[Gerardo1]

I keep bringing this up, but this launch HN post about Roundtable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36865625

still shocks me. It's a company that uses AI to produce survey results. I'll let you read their pitch/description and decide for yourself, but I think it's very fair to say that this is a service to fabricate survey results to validate whatever idea it is you had beforehand. But even side-stepping that, they claim to have overcome bias in their datasets and refused to elaborate on 1) how they did that and 2) how they could prove that they did that.

As long as this community, which is far more technically sophisticated than the general public, isn't laughing companies like that out of the room, we're in serious trouble.

There was also this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37259753 which was an individual's project to provide an AI therapist and while people here and there did mention the cons of having a program provide medical treatment, the overall sentiment wasn't at all negative.

I'm not even some AI luddite: I use and greatly benefit from some AI tools. But just like crypto, AI isn't the be-all-end-all technology. The difference is that where crypto is primarily a financial risk to people duped into using dubious-at-best-scams-at-worse products, AI will cause real, concrete harm, i.e., https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/03/31/man-ends-his-life-a...

[ekanes]

> an individual's project to provide an AI therapist and while people here and there did mention the cons of having a program provide medical treatment, the overall sentiment wasn't at all negative.

Sorta. You're forgetting to compare it to an alternative. Compared to a licensed therapist that you can find, schedule, travel to and afford... for some people an imperfect something is better than the nothing they have now.

[moritzwarhier]

This is really the only part of the post where I too started pondering.

Wholeheartedly agree with the rest and am thankful for the link compilation.

IMHO, the thing with therapy for mental health problems is that it's mostly in such a sorry state that it's an insult to GPs point to call it a medical treatment. I only make that bold claim because of my own experience. As always, YMMV.

Doesn't make the AI thing less creepy, but I'd still carefully consider there's some real potential here.

[norir]

For me, the idea of robots being necessary to provide needed therapy that otherwise would be unavailable is enough to induce existential despair. I really can't imagine it as a viable long term treatment. Much of the point of therapy is just having a human advocate who is invested in your wellbeing. AI therapy sends the message that human problems are not worthy of human attention.

[ekanes]

I don't disagree. That said we still live in a world that has always known hunger and war, and those are even lower on maslow's hierarchy. So my point is simply that we are where we are and that anything that helps is worth doing rather than not doing because the more ideal alternative isn't happening.

[pixl97]

> AI therapy sends the message that human problems are not worthy of human attention

Scratch 'AI therapy' and just put in capitalism and you have the answer to the problems we have.

Therapy is a job that people do to pay the bills after the 10th person they've seen that day.

[noduerme]

>> Therapy is a job that people do to pay the bills after the 10th person they've seen that day.

You're contradicting yourself. Either therapists actually care, or they wouldn't do their job without capitalist incentives. Which is it?

[pixl97]

You seem to only deal with black and white situations, reality rarely present clean cut scenarios like that.

For example I deal directly with customers quite often. The amount of "I give a fuck" is much higher at 8AM then it is at 4PM. To find people that can give out a continuous amount of caring at 40 hours a week is difficult. Then you tend to have some percentage of employees that "Don't give a fuck" at all and are there for a paycheck.

It turns out that if you take away that paycheck you'll find that 99% of your therapists and your engineers will go do something else. :)

[noduerme]

Okay, so how would scrapping "capitalism" improve the availability of therapy?