Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: It is ten years in the future. Your days are dark and dreary due to the grinding return of your recurrent major depressive disorder. But even amidst the despair, you recognize a bright spot in your situation, all things considered. Ten years ago, your depression was worsened by the fact that a nationwide shortage of mental health clinicians made it impossible to find adequate care. And the care itself didn’t help much. You remember the string of ineffective medication trials overseen by a cavalcade of 15-min mind-numbingly impersonal med checks with your psychiatrist. You remember psychotherapy starting to help, but you also remember your insurance terminating coverage after 6 sessions, just when the therapy seemed to be lifting your mood. Those painful memories highlight how much better your clinical care is now, something you’ve talked about more than once with your current therapist, whose clinical acumen can only make you marvel at the degree to which, after so many years of stagnation, mental health care has advanced. Your therapist knows you so well she can almost read your thoughts. She is always empathic, although also able to be gently confrontational when appropriate. And she is always available, so available, in fact, that she recently set a limit on the frequency of your interactions, using your craving for constant contact in the transference relationship to help you realize how the emotional neglect you experienced at the hands of your parents has made you too emotionally dependent on others as an adult. But there is a wrinkle. Your therapist is not human. Ten years from now, humans will have faded from the psychotherapy scene (except as a high end offering for the very rich), replaced by generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered bots that long ago passed the Turing Test and are now completely indistinguishable from humans in their verbal interactions with the world. A year or two ago, in our present time, some may have doubted that this type of scenario could be possible, but no longer. Indeed, a recent poll found that 55% of younger Americans would feel more comfortable talking about mental health struggles with a “confidential” chatbot than a human therapist [ 1 ]. And they might not be completely wrong. A recent study found that experienced psychotherapists could not differentiate human from AI-produced psychotherapeutic responses, with the exception that the psychotherapists rated the AI-generated responses as superior [ 2 ]. Ten years from now, the question of whether one is dealing with a human, or an artificial entity, will have become passe. What is not so clear is whether, ten years from now, you will care whether your therapist is actually conscious or only manifests the perfect appearance of consciousness. If your therapist appears to be as conscious as your spouse and children (and different, perhaps, only in being more accepting of your issues), will it matter if nobody’s home? Will you care whether your therapist thinks and worries about you between sessions, or is—in fact—an entity that sits in eerily empty mental silence even when engaging with you? If you are being so profoundly helped by her, will it matter that your therapist is, technically speaking, a “philosophical zombie”, a being identical to a human, but lacking consciousness? [ 3 ].
Source: Molecular Psychiatry
Language: English
Subfield: Applied Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $5,490
OpenAlex ID: W4415743328