US suicide deaths reached record high in 2022
reuters.com
reuters.com
Would be my response. I wouldn’t want to work for someone that asks that kind of question anyway.
My GitHub speaks for itself, I don't really plan on justifying my time away from formal employment other than "sorry, I wanted to enjoy life while my body and mind were working at near peak rather than waiting another 30 years to avoid making others around me uncomfortable". Because god knows people get weird about hearing how long I've been happily unemployed. I've said it here before and it's wiiiiildly unpopular but a decade of tech salary goes *a very, very long way* if you're not on the consumer-capitalist treadmill.
So two things on my mind: - has there been research on whether such tools could actually be significantly helpful to people facing depression, as individuals and over whole populations? - are existing virtual companions already being prescribed by health professionals?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replika
That movie Her seems to explore this topic, I don't know, I isn't see it, even the movie seemed too sad to me.
4 years ago, no one would have predicted the success of only fans, a porn influencing site. But here we are, people are working too hard at work to make money and then throwing it away at rent and to pay for imaginary sex. Next step, get them to pay for the emotional relationship.
I don't like the future.
This feels like an 80s trope. People are lonely because the discomfort of social situations drives them to hide in their smartphones rather than take the time to get to know people. It's a sad prison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
>Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community is a 2000 nonfiction book by Robert D. Putnam. It was developed from his 1995 essay entitled "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital". Putnam surveys the decline of social capital in the United States since 1950. He has described the reduction in all the forms of in-person social intercourse upon which Americans used to found, educate, and enrich the fabric of their social lives. He argues that this undermines the active civic engagement which a strong democracy requires from its citizens.
Smartphones fit nicely in his conclusion.
For a lot of youngsters, they don't have a network outside. They grew up online. All they know is online.
It is really hard for youngsters to get out of when they don't know anyone outside it.
I had no money, because you can't pay almost $100K in student loans and $900/mo in rent when you make $37K/year before taxes. I never went anywhere when my friends did.
I was the only person in my friend group that liked certain hobbies and social media wasn't that big back then (my main social media sites up until that point were blackplanet and geosites- Facebook had JUST come out) so there was no way for me to connect with like-minded individuals about things I really cared about.
I went to school ~600 miles away from my family in a city of ~35k people and only 88 of them were the same ethnicity as I, so I had to suppress most of my personality to "not stand out", which strained my relationship with my partner and led to a surprise breakup.
By the time I hit 22 I was legit prepared to end it all- I even left a "final farewell" note on /b just to give them one last "rofl" on the way out.
A full decade later I look back and realize that it wasn't my shitty job or financial situation. It wasn't being in a minority group in a hostile school or the breakup. I wasn't (committed to being) suicidal. I was literally just being an edgy dingleberry. My problem was 100% made up and I was just looking for ANY reason to stay trapped in a cycle of sadness. Eventually it just... Went away? At some point at 24 something changed in my brain where all of a sudden I want thinking about how lonely I was.
None of it had anything to really do with social interaction, at least not ACTUAL interaction. It felt like I was just bitter because I couldn't do all the stuff I WANTED to do, and that stuff just happened to be related to social interaction. Maybe my scenario isn't the same as what you're describing but I don't think smartphones/social media were my issue. I just needed to mature a bit more and not be so focused on what I COULDN'T do.
Having said that while I think smartphones are one of the most influential inventions to come out since the turn of the millennium... The biggest social media sites are a net drain on society and I would not be sad to see them go in the slightest.
Throw in access to a smartphone where you’re bombarded with images and videos of the best version of everyone you know’s lives and you start feeling even more like you are the problem and are more likely to take your life when in a vulnerable position.
Throw in cyber bullying and if you happened to be bullied by any groups you’re part of that bullying would continue even when you’re home.
The one good thing about the internet is that it may have allowed you to communicate with others in your situation and help you realize you’re not the problem.
But we don’t need smartphones (and an always available camera) for that.
>"...Throw in access to a smartphone where you’re bombarded with images and videos of the best version of everyone you know’s lives and you start feeling even more like you are the problem and are more likely to take your life when in a vulnerable position..."
