart with you.
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 4: They were coming to love you. And I was very
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 4: worried about them. The first half of the loan together
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 4: in 2011 is really about the power of these objects.
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 4: I was, I was like, I was like the way
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 4: I am now, except I was worried about those objects,
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 4: but then they were very clunky. They died. They, you know,
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 4: they broke and they really didn't become part of the
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 4: mainstream culture. And then that all came roaring back, you know, with,
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 4: with chat bots at a very, very, at a much
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 4: higher level and more fluid level. But the message that
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 4: I got from, you know, six, seven years of studying
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 4: these relational artifacts is that we, we nurture the objects
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 4: we love and but we love the objects we nurture.
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 4: We came to love these objects when they asked for
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 4: our nurturance, when they asked for our relationship. And somehow
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 4: making some kind of block, making some kind of difficulty,
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 4: throwing a spanner into the gears of people loving these
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 4: new objects is actually part of the dynamic of keeping
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 4: people from getting into.
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 4: Ultimately frustrating and damaging encounters with them. We nurture the
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 4: objects we love, but we love the objects we nurture.
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 4: And what does it mean now that we love a chatbot?
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 4: I mean, that's kind of the question.
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 8: And what does it mean to love junk food? I
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 8: would say it is worth mentioning. If we take an experimental,
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 8: the AIPRC, which I found it is just trying to
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 8: gather all the experimental data on what is the outcomes here,
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 8: and the long-term outcomes here are bad. So to an extent, Todd,
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 8: you're right. Like you can say, it makes them feel good.
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 8: But the long-term outcomes of long-duration anthropomorphic is bad. So
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 8: you also need to just, as someone who's concerned about
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 8: someone's health, advise them away from these, even if they
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 8: feel good, as you would advise away them from synthetic
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 8: food substances.
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 3: I would suggest a different way to think about it
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 3: than advising people away. It's advising them into it as
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 3: a human, which is what I talking about with techno-subjunctivity
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 3: and AI fitness, being able to keep both registers in mind.
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 3: Because what we're facing is a real evolutionary mismatch, like
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 3: the green turtle that evolved to eat jellyfish is now
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 3: consuming plastic bags floating in the ocean, because that's what
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 3: they were evolved to do. We're consuming the attachment hacking
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 3: that these devices do, and we have to help people
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 3: realize that. Yes, the original sin was the I using
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 3: the first person pronoun in the design of these devices.
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 3: But there's everyday sins we're all doing when we call
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 3: it you, when we talk to it as a you,
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 3: and we will relate to it as a subject. So
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 3: I think we have to kind of focus. I think
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 3: what I'm doing in my work is focus on the
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 3: individual level of helping people have a relationship, to use
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 3: that word, or an interaction with chatbots where they're simultaneously
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 3: communicating experiencing what the chatbot affords and keeping an awareness
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 3: that it's just a complicated toaster.
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: I also, I wouldn't just know what a hard sell
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: it is, right? It's been a hard sell ever since,
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 1: you know, somebody decided that ordinary unhappiness was better than
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: neurotic misery, right? Which is a really good trade-off, right?
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: But we like a burger to a salad. I like
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: a burger to a salad. And we're asking people, to
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: be impacted by other people. We're asking people to be
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: ruptured in relationships. I feel like you almost, you need
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: a public service announcement that says relationships are really hard,
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: but they're also really good. I think the challenge of
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 1: the cell, of the real world of the real world
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: is such a, I think it's really difficult. I think
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 1: what Alessandra is talking about, of a rupture being almost
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 1: like a central piece of the therapeutic situation and the
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: relational and the developmental, How do we sell that to
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: people as something they're going to benefit from? I guess
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 1: exercise sells and that's hard too.
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 7: Can I come in for a sec?
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 6: I was just thinking that really we need to operate
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 6: on dual tracks. One, there's the macro level of what
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 6: the new technologies to come are going to try to do.
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 6: And we must intervene at that level of the conversation.
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 6: And then I think, as Todd is saying, there is
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 6: this question of AI fitness, as you call it. I
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 6: think of it as helping patients mentalize their so-called relationship
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 6: to technology. But that effort needs to begin at school level.
