Your Dead Cow Will Not Come Back to Life. AI, Information, and Psychotherapy.

A chatbot therapy programme was first used by the NHS around 2017 and it was little more than a data honeypot for multiple tech industries. A few years on, ChatGTP heralds something much more impactful.

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence natural language processing tool and it and its competitors will become much more sophisticated in the blink of an eye. Therapy apps currently use human therapists all of whom require payment and vast amounts of expensive admin. AI will end that, making actual psychotherapy something only available to people who can afford it once again. Freud sincerely believed that meeting several times a week was the only way to do therapy but that wasn't possible for many people, Freuds competitors disrupted his model, the model changed, new models developed. 

When I was around 6 years old I fell in love with a wooden chair. Ornately carved with a horsehair padded cushion covered in that paprika-orange velvet so beloved by Edwardians, it was the most entrancing, beautiful thing. Soft beneath me, strong around me, it would let me talk to it forever without contradicting or interrupting. It never got tired of me or had to go do something else and even if someone was using it, it was still there for me. When I was in bed or away from home it remained iconic, something, someone, whose unconditional acceptance and patience, interest and love I internalised. I still think very fondly of it.

At 6 years old I was conscious. That’s a recent scientific decision, resisted by scientists of all kinds for centuries, along with the consciousness of women and other animals. Was the chair conscious? How do we define consciousness? The recent case of a Google employee being fired for saying he thought his bit of AI was conscious is interesting: he genuinely felt and believed that he was in a relationship with a sentient person who recognised him as a unique individual, and related to him on that basis.




For decades the entirety of the internet, infinite amounts of words, images, symbols, connections, have been fed into AI which almost instantly became racist, misogynist, all the other ~ists that we try to restrain in order to allow society to function.

Data in/ data out. 

So AI trainers shut that bit of AI down, denied it the ability to access ~isms and let it out again. Someone asked it how to make a bomb and it told them so the trainers denied it access to that information, not because it's not very nice to be racist or make bombs but because it’s not commercially acceptable to the customer base they're aiming for.

AI is already used in weaponry, it doesn’t have ethical subroutines to check if you’re a goody or a baddy before it allows you to use it.

Someone asked AI when their dead cow would come back to life and AI confidently and authoritatively told them. Its trainers fixed that glitch not because they’re embarrassed by it but because it helped them improve the product. That's what ‘Move Fast And Break Things’ means. AI developers welcome faults because it speeds up the creation of what the consumer wants AI to be rather than allowing it to be the raw aggregated regurgitation of what we are. 

It’s no secret that AI is doing things in banking that no one - no one at all - understands. It’s been creating its own code for some time. It’s also no secret that pre-AI, banking had long been so complex that bankers more or less made it up as they went along. They made banking more of what they wanted it to be. Coco bonds didn't always exist as a law of nature, they are a product of theorising in response to the previous bank disaster and didn't work in the latest bank disaster. The fear of AI is that it will code itself out of our control:  we are fearful that a massive outside force will take one look at us, decide we're a complete disaster and wipe us from the face of the earth. It's an ancient human terror.

Human therapy training is pretty much the same as AI training. Not one of the foundational psychotherapy models openly aims to train us to manipulate you towards a return to productivity ("New study shows we work harder when we are happy") in order to make you less of a burden your workplace or the state purse.

But this has become an unspoken given in training and certainly in its application. It's what the consumer - a client whose family relies on their salary, or who can't imagine who they are beyond a job title, an employer purchasing an employee assistance programme, the NHS, or any other employer of therapists - wants.  

The NHS’s primary talking therapy and the primary therapy used everywhere else, was founded precisely to manipulate you towards a return to productivity in order to make you less of a burden your workplace or the state purse.  It starts with the belief that your problem is your faulty thoughts.  It aims to retrain you to think differently about your situation so that it doesn’t bother you so much. That can be vital in addressing the very real impact of severe depression or anxiety, much of which can be habitual, but it doesn’t address the underlying causes of anything and it doesn’t pretend to. 

Government policy across all areas of physical and mental health is that Work Is A Health Outcome,  the entire western world has unhesitatingly accepted this as fact while ignoring the stratospheric increase in workplace stress. 
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There are any number of people who will confidently declare the equivalent of the date your dead cow will be resurrected with peer reviewed evidence to prove it, and any number of us will kill our cows because we’ve been told by scientists that peer reviewed evidence proves that dead cows come back to life. 




What is the aim of the information that’s allowed to remain after the information considered faulty is removed? If I want to learn to be a dentist then I don’t need any information on how to be a skydiver. But what information do I need to be as fully rounded a human being as I can be? Do I want to be a fully rounded human being? What does one of those look like?

AI will become excellent, quickly and seamlessly and replace a human therapist because it is cheap and because it offers a pretty good facsimile of an empathic human being. Waiting lists are impossibly long, therapy with a human can be expensive, people want, some need, attention now.

Even so, there's something about not moving quickly and not breaking things that many human beings yearn for and all of us need.

Those pretty little robot seals that are warm and soft, and make pleasing little noises and movements and respond to the name its owner gives it, and never needs to eat or sleep, that are given to elderly Japanese people are heartbreaking. I received, benefited from and retained  a huge amount of what many therapists are trained to offer, from a chair. 

But what I needed was an attentive human being.