Daniel Cahn, co-founder of Slingshot AI, on the potential of AI in therapy and modelling the mind with AI. Why is anxiety and depression affecting a large population? To what extent are these real categories? Why is the mental health getting worse? How often do you want an AI to agree with you? What are the ethics of persuasive AI? The answers to these questions will surprise you. MLST is sponsored by Brave: The Brave Search API covers over 20 billion webpages, built from scratch without Big Tech biases or the recent extortionate price hikes on search API access. Perfect for AI model training and retrieval augmentated generation. Try it now - get 2,000 free queries monthly at http://brave.com/api. Daniel Cahn (who is also hiring ML engineers by the way!) https://x.com/thecahnartist?lang=en https://www.linkedin.com/in/cahnd/ https://thinkingmachinespodcast.com/ TOC: 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:56 Therapy effectiveness vs drugs and societal implications 00:04:02 Mental health categories: Iatrogenesis and social constructs 00:10:19 Psychiatric treatment models and cognitive perspectives 00:13:30 AI design and human-like interactions: Intentionality debates 00:20:04 AI in therapy: Ethics, anthropomorphism, and loneliness mitigation 00:28:13 Therapy efficacy: Neuroplasticity, suffering, and AI placebos 00:33:29 AI's impact on human agency and cognitive modeling 00:41:17 Social media's effects on brain structure and behavior 00:50:46 AI ethics: Altering values and free will considerations 01:00:00 Work value perception and personal identity formation 01:13:37 Free will, agency, and mutable personal identity in therapy 01:24:27 AI in healthcare: Challenges, ethics, and therapy improvements 01:53:25 AI development: Societal impacts and cultural implications Pod version: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/machinelearningstreettalk/episodes/Can-AI-therapy-be-more-effective-than-drugs-e2mvhd0 Refs: Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up (Abigail Shrier) https://amzn.to/3WSLga4 Irreversible Damage: Teenage Girls and the Transgender Craze (Shrier) https://amzn.to/4d9kpfx (note that this book will be offensive to trans folks, forewarned - Tim hasn't read it/isn't taking a position) The Coddling of the American Mind (Haidt) https://amzn.to/3WMtPaS The Anxious Generation (Haidt) https://amzn.to/3SB9MJU Lost Connections (Johan Hari) https://amzn.to/3SC7471 (Note the book cover of "Hillbilly Elegy" was a mistake, I meant to link to "The Minds of Billy Milligan") i.e. a book about multiple personality disorder https://amzn.to/4dUHZg7 Noise (Kahneman) https://amzn.to/4ftMgsi Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR) https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm Biopsychosocial model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopsychosocial_model The serotonin theory of depression: how the media got it all wrong https://pharmaceutical-journal.com/article/feature/the-serotonin-theory-of-depression-how-the-media-got-it-all-wrong The ELIZA effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect How to Win Friends and Influence People https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/0091906814 Evidence of Human-Level Bonds Established With a Digital Conversational Agent: Cross-sectional, Retrospective Observational Study (JMIR) https://formative.jmir.org/2021/5/e27868/ COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE (Turing - imitation game) https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/sources/t_article.pdf Decision transformers https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01345 Loneliness and suicide mitigation for students using GPT3-enabled chatbots https://www.nature.com/articles/s44184-023-00047-6 Little Treatments, Big Effects (Jessica Schleider) https://amzn.to/4deN7vh Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned (Stanley and Lehman) [Possibly the best book ever written] https://amzn.to/3yxykNf Machine Love (Lehman) https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.09248 Infinite games https://amzn.to/3LYF3Tq OpenAI model spec https://openai.com/index/introducing-the-model-spec/ A Brief History of Intelligence (Bennett - interview dropping soon) https://amzn.to/3WTWs5Z Bullshit Jobs: A Theory https://amzn.to/46ENSeO John Carmack take - https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1796622337963389412 Determined (Robert M Sapolsky) https://amzn.to/4dc8KN3 So You've Been Publicly Shamed (Jon Ronson) https://amzn.to/3WDLzE9 The Examined Life (Stephen Grosz) https://amzn.to/3SF6s0H Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) https://amzn.to/3WzEZyx Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modeling https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.01345 Ender's Game https://amzn.to/3yxXNGq Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs https://amzn.to/4ccrc6Q Thinking Machines (Daniel’s podcast!) https://thinkingmachinespodcast.com/ The Upside of Stress (Daniel referenced this on a part of the conversation which we edited out) https://amzn.to/3LYMTww