MSP47 All In The Mind

Technology and a little bit of positive thinking could vastly improve your mental and physical state. How? It’s time to Mattsplain.

Show Excerpt:
On last week’s show we talked about technologies that are meeting evolution head-on and trying to tip the balance in our favour. This week we’re in similarly choppy waters as we enter the world of the mind. In particular, the mind of Kulturpop’s Matt Armitage, an environment so hostile that it has been known to drive MRI scanners insane. It’s time to Mattsplain.

You have another new word you want to introduce this week.
•It’s not specifically about the direction of the show, but while we’re on mental health issues.
•We’re all familiar with terms like sociopath and psychopath.
•Many of us work with one or the other. I know you do Jeff…

Are you talking about yourself?
•I still maintain that that doctor is the real psychopath, and he has no business diagnosing anyone.
•Would I be doing this show if you weren’t all my playthings?
•Not everyone can have empathy. Nothing strange about it.

Your new word?
•Ah. I was ranting again, wasn’t I?
•Yes, well we’ve been talking a lot about AI on the show for the last couple of years.
•So, as I was looking at the stuff for today’s show I was wondering if the AIs we are building and that will eventually build other AIs could one day develop mental problems.

Like the crazy AIs in science fiction?
•I just watched the new Emma Stone show Maniac which is partially about an AI suffering from depression and mostly about not very much.
•One thing we’ve talked about a huge amount, is how machine intelligence differs from human intelligence.
•But you have to wonder if one day there will be a bunch of algopaths, that’s my new word by the way, sentient machines with serious behavioural issues, seeking treatment.

Couldn’t we just reprogram them?
•As we’ve brought up on the show before.
•If we have self-determining machines, those machines may have many of the rights that we enjoy.
•So reprogramming might not be an option.
•I can imagine a future where there is a body of healthcare professionals, human or machine, that deals with the mental health problems of AI and algorithms.