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I want to study psychology but won't AI make it redundant in a couple of years? (lemmy.world)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I know it's not even close there yet. It can tell you to kill yourself or to kill a president. But what about when I finish school in like 7 years? Who would pay for a therapist or a psychologist when you can ask for help a floating head on your computer?

You might think this is a stupid and irrational question. "There is no way AI will do psychology well, ever." But I think in today's day and age it's pretty fair to ask when you are deciding about your future.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If you're going to avoid psychology, do it because of the replication crisis. What is being called "AI" should play no role on that. Here's why.

Let us suppose for a moment that some AI 7y from now is able to accurately diagnose and treat psychological issues that someone might have. Even then the AI in question is not a moral agent that can be held responsible for its actions, and that is essential when you're dealing with human lives. In other words you'll still need psychologists picking the output of said AI and making informed decisions on what the patient should [not] do.

Furthermore, I do not think that those "AI systems" will be remotely as proficient at human tasks in, say, a decade, as some people are claiming that they will be. AI is a misnomer, those systems are not intelligent. Model-based text generators are a great example of that (and relevant in your case): play a bit with ChatGPT or Bard, and look at their output in a somewhat consistent way (without cherry picking the hits and ignoring the misses). Then you'll notice that they don't really understand anything - they're reproducing grammatical patterns regardless of their content. (Just like they were programmed to.)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I haven't heard of Replication Crisis. Thanks for pointing that out.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

It boils down to scientists not knowing if they're actually reaching some conclusion or just making shit up. It's actually a big concern across multiple sciences, it's just that Psychology is being hit really hard, and for clinical psychologists this means that they simply can't trust as much the theoretical frameworks guiding their decisions as they were supposed to.