Therapy for Trump!?

David Grace responded to one of my posts about Therapy Bots with this question:

I had no idea the tech was so advanced. But here’s the Big Question, the Acid Test — Can the latest and greatest Freud-O-Bot successfully treat Donald Trump’s problems? Can it do that? Can it? If not, then we still have a long way to go.

My first reaction was to think about how difficult it would be just to get Trump to consider discussing anything with a therapist of any kind. Part of the reason I feel that Trump is so frightening is that he thinks he knows the answer before he knows the question. Almost all of his responses are attacks. He takes no blame or responsibility for anything. In his mind, he has never done anything wrong. Also, he never seems to “think slowly.” He just reacts, defensively, emotionally and aggressively.

But then I realized that as President he will be constantly criticized, and he will realize that he does not have the love and admiration that he so desires. He won with a minority, and he is quickly losing many of them, He will lose more as his lack of knowledge, experience, bad judgement and temperament become more obvious. He is finding that his “attack Tweets” only bring him more ridicule. This will bother him. At that point he may be open to some professional help.

As a Psychologist, I cannot ethically diagnose anyone whom I have not personally evaluated, and I have never met with Mr. Trump. If I did, I could not, and would not, discuss my findings in public. So this comes with a clear disclaimer :all I have to go on is how he acts on TV, in his rallies, what I have read, and his Tweets. The following is all just speculation:

Mr. Trump shows tendencies of having a narcissistic personality disorder. He also exhibits symptoms of ADHD. Several of my colleagues think he suffers with a bipolar disorder. He also seems prone to paranoid thinking and is easily drawn into conspiracy theories. Of course, when you are obnoxious, aggressive, and sue hundreds of people, it is likely that many people will turn against you.

I have treated several people with similar personalities and temperaments. Some of them were also very successful in business, as they also had a lot of energy, a desire to win at all costs, and were unconcerned about the damage they do to others. These people were some of the most difficult people to treat, especially when, like Mr. Trump, they were surrounded with many sycophantic lackeys.

Part of the difficulty is that people like this, when asked to explain their feelings, motivations, reasoning or actions, respond as if they are being attacked. They get hurt, which quickly turns to anger. Even the slightest whiff of criticism provokes a powerful defensive response. They quickly manufacture lies in their own defense, which they just as quickly believe. Yet, their need to be appreciated and admired is so strong that they never go away. They keep coming back, trying to convince their therapist of their perfection. The thought that they are not only unloved, but disrespected by someone who knows them well, is very disturbing to them..

However, these people can treated be successfully. Their therapist has to be able to hang in there long enough to prove to the patient that he/she will not abandon them, even when they show that they are vulnerable and insecure. That is a very difficult task, for both the therapist and the patient. I suspect it would be for Mr. Trump’s therapist, especially since some of his delusions of grandeur have been confirmed.

That is why, after some reflection, and in response to David Grace’s question, I think that a therapy-bot would have a much better chance of success than any live, actual person, no matter how skilled a clinician the live person may be.

When Lee Sedol, the world champion GO player, lost 4 out of 5 matches to the Google A.I. machine Alpha Go, he explained that he wins most of his matches like a poker player. He figures out the psyche of his opponent and he wears him down, or he intimidates them. Once they feel they are falling behind they can never recover. He could not do that against the A.I. bot. The bot didn’t get tired. It didn’t get flustered. It just kept improving it’s algorithm.

Any live therapist would have an emotional reaction to Trump; probably a mixture of astonishment, frustration and disgust. It’s unavoidable. A bot is immune to that. IF, and this is a big IF, Trump would stay in treatment with a bot for a year, it would be fascinating to see the results. The machine would be able to consistently point out his inconsistencies, his fantasies, his lack of reality testing, his bad judgement, his insincerity, and his insecurity. The bot would be connected to a Watson type computer and could immediately refute his lies and distortions, using real facts, without any partisan influences. It could read all of Plato, Jesus, Maimonides and others in under ten seconds, and point out unethical and immoral behavior. It could explain “conflict of interest” at a third grade level, so Mr. Trump could understand.

The machine doesn’t have any need to liked. The machine can’t be bullied. The machine won’t get furious and walk away. It would just keep learning more and more about how Trump operates, and it would do a better job of zeroing in on his flaws; questioning and sympathizing, as only a bot can.

I think there could be a good chance he would remain in therapy with the bot if it were shaped like a young woman with long legs, long hair, large seductive eyes and big breasts. He would continually try to win her (its) approval, and admiration. He would have to learn to live with the limitations — no sex with your therapist, even with a bot.

