AI Predictions from a Non-Expert

 

How do you feel today?

I have seen a prediction that significant job loss due to AI will be evident by 2028.

This prediction is of course incompatible with the drive by various governments for mass levels of immigration. If the AI prediction is correct, we are only importing mass levels of unemployment. Wouldn’t it be wise to at least wait and see? Or, to be safe, to bring in only temporary guest workers?

Experts are usually wrong, of course. They are likely to be wrong about the need for mass immigration, and they are likely to be wrong about the AI impact on jobs. Making it a wash. Whenever government intervenes, the results are likely to make things worse.

This is not just a casual statement, nor an expression of cynicism. It is demonstrable. Experts are less likely to be correct in their predictions than either a coin toss or a man in the street interview. Studies show this, repeatedly. And there are good reasons for this. It is always in the interest of the experts to predict some dramatic change. This gets them attention and publication; and convinces the public that their expertise is needed. And there is no down side. Just as with fortune-tellers, nobody remembers predictions that turn out to be wrong. But should you get lucky, you become immortal.

However, while experts will always predict dramatic change, dramatic change is actually rare. In most cases, the best prediction is the boring one that things will continue on more or less as they are. And that gets you no attention. And gives governments no excuse to extend their power and influence.

Remember that next time you are warned about climate change.

If AI is going to start replacing jobs, I, being no expert, predict that the one profession that should be most concerned is medical doctors. Their expertise is diagnosis of illnesses, and writing matching prescriptions. The process is mechanical. It seems obvious that AI can diagnose and prescribe more reliably than a human. And because MDs earn so much, there is huge business case for replacing them. Suddenly health care costs are manageable again—a huge public and private expense. I suspect they would have been replaced already were it not for their political power as a lobby; but they must be living on borrowed time.

Clinical psychologists ought to go next. What they do is exactly what AI chatbots are already perfectly capable of: to agree with and echo back whatever the patient feels and thinks. An ersatz non-judgmental friend.

Is there any need for supervision of these chatbots? Not beyond that of the user. And, indeed, for the sake of privacy, a machine is preferable to a human. Moreover, you can make the chatbot exceptionally physically attractive, improving the experience and making the friendship seem more valuable; you can even let the patient select the physical features he feels most comfortable with. A human therapist is rather hit and miss. Nor will a chatbot take advantage of the patient, the way therapists are often discovered to do.

Nor can we tell all the unemployed therapists and doctors to learn to code. Actual coding is probably best done, again, by AI.

Our New Religion and Its Failure

Over the last couple of years or so, I have been working on two books on the topic of depression and anxiety. Working titles: The Truth about Dragons and The Book of Consolation.

In the course of research and writing, I have sadly apparently lost two of my oldest and most valued friends.

The first will not respond to my emails since I disagreed with him over Freud. I do not clearly recall what the exact point of disagreement was; I disagree with Freud on almost everything. I believe it was on Freudianism calling itself “depth psychology.” Since it saw everything psychic/spiritual as a direct reflection of physical things, I think I argued that it actually greatly lacked depth in comparison to a religious approach.

My second friend to shun me actually accused me of moral mendacity for dissenting from Abraham Maslow’s existential psychiatry. Since then he will not respond to emails. My point was that, in saying concurrently that the key to mental health was finding a meaning in your life, and that there is no meaning in human existence, Maslow had no place to lead a patient but permanent despair. A meaning you just make up is meaningless. This is why existentialism has mostly evaporated as a philosophy.

That they would end a friendship of many years over such matters made me wonder. What is going on here?

And here is what I think is going on. Modern psychiatry or psychology is a religion. To them, I had become a heretic. People now rely on their psychologies as their world views, and so feel deeply disturbed if they are challenged. The entire universe is at stake.

Psychology/psychiatry generally pretends to be scientific, but that was never true. Broadly speaking, there has never been any decent scientific evidence for any of the psychiatries or psychologies we have seen come and go over the last century or so. They are visibly held to for reasons other than evidence or experiment. Nor do they work as philosophies: their approach is automatically ad hominem. Anyone who dissents from them is, in effect, declared insane. So they are adhered to neither for logic nor evidence, and cannot be challenged on either ground.

So the proper question is, how well do they work as religions; as comprehensive world views?

And the immediate evidence is, not well. Since we have generally shifted, as a society, away from traditional religious views and towards the psychiatries as substitutes, the incidence of mental illness has, by most accounts, skyrocketed. Suicide is also up. An international survey undertaken by the WHO suggests that rates of recovery for all kinds of “mental illness” are significantly better in the “underdeveloped” world—where folks are more apt to rely on religion rather than a pricey therapist. Other studies show therapists produce a worse or a no better cure rate than a layperson.

Some deficiencies of psychiatry or psychology are obvious. To begin with, they deny the reality of the psyche. Where do you go from there? They deny moral considerations, and morality is, according to long philosophical and religious tradition, if it is not self-evident, a key concern of human existence. They broadly avoid any consideration of a God, which is to say, of any inherent meaning in the universe.

It is a meagre, despairing worldview.

But it is our real religion nowadays, and not our nominal religions anymore.

In writing the first book, I contacted the Toronto Catholic archdiocese to see if I could get a nihil obstat—an official statement by the bishop that there was nothing in the book that ran counter to Catholic doctrine. They wrote back offering to have it looked over by a priest who was also a psychiatrist, to ensure that it was sound in psychiatric terms. When I specified that it was Catholic doctrine with which I was concerned, they said they could not help me. Nobody there was interested.

The New Testament understanding of mental illness is plainly that it is generally a matter of demonic possession. Casting out demons was the precise mission on which Jesus first sent out the apostles, and much historic evidence suggests that it is its legendary ability to cure mental illness that was the primary cause of Christianity’s spread through Europe, later through the Americas, and even today through Africa.

Yet the current protocol for exorcism in the Catholic Church is clear and firm that no exorcism may be contemplated until and unless all “natural,” that is, psychiatric, explanations have been ruled out, by the patient displaying some impossible supernatural knowledge. By, for example, suddenly being fluent in a foreign language, or showing knowledge of some secret matter. Or at least showing a violent aversion to religious objects.

This makes no sense in theological terms. Catholic doctrine holds that demons are real beings. Yet why would a real demon be so stupid as to do something to prove he is there? In order to get exorcised?

In other words, in case of doubt, faith is assigned to psychiatry and psychology, not to Catholicism. Even by the Catholic Church.

This is perhaps one reason for the rapid growth of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements within Christianity. They are the branch that still takes it all most seriously. And that performs exorcisms and healings.