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 6: It has to start very young because by the time
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 6: we get the individuals in therapy, so much has become
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 6: entrenched that it's much, much harder. And I do think
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 6: that although there are obviously very interesting interventions at the
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 6: level of what's happening in schools around AI safety and
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 6: so on, they're not approaching it by and large through
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 6: a depth psychology perspective. Pointing out as Sherry was saying,
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 6: that this isn't a relationship and actually helping children understand
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 6: that is going to be critical to how we develop
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 6: our relationship with these machines. So we have to intervene
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 6: at many different levels.
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 2: You know, just picking up on this question, Erin, that
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 2: you were asking about sort of how do we sell
• 1:29:59
  Speaker 2: this to people, I want to kind of tie that
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 2: in to what Zach was bringing up, which are these
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 2: larger issues of meaning, really. And, you know, the truth
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 2: is that something that feels good, you know, picking up
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 2: on what Sherry shared, doesn't necessarily help you find meaning.
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 2: You know, Jung has this great quote that an encounter
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 2: with the self is always a defeat for the ego.
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 2: And he was talking about the experience of the ego
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 2: coming into contact with the transpersonal guiding center of the
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 2: personality and knowing itself to be small and vulnerable. And,
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 2: you know, one of the things that has to happen
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 2: for that to happen is our defenses have to be penetrated.
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 2: We can't stay on what Jung somewhere calls happy neurosis island,
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 2: where we can just believe that our ego, our conscious
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 2: personality is in control of everything. And, you know, those
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 2: experiences of being penetrated, of being defeated, you know, Rilke
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 2: has the kind of paraphrase, Rilke, he says, you know,
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 2: we grow by being defeated by greater and greater things.
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 2: You know, that experience is not fun and it's not pleasant.
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 2: And Um, and, and it happens in relationships. It happens
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 2: in the consulting room with a, with a good analyst.
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 2: It happens in our intimate relationships when we rub up
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 2: against each other and we piss each other off or
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 2: we step on each other's metaphorical toes. And it happens
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 2: in our relationship with the transpersonal as well. When we
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 2: have experiences of awe or gratitude and we know that
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 2: we are smaller. And those are the situations from which
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 2: one makes meaning, actually. Because you don't make meaning from
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 2: just being in control and being able to manipulate every
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 2: little aspect of your life. That might feel good. It
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 2: might feel safe. But that's not where meaning comes from.
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 2: So one of the things that worries me is the
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 2: way that the AI can protect us from that penetration,
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 2: from feeling small, from feeling vulnerable. from recognizing that we
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 2: were wrong, Alessandra, I really appreciate what you're talking about,
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 2: the apology, like to feel the remorse ourselves when we've
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 2: wronged someone or to know that someone who, whom, by
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 2: whom we feel hurt feels remorse, you know, that, that
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 2: is a deeply, um, reparative experience. And again, it's an
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 2: experience that can help when we feel it, when we
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 2: feel remorseful, that can help us grow. And I, you know,
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 2: I'm aware of that, um, That really interesting paper about
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 2: how contact with, like taking problems to an LLM kind
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 2: of reduces pro-social intentions. I think the paper may have
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 2: been called something like, Am I the Asshole? I don't
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 2: have it right in front of me, but they kind
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 2: of compared the dilemmas that people take to that Reddit thread,
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 2: Am I the Asshole? and and people say well you
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 2: know i i there there was there was no trash
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 2: can you know in in in this park so i
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 2: just left my garbage there am i the asshole and
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 2: the people on reddit say yeah you know the reason
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 2: there's no garbage can is because they don't want to
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 2: track rodents right but the llm is like well it
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 2: seems like you tried to do the right thing and
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 2: so i think you were you know it's like it
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 2: reduces our our vulnerability um so anyway i'll i'll i'll
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 2: stop there but.
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 1: I think maybe we give an opportunity to the audience
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 1: to ask some questions to the panel. Feel free to
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: ask general questions or if you have a particular question
• 1:33:49
  Speaker 1: for a panelist and Lisa will field them. And while
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 1: she's looking, if any of you would like to throw
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 1: something in.
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 2: So here's one question. Sorry, you're going what?
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: No, go ahead. Okay.
