humanity – Go Retire Psychiatrist

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.

Sena and I got our annual flu shots last week, and I also got a pneumonia vaccine. We’ve been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 since earlier in the year. Now we’re waiting for the word on whether we’ll need COVID-19 vaccine boosters. We’ll probably know more about that by the end of the week after the FDA Advisory Committee meeting on the matter.

We’re part of the vaccinated, which is increasingly distinguished from the unvaccinated in various ways. The controversy about the unvaccinated almost amounts to them being discriminated against, according to some news headlines. The COVID-19 pandemic is now being called a pandemic of the unvaccinated, although some are able to resist the trend by seeing through it and realize we’re all in this together.

It reminds me of an old Cold War era episode of The Twilight Zone, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” which originally aired in 1960. The gist is that aliens seeking to conquer earthlings create paranoia and violent conflict amongst neighbors on a quiet cul-de-sac simply by manipulating the electrical power to cars and other devices. At first, the electrical malfunctions are only puzzling until a boy named Tommy tells everyone that the trouble is being perpetrated by aliens who are indistinguishable from humans, a notion he got from a comic book.

And after that, everyone on the street begins accusing each other of being malevolent aliens disguised as humans, often on the basis of interpreting benign behaviors like insomnia or tinkering with a ham radio as evidence for dangerous plots. One character even shoots his neighbor dead, believing he’s a dangerous alien.

There was a 2003 remake of this in which the government, instead of aliens, is doing the manipulating. No doubt both of these will be re-broadcast as part of Twilight Zone marathons next month as part of the usual October Halloween TV program lineup.

Sena thought of another Twilight Zone show, “The Shelter,” first broadcast in 1961, which also might fit the current pandemic context. A doctor builds a bomb shelter to protect just him and his family in case of a disaster. The unthinkable happens with UFOs being sighted and the friends and neighbors who threw a party for him all want to beg, bargain, or threaten their way into the doctor’s bomb shelter because they didn’t build their own. He refuses to allow them in. The neighbors turn on each other, showing the worst selfishness, hatred, and racism. They finally break into the doctor’s shelter with a battering ram (which, of course, negates the safety it might have provided)—only to find out in that moment that the UFOs were just satellites. They had become monsters and could not see how it happened.

Depending on what news media outlet you prefer to read, the vaccinated or the unvaccinated will be cast as bad guys or good guys. As the rhetoric heats up based on divisions between political parties, religious groups, scientists, races, and nations, the antipathy has fostered escalating tensions over whether vaccine and mask mandates should or should not prevail. The unvaccinated have their own battering ram—fake vaccination passports, which negate the safety assurance. The unvaccinated can’t get in to see their doctors in person, poison themselves with unproven medicines, or accuse the government of trying to poison them with vaccines. The wealthy vaccinated buy their booster shots at the expense of those who can’t afford them and before the medical experts can approve their safety and necessity. People are resorting to violence.

I always had a little trouble with the title of the Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” The monsters are not just due—we have arrived. Why is it so hard for me to recall an episode showing exactly how to recover our humanity?