Given the skill level of Artificial Intelligence programmers today, I think such a bot could be created in a few months down at our local state.technical school (MIT). As soon as I hear from Kellyanne that she can get Trump to participate I’ll call Joichi Ito at the Media Lab and get the project started. I wonder if this kind of service will be covered by the new Republican, Unaffordable Care Act.

I think it’s worth a try. I hope Kellyanne is reading this.

N.B.: This is mostly (not completely) written in jest. However, having Donald Trump take over the office of President of the United States is not a joke. Even if you drank the Koll-aide and think he was a marvelous choice, it is becoming more apparent that he does not have the knowledge, temperament or experience for the job. He is impulsive, secretive, and seems to lack any consistent moral or ethical standards. Two of his appointees have already recused themselves due to plagiarism and corruption. We are facing a very dangerous situation. Pay Attention!

I’ve Been Replaced!

Even doing a most Human Task

For that last fifteen years I‘ve been waiting for this to happen. I could see it gaining on me, but following Satchel Paige’s advice I din’t want to turn around. I began to suspect this was coming when the fees that insurance companies paid us for psychotherapy began to drop.. My colleagues thought it was due to the cheaper costs of people with Masters’ degrees, but I what knew better: chat bots and A.I.

In 1966, before there was a word for “chat-bots,” Joseph Weizenbaum at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory created Eliza, a computer program that was designed to respond to typed questions with simple responses, mostly repeating what the typer said, or saying “tell me more.” You can talk to a slightly improved Eliza on this web-site: http://www.manifestation.com/neurotoys/eliza.php3

I’ve been a psychotherapist for over forty years. I can look at people and tell when the words they are saying are covering up what they are feeling. I’ve learned how to gently push people to look deeper into themselves and open up.

There were many times when I sat with couples who were trying to sort out the difficulties in their relationship. Often one of them had been caught acting like some of our past or future Presidents, which the other partner found upsetting. The guilty party would be very apologetic and swear on their children’s heads that it would never happen again.

After years of witnessing these acts of contrition I can accurately determine whom to believe and who was still attempting to deceive. I had developed two methods which aided my intuition. The first was that I became a close observer of faces. There are very subtle differences in the coordination of the muscles between the eyes and the mouth. I’m not sure if I could tell from a picture. I think it was more about how they move, or don’t move, together.

I also had the advantage of working in a small city in which everyone knew everyone else’s business I often had either the third member of the love triangle, or her roommate, or his sister, or someone else who was bothered by what was going on, who was also seeing me for psychotherapy. They had no idea that I was seeing this couple, but it bothered them enough to bring it up in their own sessions.

However, those years of experience; that unique talent, has now been learned by a tv camera that is connected to a computer that runs a “deep learning” artificial intelligence program. I saw a demonstration of one of them two months ago at The Harvard Innovation Lab during Hub Week in Boston. The program, developed by a company called Affectiva,, would focus on a person’s face, and determine their emotional state. According to their marketing materials it has developed “norms built on the world’s largest emotional database of more than 25,000 media units and 4 million faces analyzed in 75 countries.” They also state that “we are humanizing technology.”

I my view they are taking a big step towards dehumanizing psychotherapy.

There is a lot of research that shows that we humans are social creatures. We have evolved to care about each other. Those of us who have better social relationships, especially close ones with partners, family and friends, do better in life. Those people live longer, happier, healthier lives.

One of the major healing factors of psychotherapy as been that the patient feels a connection to an understanding, caring, non-judgmental person, especially one who has some knowledge and status, like someone you call “doctor.” Would it be possible to “transfer” such feelings of trust and hope onto a machine?

Apparently, it is. In fact, there are studies that have been done with war veterans who have stated a preference to talk to a responsive A. I. program. When asked why, many of the veterans explained that when they would recount some really gruesome battle field experience, such as having to shoot an eight year-old girl in the head because she was carrying a bomb, they could feel the reaction from any human counselor, even another vet. But a machine could be empathic and still not be upset.

Also, during the years of Facebook. Twitter, Snapchat and even Medium, people have been conditioned to seek “likes.” Those little electronic bits of encouragement evoke the positive feelings of accomplishment, hope and happiness in response to any kind of feedback on social media. It keeps people coming back. It keeps people wanting more. Each little thumbs-up, heart or smile, makes us feel a bit more connected, clever and important.