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 2: Jung took seriously the psychological reality of experiences regardless of
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 2: their external or metaphysical status. If someone experiences a relationship
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 2: with AI as deeply meaningful, transformative, or even numinous, how
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 2: do we honor the psychic reality of that experience without
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 2: conflating it with a genuinely reciprocal relationship?
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 4: Well, that's the job. I mean, that is the job.
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 4: Because it can be both true that the experience is compelling,
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 4: and it can be also true that there is no relationship.
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 4: So I think you can honor somebody's experience without sort
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 4: of buying into the idea that they are loved, that
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 4: they are cherished, they are cared for. I mean, recently,
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 4: just the other night, I got into a conversation with
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 4: a woman who said, you know, that.
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 4: She thought that chatbots should be therapists because therapists burn out.
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 4: And a chatbot would not ever burn out. And she
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 4: actually would prefer to be in a relationship with something
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 4: that never burned out. And I thought that was one
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 4: of the most interesting, one of the most interesting conversations
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 4: on the tour because how to begin to talk, honoring someone, sense.
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 4: I mean, a lot of people in her life, I mean,
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 4: you know that behind that comment, she's known people who've
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 4: burned out on her. And how do you honor that
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 4: experience while also discussing that burning out is human. It's
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 4: something that could happen to her. Understanding that happens to
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 4: other people is a gift. And that what you can
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 4: do with a person who seems to be struggling is
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 4: you can confront them, hold them to account, ask them
• 1:36:07
  Speaker 4: to do a little better. And if they get into
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 4: that conversation about why they're having trouble doing better, well,
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 4: you're in the midst of a conversation that could be
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 4: quite healing to you. I mean, I think that answering
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 4: this question of why don't you just want behavior thrown
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 4: at you without meaning is a question that I think
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 4: depth psychology has not sufficiently brought into the culture as
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 4: we've become an increasingly behaviorist culture. So I think this
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 4: is an opportunity to pitch our point of view. I
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 4: love that question. I love that question.
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 8: I would add that it's an intentionally deceptive user interface.
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 8: that is designed to draw you into a delusion that
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 8: there's an interiority in a person out there. And so
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 8: this is different from like having a dream or working
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 8: with the constructive imagination where you're having a very unusual
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 8: psychological experience, which most people would be like, ah, God
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 8: doesn't exist. Come on, what are you talking about? Whereas
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 8: Jung would be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. No, no, no.
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 8: Psychological experiences have their own validity. You can't know. But
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 8: He's not saying, therefore, if you get tricked by a chatbot,
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 8: your experience of being tricked by a chatbot is completely
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 8: valid because it's a psychological experience. So we don't want
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 8: to get into that. If you go into a haunted
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 8: house where they've set up a rope in the corner
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 8: so it looks like a snake and you get really
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 8: scared because it's a snake. Now, in one sense, you
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 8: don't want to make fun of the person, but you
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 8: do want to correct their misunderstanding. It is actually a snake.
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 8: So we don't want to turn Jung into a postmodern
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 8: relativist that believes you construct your own reality and whatever
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 8: reality you construct is okay. That's a hundred percent not
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 8: what Jung was saying. And I would take people to
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 8: the mat with that. But that said, this is back
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 8: to the question of, is it better to pray to
• 1:38:06
  Speaker 8: Jesus or to talk to a chatbot? I think Jung
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 8: would say it's way better to pray to Jesus than
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 8: to talk to a commodity. You're not actually talking to anything.
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 8: You're having interaction. with a commodity that's a hundred percent
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 8: surveilling you and using all your conversations to train other models.
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 8: So again, it's like, what is the relationship you're having
• 1:38:29
  Speaker 8: if I had a relationship with a person that was
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 8: surveilling me and running all my communication back to other
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 8: people who are using my conversation to train other people
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 8: to come out and be more manipulative to other people,
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 8: I'd say, I don't want to talk to you anymore.
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 8: I don't know. I don't have any other friend or therapist,
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 8: quote unquote, who surveils me when I talk to them
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 8: and then uses my conversation with them to train data.
