Category: health care

I read the Psychiatric Times article “How Psychiatry Has Enriched My Life: A Journey Beyond Expectations” by Victor Ajluni, MD and published on July 4, 2023. It was like a breath of fresh air to read an expression of gratitude. Just about everything I read in the news is negative.

At the end of the article, Dr. Ajluni added a comment acknowledging that artificial intelligence (AI ChatGPT) assisted him in writing it. He takes full responsibility for the content, to be sure. I wouldn’t have guessed that AI was involved.

There’s a lot of negative stuff in the news. There are hysterically alarming headlines about AI.

I suppose you could wonder if Dr. Aljuni’s article is intentionally ironic, maybe just because the gratitude tone is so positive.  If it had been intended as irony, what could the AI contribution have been, though? I have a pretty low opinion of the AI capacity for irony.

I think irony occurs to me only because I tend to be pessimistic about the human race.

Maybe that’s because it has been very easy to be pessimistic about what direction human nature seems to be taking in recent years. I’ve been reading Douglas Adams’ satirical book, “The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” It contains several of his books which I think are really about human nature, and the setting is in a funny though often terrifying universe. I think there’s an ironic tone which softens the pessimism. The most pessimistic character is not a human but a robot, Marvin the paranoid android.

Unlike Marvin, I don’t have “a brain the size of a planet” (it’s more the size of a chickpea), but I am getting a bit cynical about the universe. I’m prone to regarding humans as evolving into a race of beings similar to those described in the book “Life, The Universe and Everything.” In Chapter 24, Adams describes the constantly warring Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax.

The Silastic Armorfiends are incredibly violent. Their planet is in ruins because they’re constantly fighting their enemies, and indeed, each other. In fact, the best way to deal with a Silastic Armorfiend is to lock him in a room by himself—because eventually he’ll just beat himself up.

In order to cope better, they tried punching sacks of potatoes to get rid of aggression. But then, they thought it would be more efficient to simply shoot the potatoes instead.

They were the first race to shock a computer, named Hactar. Possibly, Hactar was an AI because, when they told Hactar to make the Ultimate Weapon so they could vanquish all their enemies, Hactar was shocked. Hactar secretly made a tiny bomb with a flaw that made it harmless when the Silastic Armorfiends set it off. Hactar explained “…that there was no conceivable consequence of not setting the bomb off that was worse than setting it off…”, which was why it made the bomb a dud. While Hactar was explaining that it hoped the Silastic Armorfiends would see the logic of this course of action—they destroyed Hactar, or at least thought they had.

Eventually, they found a new way to blow themselves up, which was a relief to everyone in the galaxy.

There are similarities between Hactar and the AI called Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence (V.I.K.I.) in the movie “I, Robot.” The idea was that robots must control humans because humans are so self-destructive. Only that meant robots had to hurt humans in order to protect humanity. The heroes who eventually destroy V.I.K.I. make up a team of misfits: a neurotic AI named Sonny, a paranoid cop who is himself a mixture of robot and human, and a psychiatrist. Together, the team finally discovers the flaw in the logic of V.I.K.I. Of course, this leads to the destruction of V.I.K.I.—but also to the evolution of Sonny who learns the power of the ironic wink.

Maybe kindness is the Ultimate Weapon.