I can't get over the way interviewees are treated. I have had several run-ins with existential dread and realized that the first X years of sacrificing my life to FAANG company gave me enough money to retire for close to a decade (well, based on my burn rate and what the stock is doing, it's unbounded at this point). It's going to really be something when I start interviewing and openly scoff at these types of questions.
My GitHub speaks for itself, I don't really plan on justifying my time away from formal employment other than "sorry, I wanted to enjoy life while my body and mind were working at near peak rather than waiting another 30 years to avoid making others around me uncomfortable". Because god knows people get weird about hearing how long I've been happily unemployed. I've said it here before and it's wiiiiildly unpopular but a decade of tech salary goes *a very, very long way* if you're not on the consumer-capitalist treadmill.
For me the post pandemic inflation has taken a much bigger toll. All the essentials cost too much and there’s not enough left to spoil my family or myself with. Makes working my crappy pointless job even more depressing.
This stings because I lost a few close friends to suicide and gun violence last year. It's really sad that we can't/won't do anything to stymie the trend
One of the first chatbots, ELIZA[0] from 1966, attempted to offer psychotherapeutic assistance to users. I feel like since this was one of the first applications of chatbots, it would have been strongly iterated upon. But I'm not sure there's a lot of development in the field, apart from virtual companions (like Replika[1]).
So two things on my mind:
- has there been research on whether such tools could actually be significantly helpful to people facing depression, as individuals and over whole populations?
- are existing virtual companions already being prescribed by health professionals?
Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA, running the DOCTOR script, was created to provide a parody of "the responses of a non-directional psychotherapist in an initial psychiatric interview"[15] and to "demonstrate that the communication between man and machine was superficial".[16] (Wikipedia)
We all knew ELIZA was a joke, and we used it that way. ELIZA was so hilarious that it was integrated into Emacs with responses from Zippy the Pinhead.
ELIZA was on the level of jive and the Swedish Chef translator. We loved text processing for purposes of humor and entertainment. That tradition is carried forward by the entertainment utility called ChatGPT.
Ok, it was apparently not the initial intent, but he did simulate that behaviour, and "Many academics believed that the program would be able to positively influence the lives of many people, particularly those with psychological issues, and that it could aid doctors working on such patients' treatment."
I'm sorry, but please take Wikipedia articles with a grain of salt.
"Many academics" is commonly known here as "weasel wording". It's a good way to be vague and gain an aura of authenticity without actually saying who you're talking about. On Wikipedia, if someone wants to write "Most academics believe..." or "A majority of scholars say..." then we need to find a consensus reported in a meta-paper, and not just collect a few random references that agree with the position.
In this case, there is one reference to Weizenbaum himself, and there is a reference to a paper with three authors: Colby, Watt, and Gilbert. So we can safely and accurately rephrase your quote as: "Three academics wrote a single paper in which they said they believe..."
But this is the future. Most people are too lonely. People are forced to value jobs and careers more than relationships.
4 years ago, no one would have predicted the success of only fans, a porn influencing site. But here we are, people are working too hard at work to make money and then throwing it away at rent and to pay for imaginary sex. Next step, get them to pay for the emotional relationship.
> People are forced to value jobs and careers more than relationships.
This feels like an 80s trope. People are lonely because the discomfort of social situations drives them to hide in their smartphones rather than take the time to get to know people. It's a sad prison.
>Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community is a 2000 nonfiction book by Robert D. Putnam. It was developed from his 1995 essay entitled "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital". Putnam surveys the decline of social capital in the United States since 1950. He has described the reduction in all the forms of in-person social intercourse upon which Americans used to found, educate, and enrich the fabric of their social lives. He argues that this undermines the active civic engagement which a strong democracy requires from its citizens.
" He concluded the main cause was technology "individualizing" people's leisure time via television and the Internet, suspecting that "virtual reality helmets" would carry this further in the future."
Ah yes, I forgot about all of those “meme” studies of youth mental health showing a marked decline during the 1950s like we see today with studies that analyze mental health after the introduction of the smartphone.
