Doctor Search Engine

There is, with no doubt, a lot of interest today in artificial intelligence: what it may bring to mental health, medicine and our lives. Many folks are scared and others excited. Makes sense to me. Opportunities and dangers.

For a moment, let’s pull back a bit and look at the big picture.

This is not the first time new technology has entered the human condition and not the first time it’s come with new freedoms and new consequences.

Neil Postman, the late professor at New York University, studied the history of technology. Two of his many books spoke to me: Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly. Postman claimed that when technology enters our lives, we gain tremendously, but we also lose skills we had before, as well as discover risks we could not have seen coming.

The Printing Press

Gutenberg invented the printing press circa 1436. It changed the world forever, giving access to religious texts, literature, and scientific material to a wide audience. Before Gutenberg, the average educated person owned five to ten books. Much of literature had been transmitted through oral tradition, stories told down through the generations.

Think of Homer and the Odyssey. Or the Talmud as a written, oral tradition. Think about how precious the Bible was. Hand-written. Think about how few people could read because they didn’t have access to reading material.

The printing press introduced a shift in how knowledge became more widely available.

The cost of the printing press? Memory.

Before the printing press, people memorized huge swathes of material to share in the oral tradition. After, that wasn’t needed anymore.

The modern reader can relate to this. Anyone alive before cell phones recalls memorizing dozens of telephone numbers. Now, with “contacts” and caller-ID, it’s next to impossible to remember more than a few.

The printing press also changed how we assimilated knowledge. Think what it would be like if you had only five to ten books to read. You would likely read them hundreds of times, each time seeing something different. Think about the old priest on the train with his beloved Bible, dog-eared and well-used. He might be studying this text again and again. Something new would come up every time.

For us in the present, books are cheap and plentiful. You may read one book while already thinking about the next. And then forgetting what you just read. Less depth. More access. A technological gain and technological loss.

One reason I like doing psychotherapy is because it offers the opportunity to look again and again at a patient’s life, continuing to learn, to help them grow. In a way, it’s a throwback to an old-fashioned relationship. Deeper. Layer after layer.

Modern Transportation

Cars and planes provide quick transportation to wherever we want to go. This kind of mobility defines modernity. The unanticipated disadvantage is the effect on family life. Modern families are scattered far and wide.

There’s nothing quite like the presence of multi-generational members of one’s tribe within a short distance of one another. Being in walking distance to those you love. This is, for most, a thing of the past in the 21st century.

The Internet

Much has been written about the internet, how it brought us access to information, a way to communicate with folks instantly and outside our direct vicinity. A new way to sell products. A new way to create communities. A new way to get our news.

The downside? As far back as 2003, I co-authored a section with Josepha Silman in Deciphering Cyberspace. We argued 20 years ago that the internet would accentuate the good of humanity and the bad. That we would see more communication, as well as more shallowness. More connecting and more anonymity. We were not alone in predicting both opportunity and dangers. Dating sites and predators, for instance, or commercial businesses and fraud. Few would argue against this now.

Anxiety Essential Reads

Is Digital Overload Increasing Your Anxiety?

Facing Fears of the Future

Doctor Search Engine

People often get their medical information from the internet. This can be of great value. Data is easily accessible to the public. But without the mediation of a licensed professional, mistakes happen. To be honest, they happen even with good medical care. I’ve heard of a case, for instance, of a person who had neck pain, looked up the symptoms on Doctor Search Engine, and promptly learned about transcranial magnetic stimulation.

He was to find out later that he had suffered from a heart attack. A call to a physician would have been useful.

Too many patients read about side effects that make them anxious. I have no trouble with patients understanding what is at stake, but often they lack perspective.

Misunderstandings from the internet regarding medical practice can be avoided, but it’s not going away. The New York Times, for instance, recently reported that young patients are learning about dissociative disorders from non-medical sources, something I’ve observed in my practice, too. There’s a big difference between a dissociative disorder and hyperventilation or an anxious moment. It’s good when folks consult the web and their health practitioner, but I worry about those who don’t.

Summary

What’s important here is not to critique the technologies that arrive in our lives—those that offer real benefits. It’s just that we should know negatives also comes with the positives. And sometimes, that negative is not anticipated.

How many telephone numbers can you remember?

Now we are confronted with a new technology which is only at its infancy, artificial intelligence. With the AI revolution, let’s open the door to how wonderful it could be for health, happiness, and community. Let’s also be alert to the dangers it can bring along… often unanticipated. Its greatest advocates also need to be its greatest critics.

After all, AI is only the newest of many novel world changing technologies. As per Heraclitus, the only thing constant is change. From the plane to the car, from gunpowder to the printing press, from the internet to the cell phone, from the wheel to writing itself. With everything that brings us forward, there’s always a shadow.

It’s the way of our world.