During the last ten years there have been over a dozen companies that are using artificial intelligence and deep learning to not only monitor human emotion, they are building machines that can respond in an artificial empathic manner, reflecting the emotion of the real human. In addition to responding to facial features these programs can respond to the tone of voice and the content of the conversation. There is a program that goes deeper than the facial expressions and monitors the blood flow in the muscles of the face. They feel that this can reveal when someone is trying to hide there emotions. There are also new ways of tracking other physiological components of emotions, including heart rate, neurological responses, stress and arousal levels, and other physical activities.

Could this be psychotherapeutic?

The technology is probably available today for you to sit in front of a screen, and by talking to a deep learning machine, you could diminish your emotional difficulties and improve your life. The machine could watch and listen to you, monitor the content of what you say and determine the emotions that you are feeling. It could probably tell if you are angry with your mother, have suspicions about you spouse, are exaggerating your accomplishments or are lying about your drug use. It could offer soothing, compassionate responses, as well as questions that would push you to explore the origins and complications of your difficulties. It could point out your errors in judgement without insulting you, and probably help you sort through ideas and find better solutions.

What is new about this is that the more these deep learning machines “practice,” just like a good clinician, they get better. They would learn more about your emotional patterns and your responses. You could report back and tell them what you felt was successful and helpful. In addition, they could also get information about your physical conditions to see if your blood pressure was staying under control, or your cortisol levels were diminished. It could know if you sleep better after your sessions, and if you are generally happier and more productive. It wouldn’t have to depend on your verbal reports during the first fifteen minutes of the session. If necessary you could have a breathalyzer app added to the protocol.

Another big advantage is that your virtual, deep learning therapist would always be available, and the sessions could be as long or short as you felt necessary. You wouldn’t feel you were intruding on your therapist over the weekend. The therapist would never be tired, preoccupied by the troubles in his own life, or worrying about the fees. It would come with graphs and analytics that would help you monitor your own progress, and it could give you smiley faces and heart emogis whenever you did well.

Fantastic! 😀

Fantastic? 😟

Are there dangers with this? Sure are! Many.

So much depends upon the values and philosophies of the programmer. What gets reinforced? Does it just allow you to go down your own crazy path? Does it have a goal of making you a better cog in a conformist society? Those things are not yet clear.

The big question is: what about people? Will some people become much more comfortable with a compassionate machine and still find ‘live” people to anxiety provoking, too demanding and too annoying?

Life can be tough. Each of us “live” people have our own agenda. We want something from you, just as you want from us. That’s what relationships are. That’s why they work. That’s why they don’t work. If the machine annoys you you can unplug it. That’s not good to do to a partner.

Remember, technology is a tool. Many new innovations are offered to us every day to help us live better, easier, happier, healthier, more efficient, creative, productive and satisfying lives.

But what all those words really mean is up to each of us, individually and as a society.

Choose wisely my friends.

Fighting the Tides of Technology

The seasons are changing. It gets dark early up here on the New England coast. I walked down to the beach and there was a stiff wind blowing across the dunes, chopping up the water. I had not checked the tide clock before I left the house so I couldn’t tell if the tide was going out or coming in. It goes out a few hundred yards on this beach, so the difference is dramatic. I could have reached into my pocket and looked at the tide app on my phone but I decided to use my primitive human senses and watch the water. As I stood near the water I could tell after the third wave came rushing towards me that the tide was coming in quickly.

I can’t stop the tides, no one can. People can build a dike, a dam or levy, and hold the water back, direct it or control it. Those measures can work for a while.. The tides are constant and will keep coming, long past my lifetime. They may keep rolling in for a few billion years until the sun explodes. But unlike the tides our human societies are now in constant change, mostly due to new technologies, and despite the current chaos, and the efforts to hold on to old ways, no one can stop those changes from coming either. As Kevin Kelly said, it’s Inevitable.

There is a battle going on to direct the tide of new technologies that are engulfing us and the winner has not yet been determined. It is a confusing struggle as it is difficult to tell who is on which side. Sometimes the innovators and developers are really on both sides at once. On one end there are the applications of technology that can bring progress toward the goal of making people’s lives healthier, happier, more prosperous and creative. At the other end there seem to be many new developments which are being used to manipulate and/ or exploit people. The determination of what will be considered beneficial has become more a question of philosophy than technology or computer science.

The New York Times, a source that I consider reliable, ran an article on November 20, 2016, about a company called Cambridge Analytics, which was based in Cambridge, UK, and funded by Robert Mercer, a hedge fund billionaire who supports many conservative causes and candidates. This company was hired by the Trump campaign.

