Over the weekend, I watched a 60Minutes segment about the development and application of AI-powered mental health chatbots as tools for therapy support and it really made me uneasy. They claim that these chatbots are designed to fill the gap created by a critical shortage of human therapists and the growing number of individuals in need of mental health support.
I have serious concerns about about the effectiveness, safety, and ethical implications of these chatbots. The segment does highlight the necessity of maintaining a human element in therapy, emphasizing connection and empathy, which may not be fully replicable by AI. However, I really think there should be a debate around the use of AI in mental health care.
We are totally missing the power of human connection in this type of therapy. Do you guys think technology can ever truly replicate the human element essential in therapy, such as empathy, understanding, and emotional connection? Yeah, AI chatbots can increase accessibility to mental health support, but how do we ensure the accuracy and safety of the advice they provide? Is it worth the trade-off? I’m not really buying it.
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it is getting over worse than I ever imagine the future will be when I was in the 80s
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@robseqio The 80s were actually pretty cool 
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Really terrible…
When we talk about A.I. I always have to think about this part of the movie.
Quote from “the Matrix” ( movie from 1999 )
Neo: This…this isn’t real?
Morpheus: What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. This is the world that you know. The world as it was at the end of the twentieth century. It exists now only as part of a neural-interactive simulation that we call the Matrix. You’ve been living in a dream world, Neo. This is the world as it exists today… Welcome… to the desert… of the real. We have only bits and pieces of information but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early twenty-first century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.
Neo: AI? You mean artificial intelligence?
Morpheus: A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time they were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun. Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
And yes, I love the 80’s to… grew up in it.
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