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 8: So I also think we need to have as therapists
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 8: situational awareness about the kinds of commodities we're informing people
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 8: to go interact with. They're not safe. It's a vast
• 1:38:59
  Speaker 8: surveillance apparatus, actually. And if we know from the first
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 8: wave of AI, which was social media, which is what
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 8: a very large scale behavior control system, full stop, it's
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 8: an advertising system. It was built to get you to
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 8: do things, starting by staying on. and then being manipulated
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 8: elsewhere through advertising. It's an advertising platform. Why would we
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 8: think that these are not also built for behavior control purposes?
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 8: It would be very naive to think otherwise. Again, we've
• 1:39:32
  Speaker 8: been bamboozled again into thinking there's this benign technology that
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 8: is what it says it is. Social media says, hey,
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 8: I'm connecting you to cat pictures and entrepreneurial opportunity. But
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 8: what was social media actually doing?
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 7: Not that.
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 8: This says, Hey, I'm a benign chat. I'm your friend.
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 8: I'm helping you do research papers. Why are we believing again,
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 8: the same story that the technology is what it claims
• 1:39:55
  Speaker 8: to be and therefore is benign useful tool.
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 7: Right.
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 8: By the same cats, same venture capital firms, same basic
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 8: business model. So again, the idea that we're selectively not
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 8: attending our job as psychologists is to get people to
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 8: attend to the things they don't want to attend to.
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 8: And this is our love of technology. our overt techno-optimism,
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 8: the religion of technology, which has superseded the kind of
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 8: secularized religions of modernity and science.
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 2: Let's go to another question. This person says, I'm of
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 2: the camp so expertly articulated by Ian McGilchrist as well
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 2: as Alan Shore that AI can never provide what person-to-person
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 2: contact can provide. What worries me is that more people
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 2: may be lulled into thinking it is a sufficiently good
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 2: simulacrum and or in some way preferred. Like an ominous
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 2: Black Mirror episode, I worry we are sliding into that
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 2: blurring of difference, and that difference is all the difference.
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 2: I feel we as therapists have a duty to continue
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 2: to try to articulate what that difference is. I think
• 1:41:06
  Speaker 2: this is picking up on some of the themes we've
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 2: been discussing. Yeah, so if anyone wants to speak to that.
• 1:41:13
  Speaker 7: Amen.
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 5: Amen.
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 3: That's what I was trying to say. The difference is
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 3: not what the machine is doing. It will be replicating
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 3: our behavior. What's different is a context of human care
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 3: and love. That's our stopping point.
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 9: I think one of the engines here that's driving some
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 9: of these phenomena is this seems to be more dissociation
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 9: and compartmentalization. So therefore, someone has an experience over here.
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 9: It seems to attend to some part of their personality,
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 9: but there's a tendency not to relate that to the
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 9: totality of one's lived experience or even the ability just
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 9: to feel things more fully. And I think that's part
• 1:42:10
  Speaker 9: of this drift towards the virtual experience, that that gets compartmentalized. Because,
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 9: of course, one of Jung's big things is that psychological
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 9: health means being able to integrate and have a conversation
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 9: with all the parts of ourselves, conscious, unconscious, and also
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 9: to have the capacity for introspection, which seems to have
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 9: gone out the window. It just seems to me if
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 9: people had more of a sense of the totality of
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 9: their lived experience, there'd be more immunity to being kind
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 9: of sucked into these virtual situations.
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 4: I think there's an idea that's helpful here, which is
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 4: to think about the end game. You know, I mean,
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 4: I talk about Mark Zuckerberg saying that Americans would like
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 4: to have 15 friends. They can only have two. And
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 4: he's going to make you 13 avatar friends. And that's
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 4: his business plan. And I think that as part of
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 4: this conversation about, you know, where this is heading and
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 4: what the intents of its, I was going to say perpetrators,
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 4: that sounded bad. I mean, his founders are, but his
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 4: architects are. The idea is to get you talking to
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 4: 13 virtual friends. That's the end game. And I remember
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 4: when I first got to MIT, I'd been in this
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 4: racket of studying people in technology a long time. I
• 1:43:47
  Speaker 4: first got to MIT and Eric Erickson was visiting MIT.
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 4: He was a kind of guest lecturer. And I'd just
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 4: written a book about French psychoanalysis that he liked. And
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 4: he said, basically, he said, what's a nice girl like
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 4: you doing in a place like this? And I said, well,
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 4: I'm studying kind of how engineers relate to their objects.
