Sean: For aging people who feel lonely or even younger people who feel the longing of loneliness and having someone to talk to, do you think that it would be a good, long term solution for them to communicate with an AI, even if that AI may or may not make them feel good about themselves?

Minter: The word that's important, I think, in what you said is, is it a good solution? And I think it is a good solution, but not the best solution. The best solution is probably having your grandchildren and your children in your company hanging out. And it's human to human.

However, people today are extremely self engrossed. They are doing what they have to do. They have less time to listen to other people. And especially today, the sort of intolerance for grandfather who's going to tell the same story 50 times.

But the issue and one of the three main reasons why I got to write this book is that we've also seen a hellaciously large amount of mental health disorders, especially amongst the young.

And I put this down to a number of things, but one of them being a lack of meaningfulness, a sense, a crisis of meaning, but also because of greater awareness, also because of a broader definition of what this is and the type of solutions, pharmaceutical or other, that are out there.

And I think there are other issues as well in terms of how we are no longer as resilient as, for example, your grandfather or my grandfather who was killed in the Philippines. I mean, you know, so there's a whole lot of things that have gone on.

And on top of that, when people have mental health disorders declared, they can't find therapists because they're just not enough therapists, trained therapists out there to do the work. And is it a good solution?

Well, sometimes they may get bad advice for sure. But by the way, that happens in real life as well. You go chat with a friend about your situation and they give you advice. Is it always the best advice? You know, I'm going to put a little wager on and know.

Is the AI going to be perfect? No. By the way, is AI capable today of therapeutic AI? No. Because it hasn't been sufficiently trained, but it's moving towards that.

.And of course it's better to have a friend who knows you, your context and those deep friends. So is AI going to replace all that? No.

And then the other thing to recognize is that outside of the fact that we as human beings, not only do we not always have the time, we sometimes don't have enough data to learn how to be appropriately empathic.

But with a machine, it's going to learn over time and it's going to be able to respond if you program it with good ethics and some good ideas around the types of therapies that you can produce, it will listen to you ad nauseam.

It can be programmed not to be distracted. It can be programmed to provide you with some good ideas. It doesn't have to be like a prescription of medication. Obviously not, but it can do some things and it can certainly be better than a lot of people, depending on the situation, depending on the relationship.

And if it's well programmed, I am very optimistic that it will provide a good solution to help with your lack of therapists, with the inversion of the population growth, with being available at 2 a.m. in the morning when the young teenager is feeling terribly distressed.

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Minter Dial

Website: https://www.minterdial.com/

Book: https://minterdial.com/books/heartificial-empathy