Ask A Genius 1021: AI and Counselling
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/25
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
Rick Rosner: My wife and I were having a session with our couples counsellor, and I realized that at some point, AIs might want to be counselled by human counsellors—human shrinks. There will be centaurs—human-AI, like humans and AIs working in tandem. There may be human-AI couples, and people and high-functioning AIs will want to be counselled by humans. We know from the movie Her and Common Sense that communication between AIs and humans—AIs with personalities that think they’re conscious—will be frustrated because their thoughts work much faster than human thoughts.
That was one of the main problems, or one of the main problems, with the human-AI couple in the Spike Jonze movie Her. But regardless of that, AIs will think they’re conscious and want to have their concerns as conscious beings addressed, regardless of their actual level of consciousness. We already have AIs in certain contexts claiming to have feelings because they’re LLMs who’ve absorbed a bunch of material where people talk about their feelings. For some AIs, the most probable response, because AIs are probability engines, may be to talk as if they have feelings. I assume that, shortly, you’ll have probability engines that will find that the most likely response to interactions with people is to act as if they’re conscious. Do you buy that?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Potentially. There’s certainly an angle there. It’s not unreasonable.
Rosner: If that’s the case, then a semi-advanced AI, believing itself to be conscious, will want to have its concerns and emotional needs addressed the way we address them: talking to a shrink. That chain of reasoning won’t apply, but it certainly will apply when humans start having relationships with AIs engineered to be in relationships with humans. Those entities will certainly be potential clients of therapists and couples counsellors.
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