It's actually a lot about a car based, commercialized society more then a phone or anything. If we had walkable cities, communities we wanted to be a part in, people would feel a whole lot less lonely. Fixing zoning laws, beautifying cities, better public transportation and working to bring more of nature into our everyday lives would make a digital one less interesting and we also would not need to work as hard as a good life would be in reach. It's like blaming books for causing people to be antisocial, same thing as video games...
It is both. They both absolutely contribute to our mental health crisis, and I'd argue it's worse in suburb-locked North America. I, as I'm sure others have as well, have identified these two individual problems as major offenders of my mental health. When I spend time away from both, I feel magnitudes of order happier. Mix that with the dystopian job culture of "the future" (today) and you've got yourself a nightmare only 80s writers would've thought of.
Lots of things changed around that time. Lots of things change all the time. Unless there's an intervention that is shown to work (ban smartphones, mental health goes up), I wouldn't trust such correlations.
IDK, back in my edgy years I was suicidal due to "loneliness"- even though I had friends and family. I even (kinda) had a partner.
I had no money, because you can't pay almost $100K in student loans and $900/mo in rent when you make $37K/year before taxes. I never went anywhere when my friends did.
I was the only person in my friend group that liked certain hobbies and social media wasn't that big back then (my main social media sites up until that point were blackplanet and geosites- Facebook had JUST come out) so there was no way for me to connect with like-minded individuals about things I really cared about.
I went to school ~600 miles away from my family in a city of ~35k people and only 88 of them were the same ethnicity as I, so I had to suppress most of my personality to "not stand out", which strained my relationship with my partner and led to a surprise breakup.
By the time I hit 22 I was legit prepared to end it all- I even left a "final farewell" note on /b just to give them one last "rofl" on the way out.
A full decade later I look back and realize that it wasn't my shitty job or financial situation. It wasn't being in a minority group in a hostile school or the breakup. I wasn't (committed to being) suicidal. I was literally just being an edgy dingleberry. My problem was 100% made up and I was just looking for ANY reason to stay trapped in a cycle of sadness. Eventually it just... Went away? At some point at 24 something changed in my brain where all of a sudden I want thinking about how lonely I was.
None of it had anything to really do with social interaction, at least not ACTUAL interaction. It felt like I was just bitter because I couldn't do all the stuff I WANTED to do, and that stuff just happened to be related to social interaction. Maybe my scenario isn't the same as what you're describing but I don't think smartphones/social media were my issue. I just needed to mature a bit more and not be so focused on what I COULDN'T do.
Having said that while I think smartphones are one of the most influential inventions to come out since the turn of the millennium... The biggest social media sites are a net drain on society and I would not be sad to see them go in the slightest.
Now throw in access to a gun and the odds of you being able to take your life in a vulnerable situation rise dramatically.
Throw in access to a smartphone where you’re bombarded with images and videos of the best version of everyone you know’s lives and you start feeling even more like you are the problem and are more likely to take your life when in a vulnerable position.
Throw in cyber bullying and if you happened to be bullied by any groups you’re part of that bullying would continue even when you’re home.
The one good thing about the internet is that it may have allowed you to communicate with others in your situation and help you realize you’re not the problem.
But we don’t need smartphones (and an always available camera) for that.
>"...Throw in access to a smartphone where you’re bombarded with images and videos of the best version of everyone you know’s lives and you start feeling even more like you are the problem and are more likely to take your life when in a vulnerable position..."
This is exactly my point- it is NOT the smartphone's fault. This is the fault of social media/advertisers and the fact that people refuse to get off of social media (because why work for money when you can just trade your privacy for a sponsorship deal and 10k followers). Nobody is "bombarding" you with anything if you just don't use those services, and if you replace "smartphone" with "Internet", "computer", "TV", etc... Your statement is still 100% true. I'm no expert but to me this is a dead ringer that the _smartphone_ isn't the root problem, and it would be unreasonable to blame this on "every device capable of displaying a webpage."
This is a "corporations suck" issue- not a technical issue. Smartphones are a convenient punching bag to blame, just like how millennials were "being corrupted" by violent video games.
Your other points are absolutely rock solid- no objections (especially the always-on camera bit, and not just because of bullying). It's this one point I take issue with. The social media and advertising companies are at fault- not the technology those companies use (yet. I love VR/AR but I do NOT like where it's going right now).
