https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=czY50ECRo4Q
The willingness of people to do something like that is just so surprising to me. And I’ve noticed it. My daughter yesterday got from her, from the Quebec government, she was asked as a student to participate in a poll. And the poll, this is from the government itself, and the poll was asking students what they thought of having AI counselors for a student with emotional problems. Yeah. Because, you know, no prejudice. Come on. If it’s an AI, it has no prejudice. It has none of the hangups, not all the hate that humans have, you know, the implicit biases. It’s crazy. I mean, the fact that the government, that my government is willing to ask a 15-year-old that, you know, send her an email and promise her $50 if she answered me, that she could answer that poll is completely insane. Like, it just shows where we are. Yeah, there’s a… I’m going to have to go in a minute, so we might have to put this up another time. But there’s another piece in the puzzle, the kind of big narrative from pre-modernity through modernity to post-modernity, which is about… and how that relates to storytelling and fairy tales. And that’s how we conceive of ourselves, which is something which in tandem with the rise of literacy changes and becomes something much more… I’m sure you’ve read Walter on, I mean, when we’re talking about orality and literacy. And the transition from orality to literacy comes with a transition in how people think of what… understand their interiority in a much more general sense. And this is more erudite and intelligent people than me have drawn links between that and the emergence of the individual as such, you know, as a feature of the modern era and then the political systems to meet and to meet and engage with those individuals. It stands to reason that that’s changing again. In fact, I see it changing already. And where this relates to the idea of having an AI counselor is because I sometimes wonder what you think of this. It’s occurred to me on occasions that the postmodern understanding of selfhood, or if you like, the digital age, understanding of what a self is, is much emptier than the print era one. It’s much more… It’s a little more… It’s less like a deep pool or a place than it is like a dreamcatcher. It’s something through which things flow and upon which things can be hung. It’s not a place in which things are collected so much. And I wonder if from that perspective, there might not be a great many 15 year olds who’ve just internalized from a young age that understanding of selfhood and just don’t really have a problem with being being catechized by a robot because they don’t think of their inner lives as being that different to a glorified autocorrect. Yeah. I don’t know. What do you think? No, I think that’s a good insight. And that’s a good insight. And I think that all of the… All of the… Like, for example, like even the fact that we’re moving more and more towards medication as solution to all kind of mental health problems, you know, like this is the basic key, shows us that the idea of the self as something that you nurture, something that you have to align with virtue, all of these types of things that used to be a normal thing to think about the self are slipping, you know, and we see the human as a kind of as a complicated machine that you have to press the right buttons. And so it’s like if the eye can press the right buttons, it’s like, of course, then the eye can just press those buttons and then you’ll be fixed. If we can give you some pills and you give you pills and you’re fixed. And so there isn’t… I would say you’re right that the… I mean, the self, the idea of the soul, obviously, is the ancient idea of the soul is very… Yeah, it’s not as strong now.