This is exactly my point- it is NOT the smartphone's fault. This is the fault of social media/advertisers and the fact that people refuse to get off of social media (because why work for money when you can just trade your privacy for a sponsorship deal and 10k followers). Nobody is "bombarding" you with anything if you just don't use those services, and if you replace "smartphone" with "Internet", "computer", "TV", etc... Your statement is still 100% true. I'm no expert but to me this is a dead ringer that the _smartphone_ isn't the root problem, and it would be unreasonable to blame this on "every device capable of displaying a webpage."
This is a "corporations suck" issue- not a technical issue. Smartphones are a convenient punching bag to blame, just like how millennials were "being corrupted" by violent video games.
Your other points are absolutely rock solid- no objections (especially the always-on camera bit, and not just because of bullying). It's this one point I take issue with. The social media and advertising companies are at fault- not the technology those companies use (yet. I love VR/AR but I do NOT like where it's going right now).
If it helps make sense of how I view this problem, the gun industry is a direct parallel. To fight gun violence we want to go after the sellers. Replace "gun" with "smartphone" and ask yourself: "does it make sense to go after smartphone manufacturers and sellers to stop cyber bullying? Is it fair to hurt the eCommerce, gaming, telephone, etc... Unrelated companies because ad companies are driving kids to despair?" To me the answer is "no", because I don't think it's fair to impact other digital companies relying on smartphones for business because a few of them are problematic. I also don't think it's fair to punish sport shooters, hunters, etc... By impacting their rights to (legal) gun ownership just because sellers want to protect their bottom lines.
Something needs to change, but I don't believe it's smartphones. We need to make it illegal to base a business model on the suffering of others.
As a suicidal person it can be extremely difficult to open up to another human being because my convictions of hopelessness and futility are so strong that to truly communicate them would also mean cursing the listener with knowledge that would make they themselves suicidal.
Maybe it wouldn't directly cause them to also become suicidal, but it could be a contributor. It could be one cut in a death of thousands. If you've ever seen the show Smiling Friends, the first episode is an example of how wanting to help can backfire in harmful ways.
An AI chatbot might be uniquely useful as a therapy option. I wouldn't have to feel the guilt of corrupting an innocent human being with dark suicidal thoughts. Sometimes a human connection is important for therapy, but the ability to talk things out may actually outweigh it for this context.
It's kind of interesting to hear that perspective. I don't worry about making others suicidal (maybe I should?) but instead worry that they'd be overly concerned about me all of the time when, e.g. I've just had a particularly bad day that day.
I certainly agree that chatbots seem to be a low-risk alternative to that. It's a never-ending delicate calculus over who you can tell what to considering that here in the US you can be locked up in a psychiatric facility for (at least) 48 hours for being a "harm to yourself." Thus, you can't explore your own feelings with another person and keep them locked inside, which is a much better alternative. /s
I'm definitely interested in using a chatbot as long as it itself isn't tied into any suicide hotline reporting scheme.
I think this will spread depression.
Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA, running the DOCTOR script, was created to provide a parody of "the responses of a non-directional psychotherapist in an initial psychiatric interview"[15] and to "demonstrate that the communication between man and machine was superficial".[16] (Wikipedia)
We all knew ELIZA was a joke, and we used it that way. ELIZA was so hilarious that it was integrated into Emacs with responses from Zippy the Pinhead.
ELIZA was on the level of jive and the Swedish Chef translator. We loved text processing for purposes of humor and entertainment. That tradition is carried forward by the entertainment utility called ChatGPT.
"Many academics" is commonly known here as "weasel wording". It's a good way to be vague and gain an aura of authenticity without actually saying who you're talking about. On Wikipedia, if someone wants to write "Most academics believe..." or "A majority of scholars say..." then we need to find a consensus reported in a meta-paper, and not just collect a few random references that agree with the position.
https://journals.lww.com/jonmd/Citation/1966/02000/A_COMPUTE...
In this case, there is one reference to Weizenbaum himself, and there is a reference to a paper with three authors: Colby, Watt, and Gilbert. So we can safely and accurately rephrase your quote as: "Three academics wrote a single paper in which they said they believe..."