I want to study psychology but won't AI make it redundant in a couple of years?

I know it’s not even close there yet. It can tell you to kill yourself or to kill a president. But what about when I finish school in like 7 years? Who would pay for a therapist or a psychologist when you can ask for help a floating head on your computer?

You might think this is a stupid and irrational question. “There is no way AI will do psychology well, ever.” But I think in today’s day and age it’s pretty fair to ask when you are deciding about your future.

magnetosphere,
magnetosphere avatar

You are putting WAY too much faith in the ability of programmers. Real AI that can do the job of a therapist is decades away, at least - and then there’s the approval process, which will take years all by itself. Don’t underestimate that. AI therapy is uncharted territory, and the approval process will be lengthy, detailed, and incredibly strict.

Lastly, there’s public acceptance. Even if AI turns out to have measurably better outcomes, if people aren’t comfortable with it, statistics won’t matter. People aren’t rational. I don’t care how “good” Alexa is, or how much evidence you show me - I will never accept that a piece of software can understand what it’s like to grow up as a person. I want to talk about my issues with a flawed, fallible human, not a box plugged into the wall.

You ask a valid question, just much earlier than necessary. I’d be surprised if AI was a viable alternative by the time you retire.

Encode1307,

There are already digital therapeutic platforms approved for mental health. Orexo deprexis is one such program. The fact is that the vast majority of people who need therapy aren’t getting it now. These ai therapy models will provide services to those people. I’m willing to bet that in a decade, the majority of therapy will be done by AI, with human therapists focused on the most severe behavioral health conditions.

intensely_human,

Dr Sbaitso was proven to be clinically effective in the 1980s.

realharo,

It’s definitely possible, but such an AI would probably be good enough to take over every other field too. So it’s not like you can avoid it by choosing something else anyway.

And the disruption would be large enough that governments will have to react.

dumples,
dumples avatar

At the end of the day AI (no just the LLM we call AI now) are really good at doing boring machine work. These tasks are repetitive, simple and routine. This includes all the LLM which can summarize boring text and generate more boring text. It can't generate anything new but just output and rearrange.

What there will be always need for are human work. This includes creativity, emotions and human interaction. A machine can't replace that at all. Psychology and therapy are all emotions and human interactions so it might be the most safe career choice. Same with something like haircutting or other career that involve human wisdom and personal skills.

Boring jobs like sending and receiving emails might be replaced. The reason businesses are so scared is that the majority of people in an office just do that

SHamblingSHapes,

They already do have AI therapy assistants. CBT type therapy is particularly easy to turn into an app. There are half a dozen in the Google Play store now. They’re a nice reminder at times, but no substitute for human conversation.

Once we do have AIs capable of conversation indistinguishable from real human, then therapy is not the only job that will be disrupted. Therapy will be no more or less safe a career path than so many other things.

Second, humans will still need to program, train, and monitor the therapy AIs. The obvious candidates to fill the role at first are experienced therapists with a bit of tech savvy. Until they optimize to the point where the job can be done by warm bodies paid minimum wage, probably “contractors” so liability can be compartmentalized. Then we’re back to the point above where everyone in any career is fucked anyway, might as well do what you’re good at and what you enjoy for a decade or two.

Addition,

Here’s a case study for you: An eating disorder hotline got rid of the humans in favor of an AI chatbot. Lasted less than a week before it was giving horrible advice.

theguardian.com/…/eating-disorder-hotline-union-a…

Psychology will be controlled by humans, probably forever.

TimewornTraveler,

homie lemme let you in on a secret that shouldn’t be secret

in therapy, 40% of positive client outcomes come from external factors changing

10% come from my efforts

10% come from their efforts

and the last 40% comes from the therapeutic alliance itself

people heal through the relationship they have with their counselor

not a fucking machine

this field ain’t going anywhere, not any time soon. not until we have fully sentient general ai with human rights and shit

cheese_greater,

I don’t think there’s harm in allowing people who would never be able to afford life-saving medicine to have life-saving medicine cat-puzzle-feeder style

Edit: this was me and access hasn’t changed the fact that I do no generally derive value from it.

intensely_human,

You realize that adds up to 60% right?

