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AI therapists and young Luddites
We had an interesting discussion in my NLP class this week regarding the growing use of AI chatbots as therapists. (My regular news magazine The Week had a “briefing” article on this recently.) As you may be aware, Americans are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for counseling and comfort, replacing human therapists. This includes both…
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Comp Sci students and the ChatGPT disaster
It’s well known that given the chance, people will nearly always look for a shortcut in making a decision, in order to avoid the more laborious effort required to think things through from scratch. The psychology discipline has various terms for this: “cognitive miserliness,” “cognitive economy,” “satisficing,” “mental inertia,” reliance on “heuristics,” and others. It’s…
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AI and the perils of empathy
Empathy — a capacity with which most people are equipped — is the ability to understand and have compassion for another’s situation. We put ourselves in their shoes, and imagine life in their circumstances. Often this involves the assumption that the way they feel in a certain scenario is the same way we would feel…
