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.

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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

Machine Learning Street Talk

The post discusses the ethical implications of AI in therapy, specifically whether AI should change people's minds. It highlights OpenAI's principle against altering opinions and contrasts it with therapy's goal of opening minds to neuroplasticity. The potential value of AI in enhancing human autonomy, competency, and relatedness is considered. Additionally, the Brave search API is mentioned for improving information retrieval in large language models. Finally, it touches on broader societal issues such as the increasing rates of anxiety and depression and the evolution of diagnostic categories.

Daniel Cahn - Slingshot AI (AI Therapy)