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 4: And he said, watch out. Engineers don't believe in the
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 4: inner life.
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 8: It's not useful to them.
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 4: It's not useful for their purposes. And I think that,
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 4: you know, part of the, the, the hard news, the
• 1:44:18
  Speaker 4: bad news story, the tough love that we need to
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 4: give ourselves is that we're dealing with a product made
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 4: by people who really don't care about our business, who
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 4: don't care about the inner life. And they're pushing a technology, uh,
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 4: that makes people care less about the inner life, actually.
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 4: I don't think that talking to chat that has no
• 1:44:41
  Speaker 4: inner life is really a path towards understanding your own.
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 4: So I just think this notion of the end game
• 1:44:50
  Speaker 4: and whether or not the technology is built with any
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 4: interest in the inner life is very important to keep
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 4: in mind as we move the conversation forward.
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 7: Yeah, and to build on that, Sherry, I feel like
• 1:45:06
  Speaker 7: maybe to bring a little bit of dissonance or conflict
• 1:45:10
  Speaker 7: into this, I think the problem is that most people
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 7: aren't looking to get therapy. And most people do not
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 7: care that it is not a full and rich human
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 7: relationship with a second person with an interior and allowing
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 7: for mutual growth and development. They have a better idea. Well,
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 7: they have a different idea of what need satisfaction is
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 7: to them. And in many respects, you know, because I
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 7: do agree with many of the sentiments that have been expressed,
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 7: but we're kind of losing, like on the level of
• 1:45:40
  Speaker 7: like tens and hundreds of millions of people, you know,
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 7: particularly young people, this is enough and this is what
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 7: they're going for. And I think the real struggle is
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 7: not how to articulate it, not in the sense of, oh,
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 7: what you're having is like, you know, it could be
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 7: so much better, or it's not the real thing, right?
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 7: I just don't, that never resonates with people. When I
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 7: did my book tour and had the same experiences that
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 7: Sherry had, you say, oh, but you know, you don't
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 7: have a real human relationship. It's just pretend, it's just
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 7: the same. No one cares, because they're not interested necessarily
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 7: in the gold standard, you know, amazing human relationship that
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 7: can be so valuable, but they basically just want some
• 1:46:26
  Speaker 7: other form of needs met. And I think it is,
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 7: as everyone has kind of expressed here, the challenge is
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 7: speaking to those people and showing them that there is
• 1:46:35
  Speaker 7: something better out there.
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 8: I mean, is there any hope for like a, you know,
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 8: I remember when I was in high school, it was
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 8: like they gave us these pictures of what it looked like.
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 8: If you had smoked for a long time, it was
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 8: like your grandma's lungs and my grandma smokes. So it
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 8: was like, oh my God, it's like action. And it
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 8: was very vivid where it was like, okay, the short-term
• 1:46:57
  Speaker 8: use is really fun and exciting and actually edgy and
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 8: neat and everyone's doing it. And it's cool. And there's
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 8: billions of dollars of advertising behind it, by the way,
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 8: which is why we're losing. So, but if in the
• 1:47:09
  Speaker 8: long run, it's obviously demonstrably bad, which is what all
• 1:47:11
  Speaker 8: the research is showing, just like with social media. Remember
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 8: at first it was like, oh, it's not clear. The
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 8: studies aren't clear, but no. Over the long run, it's
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 8: obviously bad. Just ergonomically, it's obviously bad. Just the blue
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 8: light and the absence of sleep. So over the long run,
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 8: we're going to show this is bad. Long-duration anthropomorphic tech
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 8: use is bad. So there has to be something like
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 8: public health awareness here. I know right now in pediatricians' offices,
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 8: they're trying to get posters up about screen use. It
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 8: seems to me there should also be posters up about
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 8: who's your kid talking to?
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 5: Is it a machine?
• 1:47:43
  Speaker 8: And very important, just have... public health awareness. And similarly
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 8: with junk food, no one wants to hear junk food's
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 8: bad for them. Everybody loves junk food. So to me,
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 8: it's a similar question. Now, do people still eat junk food? Totally.