If it helps make sense of how I view this problem, the gun industry is a direct parallel. To fight gun violence we want to go after the sellers. Replace "gun" with "smartphone" and ask yourself: "does it make sense to go after smartphone manufacturers and sellers to stop cyber bullying? Is it fair to hurt the eCommerce, gaming, telephone, etc... Unrelated companies because ad companies are driving kids to despair?" To me the answer is "no", because I don't think it's fair to impact other digital companies relying on smartphones for business because a few of them are problematic. I also don't think it's fair to punish sport shooters, hunters, etc... By impacting their rights to (legal) gun ownership just because sellers want to protect their bottom lines.
Something needs to change, but I don't believe it's smartphones. We need to make it illegal to base a business model on the suffering of others.
I didn’t suggest anyone get out of anything. I was merely pointing out it’s easier to be insular in the age of the smartphone. And this isn’t just a passing observation. Studies on many facets of social health show declines since smartphones have been adopted.
As a suicidal person it can be extremely difficult to open up to another human being because my convictions of hopelessness and futility are so strong that to truly communicate them would also mean cursing the listener with knowledge that would make they themselves suicidal.
Maybe it wouldn't directly cause them to also become suicidal, but it could be a contributor. It could be one cut in a death of thousands. If you've ever seen the show Smiling Friends, the first episode is an example of how wanting to help can backfire in harmful ways.
An AI chatbot might be uniquely useful as a therapy option. I wouldn't have to feel the guilt of corrupting an innocent human being with dark suicidal thoughts. Sometimes a human connection is important for therapy, but the ability to talk things out may actually outweigh it for this context.
> As a suicidal person it can be extremely difficult to open up to another human being because my convictions of hopelessness and futility are so strong that to truly communicate them would also mean cursing the listener with knowledge that would make they themselves suicidal.
It's kind of interesting to hear that perspective. I don't worry about making others suicidal (maybe I should?) but instead worry that they'd be overly concerned about me all of the time when, e.g. I've just had a particularly bad day that day.
I certainly agree that chatbots seem to be a low-risk alternative to that. It's a never-ending delicate calculus over who you can tell what to considering that here in the US you can be locked up in a psychiatric facility for (at least) 48 hours for being a "harm to yourself." Thus, you can't explore your own feelings with another person and keep them locked inside, which is a much better alternative. /s
I'm definitely interested in using a chatbot as long as it itself isn't tied into any suicide hotline reporting scheme.
I already know people for whom ChatGPT and other chatbots are better friends and partners than almost any they had in real life. Especially for the disabled or consistently unhoused. It is dystopian but so is the existing world. Simulated empathy may be better than none at all.
You can reference "disease of despair" in this case, which includes "drug overdose (including alcohol overdose), suicide, and alcoholic liver disease". "For 2018, some 158,000 U.S. citizens died from these causes, compared to 65,000 in 1995." [1]
I remember reading about the oddly high number of men who die in "accidents" where they drive at very high speed into large stationary objects without breaking or swerving. The theory being those are just suicides without notes that get miscatagorised as single vehicle fatal accidents.
This is an interesting point because, from the people I've met, I'm not sure there are non-depressed opiate addicts? Like depression seems almost to be a prerequisite for opiate addiction. Also seems strongly correlated with alcoholism
Our social order rewards being a martyr for capitalism. We supplement the banality of capitalist enjoyments with the surplus enjoyment of observing others lives in hell - in wars, in starvation and killing themselves. We should not look so close at what in particular is causing each individual or each group of individuals to do this or that horror but stand back and see that we are universally united in this struggle to be.
Whether or not we should just let people do what they want, we most certainly do not. Our laws and our culture have a lot of rules about personal behavior, and these impact the suicide rate. Changes to these rules impacts people's health and flourishing, which impacts the suicide rate. Whether or not it's "acceptable" for an individual to take their own life, a large increase in the rate of people doing so is NOT a good sign for the society you live in. We absolutely should be asking questions about why that's happening.
Simply put, there's no coming back from a successful suicide, and generally people who attempt suicide are not in a normal/healthy state of mind.
There are many liberal societies that allow euthanasia though - even for mental health conditions - it's just there tends to be a process of checks and balances to go through to ensure the patient's decision is made of sound mind and without coercion.
