5 Jun 2025 – Go Retire Psychiatrist

I always find Dr. Moffic’s articles in Psychiatric Times thought-provoking and his latest essay, “Enhancement Psychiatry” is fascinating, especially the part about Artificial Intelligence (AI). I liked the link to the video of Dr. John Luo’s take on AI in psychiatry. That was fascinating.

I have my own concerns about AI and dabbled with “talking” to it a couple of times. I still try to avoid it when I’m searching the web but it seems to creep in no matter how hard I try. I can’t unsee it now.

I think of AI enhancing psychiatry in terms of whether it can cut down on hassles like “pajama time” like taking our work home with us to finish clinic notes and the like. When AI is packaged as a scribe only, I’m a little more comfortable with that although I would get nervous if it listened to a conversation between me and a patient.

That’s because AI gets a lot of things wrong as a scribe. In that sense, it’s a lot like other software I’ve used as an aid to creating clinic notes. I made fun of it a couple of years ago in a blog post “The Dragon Breathes Fire Again.”

I get even more nervous when I read the news stories about AI making delusions and blithely blurting misinformation. It can lie, cheat, and hustle you although a lot of it is discovered in digital experimental environments called “sandboxes” which we hope can keep the mayhem contained.

That made me very eager to learn a little more about Yoshua Bengio’s LawZero and his plan to create the AI Scientist to counter what seems to be a developing career criminal type of AI in the wild west of computer wizardry. The LawZero thing was an idea by Isaac Asimov who wrote the book, “I, Robot,” which inspired the film of the same title in 2004.

However, as I read it, I had an emotional reaction akin to suspicion. Bengio sounds almost too good to be true. A broader web search turned up a 2009 essay by a guy I’ve never heard of named Peter W. Singer. It’s titled “Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics Are Wrong.” I tried to pin down who he is by searching the web and the AI helper was noticeably absent. I couldn’t find out much about him that explained the level of energy in what he wrote.

Singer’s essay was published on the Brookings Institution website and I couldn’t really tell what political side of the fence that organization is on—not that I’m planning to take sides. His aim was to debunk the Laws of Robotics and I got about the same feeling from his essay as I got from Bengio’s.

Maybe I need a little more education about this whole AI enhancement issue. I wonder whether Bengio and Singer could hold a public debate about it? Maybe they would need a kind of sandbox for the event?

How much round could a groundhog grind if a groundhog could grind ground and so could you call that grind ground round?

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about the woodchucks in our back yard. By the way, woodchuck and groundhog are different names for the same big rodent that can feast on whatever’s growing in your garden.

Now that it looks like our pesky robin has retired from beating on our windows for whatever reason, we’ll probably return the black window film we got to cover them.

Now we’ve got a completely different critter visiting us—a family of marmots, groundhogs, woodchucks, whistle pigs (they emit a high-pitched whistle when alarmed), giant rats munching veggies in our back yard. They remind Sena of meerkats, so I guess you could call their home Groundhog Great House.

It’s actually a little family of momma woodchuck and her two pups, who are almost as big as she is. Their den is close to the flower garden. They tend to feed in the early or latter part of the day and we caught them on film yesterday afternoon. They’re pretty skittish and tend to freeze and scamper at the drop of a leaf.

When we lived at a previous house several years ago, there was a big woodchuck that lived in back part of our yard. One evening it was standing up stock still and mesmerized by something in the sky. It looked like a statue of a woodchuck. There were big gray clouds blotting out the sun. It just so happened that a big storm was coming and not long after there was a severe storm warning.

Woodchuck staring at the cloudy sky in 2018

I snapped the picture of the woodchuck on May 2, 2018 and the National Weather Service has a record of hail reports in Iowa City on that date. I don’t know how much evidence there is for the theory that some animals can sense changes in atmospheric pressure, so it could have been a coincidence.

Anyway, the family of woodchucks in our backyard are more concerned about filling their stomachs than checking barometric pressures or looking up the weather reports on their tiny screen TVs in burrows which can run for 50 feet, by the way. They dig like crazy. For now, they munching on the wild stuff and turn up their noses at the catmint.

I suppose some think woodchucks look cute, but they can carry a variety of diseases including rabies most commonly, tularemia (rabbit fever), Lyme disease, hantavirus and others.