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> This attempt to substitute therapists, who are professional people who care, is a huge step towards that future. Do you want a future where Medicare only gives access to a chatbot, rather than a human professional? I don't want that, and I hope you don't either. No, I don't want to do that. And I 100% agree with you on the importance of human connection - as you wrote, "we know, from research, the act of _having a person care_ is part of what makes therapy work." Yes, exactly that. I'd dare say it's the most important part. However. The future you fear has already come to pass. In the developed world, human labor tends to be the most expensive part of any product or service. That includes therapy. That 1:1 time with a trained specialist is expensive, and you need a lot of it. Most people already can't afford it at all. I don't want LLMs to replace therapists, and I wouldn't even be talking positively about their utility in this space, if a person like me could just go into therapy whenever they needed it. Alas, we can't. It's way too expensive, way too infrequent, and takes way too much time (billed time) to get to the point where you can even hope to start to make progress. So as much as I'm typically against replacing skilled labor with self-service tech solutions, with therapy we may be forced to do it simply to have anything available to people at all. |