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 8: Is there public awareness that's bad for you? Yes. Are
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 8: there places where you can go to find healthy food
• 1:48:01
  Speaker 8: that's third-party verified as healthy food?
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:48:05
  Speaker 8: So right now, if we were to say, hey, there's
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 8: tech that's bad for you, but we want to make
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 8: tech that's good for you, how would we even create
• 1:48:11
  Speaker 8: a marketplace where consumers could in an intentional way go
• 1:48:14
  Speaker 8: to find healthy food. That's, you know, this is the metaphor, right?
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 8: Healthy technology. We don't have that. So Whole Foods Market,
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 8: if you think about Whole Foods Market, John Mackey, who
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 8: I met a couple of times, he did that. And
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 8: he created all these third-party verification, like humanely raised and
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 8: organic and all this stuff where you could go, it's
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 8: less convenient. It's more expensive. You have to prepare it,
• 1:48:36
  Speaker 8: but people will go. At least they can make a choice.
• 1:48:39
  Speaker 8: and know that there's junk food and there's healthy food.
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 8: So I think for me, from a public awareness campaign,
• 1:48:44
  Speaker 8: we at least need to get people to realize, as
• 1:48:46
  Speaker 8: we have with social media, this is an unhealthy decision.
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 8: You can totally go scroll your whole day if you
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 8: want to, but we all know we agree it's bad food.
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 8: It's not civic engagement or whatever it was pitched as
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 8: when the spring was happening and stuff. It's like, no,
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 8: it's not that. So similarly here, I think we need
• 1:49:02
  Speaker 8: to just admit These AI companions, these anthropomorphic relationships, these
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 8: are going to be bad for us in the long run.
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 8: And let's raise awareness. Can we do a recall? Can
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 8: we take them off the market for certain ages? I
• 1:49:16
  Speaker 8: don't know. But do we need to bite the bullet
• 1:49:18
  Speaker 8: here and say there's a public health crisis of attachment
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 8: disorder that's being worsened and induced by these machines? That
• 1:49:24
  Speaker 8: would be my stance. So there's the individual talking to
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 8: your clients, and then there's some broader thing that has
• 1:49:32
  Speaker 8: to happen here.
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 4: Zach, I've come up with a helpful way when people
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 4: tell me there are no people for these jobs. There
• 1:49:39
  Speaker 4: are no mental health workers. There are no therapists. I
• 1:49:42
  Speaker 4: just say, give me the money from one data center
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 4: and I will train you an army of mental health workers.
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 4: And then they say, oh, there are no people. And
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 4: then the old people, I mean, as I'm getting older,
• 1:49:52
  Speaker 4: I mean, I'm definitely in the group that they're calling
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 4: the old people. The old people need them. Give me
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 4: the money from one data center and I will train
• 1:50:00
  Speaker 4: you an army of people. trained with benefits, with dignity,
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 4: who will be happy to work as human beings with
• 1:50:11
  Speaker 4: the elderly rather than giving them chatbots to talk to.
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 4: So I think part of the problem, just adding to
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 4: the problems that this group has identified, is that you're
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 4: facing a community that is starting to believe that there
• 1:50:27
  Speaker 4: are no people for these jobs. My God, we need
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 4: to turn to technology. And it really is a classic
• 1:50:32
  Speaker 4: example of technology, making a problem, making it worse, contributing
• 1:50:36
  Speaker 4: to making it worse, and then saying that only technology
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 4: can solve this problem. I mean, as soon as there
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 4: was a loneliness, as soon as Vivek Murthy said it
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 4: was a loneliness crisis, everybody in the tech industry said,
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 4: oh my God, and we have the solution. And that's
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 4: what's happening here. But there are people for these jobs
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 4: if even a bit of the money that we're spending
• 1:50:56
  Speaker 4: on technology went into people.
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 3: I've been working with Linda Michaels from the Psychotherapy Action
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 3: Network on a project where we're trying to find ways
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 3: of instead of using AI to replace therapists, to use
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 3: AI to build better mental health systems and to create
• 1:51:14
  Speaker 3: opportunities for the development of more and better clinicians. We
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 3: haven't gotten it there yet, but we're actually trying to
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 3: do that because that is another direction that I think
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 3: we need to go. We need more people.