TimewornTraveler,

40 40 10 10

lemonnade,

math moment

dog,

Interestingly, and somewhat related, it was tested years ago whether a Robot could bring comfort/social support to lonely pets/elderly.

The results were outstandingly in support, and this is going into actual commercial usage/development as we speak.

4am,

AI cannot think, it does not logic or reason. It outputs a result from an input prompt. That will not solve psychological problems.

baked_tea,

It’s what AI does at the moment. Which may not necessarily be true in a few years, what’s what OP is asking about.

Bonifratz,

Even if AI did make psychology redundant in a couple of years (which I’d bet my favourite blanket it won’t), what are the alternatives? If AI can take over a field that is focused more than most others on human interaction, personal privacy, thoughts, feelings, and individual perceptions, then it can take over almost any other field before that. So you might as well go for it while you can.

intensely_human,

The fields that will hold out the longest will be selected by legal liability rather than technical challenge.

Piloting a jumbo jet for example, has been automated for decades but you’ll never see an airline skipping the pilot.

Zeth0s,

AI won’t do psychology redundant. Might allow for an easier and broader access to low level psychological first support.

What is more likely to make psychological consultants a risky investment is the economic crisis. People are already prioritizing food over psychological therapy. Psychological therapy unfortunately is nowadays a “luxury item”.

NMS,

Hey, maybe your back ground in psychology will help with unfucking an errant LLM or actual AI someday :P

Macaroni_ninja,
@Macaroni_ninja@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t think the AI everyone is so buzzed about today is really a true AI. As someone summed it up: it’s more like a great autocomplete feature but it’s not great at understanding things.

It will be great to replace Siri and the Google assistant but not at giving people professional advice by a long shot.

Zeth0s,

Not saying an LLM should substitute a professional psychological consultant, but that someone is clearly wrong and doesn’t understand current AI. Just FYI

Macaroni_ninja,
@Macaroni_ninja@lemmy.world avatar

Care to elaborate?

It’s an oversimplified statement from someone (sorry I don’t have the source) and I’m not exactly an AI expert but my understanding is the current commercial AI products are nowhere near the “think and judge like a human” definition. They can scrape the internet for information and use it to react to prompts and can do a fantastic job to imitate humans, but the technology is simply not there.

Zeth0s,

The technology for human intelligence? Any technology would be always very different from human intelligence. What you probably are referring to is AGI, that is defined as artificial general intelligence, which is an “intelligent” agent that doesn’t excel in anything, but is able to handle a huge variety of scenarios and tasks, such as humans.

LLM are specialized models to generate fluent text, but very different from autocompletes because can work with concepts, semantics and (pretty surprisingly) with rather complex logic.

As oversimplification even humans are fancy autocomplete. They are just different, as LLMs are different.

troed,
@troed@fedia.io avatar

Tomorrow's psychologists will be the ones to "program" AIs. It will be a very important profession.

WeLoveCastingSpellz,

I think it is one of these things that AI can’t make redundant, never.

theherk,

Many valid points here, but here is a slightly different perspective. Let’s say for the sake of discussion AI is somehow disruptive here. So?

You cannot predict what will happen in this very fast space. You should not attempt to do so in a way that compromises your path toward your interests.

If you like accounting or art or anything else that AI may disrupt… so what? Do it because you are interested. It may be hyper important to have people that did so in any given field no matter how unexpected. And most importantly, doing what interest you is always at least part of a good plan.

cooopsspace,

Given the vast array of existing pitfalls in AI, not to mention the outright biases and absence of facts - AI psychology would be deeply flawed and would more likely kill people.

Person: I’m having unaliving thoughts, I feel like it’s the only thing I can do

AI: Ok do it then

That alone is why it’ll never happen.

Also we need to sort out how to house, heal and feed our people before we start going and replacing masses of workforce.

conciselyverbose,

The level of liability you'd expose yourself actively advertising it as some sort of mental health product is insane.

I do believe someone will be dumb enough, but it's a truly terrible, insanely unsafe idea with anything resembling current tech in any way.

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