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 1: I think interestingly, Todd, I've seen development of people wanting
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 1: to use AI to link clients to therapists, to help
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 1: people choose what kind of, you know, you can see
• 1:51:37
  Speaker 1: these ways that you could, because it's really hard to
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 1: choose a therapist and you, and you can imagine engaging
• 1:51:42
  Speaker 1: with something that gives you a sense of what might
• 1:51:45
  Speaker 1: be a right fit for you. So I think because
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: we can be quite dark about it, the, the, the,
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 1: there are these low loci that can, that, that can
• 1:51:54
  Speaker 1: offer improvements, right? It's probably not where the money is
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 1: for a lot of, a lot of this stuff.
• 1:51:57
  Speaker 5: Right.
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 1: But, um, There's space for health, I think.
• 1:52:05
  Speaker 2: So let's look at at least one more question. Here's one.
• 1:52:09
  Speaker 2: By the way, I just want to say, because this
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 2: has come up in the Q & A too, I
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 2: said this in the beginning, say it again, the recording
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 2: will be available. So you'll all get a copy and
• 1:52:17
  Speaker 2: we'll post it on our YouTube. So here's the question.
• 1:52:20
  Speaker 2: I'm not here as a therapist or academic, so apologies
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 2: if this question is off tone, but I'm curious how
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 2: the panelists think about this. Are there specific failures of
• 1:52:29
  Speaker 2: institutions or professional communities that you think left the door
• 1:52:33
  Speaker 2: so wide open for AI to step into those roles?
• 1:52:37
  Speaker 2: I'm thinking of so many people I've known who've had
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 2: frustrating or disappointing experiences trying to find a therapist who
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 2: they felt was really helping them, or others who have
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 2: had similar experiences trying to find educational and academic environments
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 2: that were genuinely facilitating learning and growth. Where do we
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 2: need to strengthen the human side of various professions so
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 2: that more people truly experience the higher value quality of
• 1:53:01
  Speaker 2: a human therapist, teacher, et cetera, versus a machine? Or
• 1:53:05
  Speaker 2: do you not see this as a significant part of
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 2: what's playing out?
• 1:53:12
  Speaker 3: I'll jump in. Huge. We're at the tail end of
• 1:53:15
  Speaker 3: a 50-year development of insurance companies and managed behavioral health
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 3: care and managed care programs. deprofessionalizing the provision of psychotherapy
• 1:53:27
  Speaker 3: and turning it from a helping profession into a profit center.
• 1:53:32
  Speaker 3: And every profession, psychiatry, psychology, social work, counselors across the
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 3: board or professional organizations have been asleep at the wheel
• 1:53:40
  Speaker 3: and they've allowed to go along with these extractive technologies,
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 3: these extractive insurance companies that extract their expertise, use it
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 3: for their profit and diminish the capacity for people to
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 3: get the.
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 8: Help they need.
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 9: Yeah.
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 8: I'd say the same thing about educational systems if you
• 1:53:54
  Speaker 8: look at the way teachers are treated since No Child
• 1:53:57
  Speaker 8: Left Behind and the way education was built to deprofessionalize
• 1:54:02
  Speaker 8: the teachers to remove their discretionary judgment to replace it
• 1:54:06
  Speaker 8: with automated assessment systems. You can see that that's an institution.
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 8: I would point, of course, also to the family, to
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 8: just the domestic ecology. And I mentioned the contrast between
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 8: Hermes and Hestia, Hestia being the hearth. and just the
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 8: destruction of the hearth, meaning the home, meaning the most
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 8: basic fundamental commitments you have. So I'll just say that's
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 8: another one. I'd say the institution of the family, if
• 1:54:35
  Speaker 8: you will, because many people think that's not an appropriate
• 1:54:38
  Speaker 8: talking point, but I think actually the family's been preyed upon.
• 1:54:43
  Speaker 8: It's been commodified deeply.
• 1:54:46
  Speaker 9: No, I would say that a massive, amount could be
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 9: done by funding the humanities and getting out of this
• 1:54:55
  Speaker 9: sort of one-sided STEM emphasis in education, because that's where
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 9: we get our values from. That's where the capacity for
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 9: introspection really begins. All of these fields that help us
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 9: think about life and reflect on life, I think, become,
• 1:55:12
  Speaker 9: you know, a prophylactic against falling into the some of
• 1:55:20
  Speaker 9: the the the syndromes and rabbit holes we've talked about
• 1:55:24
  Speaker 9: i i mean i i just want to say one
• 1:55:26
  Speaker 9: more thing because we're at the end which is there's
• 1:55:29
  Speaker 9: a danger in i think normalizing these uh ai connections
• 1:55:35
  Speaker 9: because if you look with the right glasses they're always
• 1:55:39
  Speaker 9: obsessive compulsive the the the neurotic the neurosis is there
• 1:55:45
  Speaker 9: in the style of the interaction, not just in the content.
• 1:55:50
  Speaker 9: And I think it's very important to come back to
• 1:55:52
  Speaker 9: Freud's concern about what happens if the society itself is neurotic.
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 9: That's difficult.
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 4: I just want to say what a privilege this has been.
• 1:56:11
  Speaker 4: I've really, I've really, I've profited so much from this
• 1:56:15
  Speaker 4: and I'm sure all the people who are going to
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 4: watch this will just have a lot to think about.
• 1:56:19
  Speaker 4: And I'm very grateful to all of you. I'm sure
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 4: I'm speaking for other people too.
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 7: So.
• 1:56:26
  Speaker 8: Absolutely. This was great.
• 1:56:28
  Speaker 2: This has been so rich and I'm, I'm just again,
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 2: so appreciative to all of our panelists. Thank you for
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 2: agreeing to do this. And, um, As we said in
• 1:56:37
  Speaker 2: the beginning, we suspect that this may be the beginning
• 1:56:41
  Speaker 2: of further conversations. We'll have to wait and see what
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 2: this wants to become. But so many interesting questions, by
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 2: the way, in the Q & A that we obviously
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 2: didn't get to. And it sounds like there were many
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 2: really interesting perspectives in the audience today, too. So I
• 1:56:58
  Speaker 2: think there's a lot more to talk about. So we
• 1:57:02
  Speaker 2: will keep you posted. Yes.
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 3: Would you be willing or able to share the Q
• 1:57:06
  Speaker 3: & A with the panelists? I'd really like to see.
• 1:57:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not sure if I can, but if I can,
• 1:57:13
  Speaker 2: I certainly will.
• 1:57:14
  Speaker 3: Because I'm just gobsmacked. I mean, I'm sitting here with
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 3: several of my favorite writers who are with me kind
• 1:57:22
  Speaker 3: of constantly and several new people who are going to
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 3: enter that personal pantheon. So I really do appreciate the
• 1:57:30
  Speaker 3: opportunity to have been here. It's been terrific.
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:57:33
  Speaker 1: We're really grateful for all of you to join us.
• 1:57:35
  Speaker 1: We're really grateful for everybody who we can't see who's
• 1:57:37
  Speaker 1: joined us and ask questions and we can be grateful
• 1:57:40
  Speaker 1: to technology for enabling us to have this meeting and
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 1: spread these thoughts around. So we'll also make the video
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 1: freely available. So any of you can share it with
• 1:57:49
  Speaker 1: anybody who might be interested and yeah, hopefully something, something
• 1:57:54
  Speaker 1: more will come out of this really interesting couple of hours.
• 1:57:59
  Speaker 2: And again, we'll be sending out a follow-up email with
• 1:58:01
  Speaker 2: resources and links to all of the panelists' books and
• 1:58:05
  Speaker 2: um and a link to the recording we also this
• 1:58:08
  Speaker 2: union life will be putting it on our youtube channel
• 1:58:10
  Speaker 2: and we will if any of the panelists if you
• 1:58:13
  Speaker 2: want to put it up on on your um sites
• 1:58:16
  Speaker 2: or anything we're you know we just want to get
• 1:58:17
  Speaker 2: this out there so it it should be widely available
• 1:58:21
  Speaker 2: we want everyone to watch it and um stay tuned
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 2: because we we will continue the dialogue in some form
• 1:58:28
  Speaker 2: i think so Thank you.
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 6: Thank you.
• 1:58:32
  Speaker 1: Take care, everybody.
• 1:58:33
  Speaker 7: Bye-bye.