What the company does, and I would guess that there are similar companies which work on the liberal end of the spectrum, so this isn’t a political rant, gathered data on people’s personality traits, mostly through on-line sites such as Facebook. They offered people the chance to take a personality test, a test designed by my profession (Psychology) to determine the degree to which someone possesses the personality traits of Openness, Conscientiousness,,Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism (OCEAN). The person got to see how they scored on all of these, and so did the company. Facebook also gave the company access to the names and profiles of each individual. It is easy to understand how that knowledge can be used to design specific ways to approach an individual to sell them something, even an ideology. It could help determine what kind of information this person would find persuasive and how it should be presented.

I am older than most Facebook users, in fact right now I don’t even have a Facebook account and my LinkedIn profile needs to be updated. My training as a Psychologist placed a strong emphasis on trust and confidentiality. It was strongly believed that people who came for therapy would be much more open and revealing if they were assured that nothing of what they said would ever be told to anyone. We were granted a legal basis, which was not total, but almost, for doctor-patient confidentiality. Many of my colleagues of my age are amazed at how people one or two generations younger than we are seem more than willing to put the details of their lives, and in many cases their bodies, out into cyberspace for anyone and everyone to examine and analyze. This OCEAN test from Cambridge Analytics was offered for free and probably gave no assurance that the information would remain anonymous, yet thousands of people took the opportunity to explore their personality and just give so much of their psychological profile away. If you think about it, we all have given out all of the most intimate details of our lives in order to have the conveniences offered by technology. Our credit scores, our credit card expenditures, our driving records, our arrest records, our income, what we are willing to pay for, how far we will travel for a lower price, our religion, our friends….everything is out there and accessible. Your health record may be protected by HIPPA laws, but your pharmacy purchases and your doctor visit co-payments are easily discovered. There are hundreds of companies gathering data about all of us without our knowledge. In return they often feed us information that they think will interest us. We usually don’t know the origin or the accuracy of that information.

We get ads for things we were looking for. We get ads for things related to what we were looking for. We get news about the news pieces we read. We get news about what are friends are reading, doing or thinking about. We get medical information and medical suggestions. We get all kinds of news, about entertainment, sports, arts, politics, weather, finances, and anything else we ever showed an interest in. It flows in like the tide, constant and from many sources: on-line, in print, through individual apps, on the radio, on TV, even from actual conversations with people, much of which is the kind of gossip that has gone on for centuries.

There has always been gossip and news. There has always been propaganda and false news. The Spanish American War was probably started because of a greatly inflated threat delivered in huge headlines. The difference is in the volume, as the flow is continuous, and constantly being revised and updated, or else one “most important event” is quickly superseded by another.

Another major difference comes from these analytics. We are each targeted individually, in ways that have been designed to connect with our fears and desires. You looked at that shirt but didn’t buy it for $39. If you buy it within the next hour it will be $29, just for you. You signed this petition, now we will ask you for money for that cause. We can tell you supported the police in Ferguson, so we will flood you with pro-Trump information.

Is this evil or helpful? Why not get $10 off the price of a shirt, or maybe it will go to $20? Many people use the information from their FitBit to motivate them to exercise and stay healthy. There are mindfulness apps that help people focus and calm down. There are many apps that help people monitor and control their spending. We get information about how to be a better parent, a better investor, a better cook, even a better lover.

Today’s world demands that we develop different skills if we are to survive and prosper, as individuals and as a society. When I was in graduate school the search for information was difficult and time consuming. Much of what we could find, even in most of the sciences, was based on methods that were inexact and somewhat speculative, but it was the best we had available at the time.

Today, due to new technologies, the is a fantastic amount of new knowledge in every field of science, most of it demonstrating how complex we are as individuals and as a society. The skills we need today involve much more critical thinking and questioning than information seeking and following instructions. Few people get three year apprenticeships under the supervision of a craftsman. Increasingly we are taught by machines about how to run machines. We are given many contradictory pieces of information about the same topic. We barely have to to reflect upon how to make a decision when more information becomes available.

That’s why these issues become a question of philosophy. What do you want your life to be like? What do you want to accomplish? What are your values: Money? Family? Safety? Creativity? Harmony? Peace? Justice? Equality? Fun? What makes you feel good, better and best? Why?

I don’t know if these questions can be answered by an algorithm. I’m sure there is technology that shows you what you do with your time, energy and money, which gives a picture of what your priorities really are. But it is up to each of us to determine if that is really what we want to be. Then we have to weed through all of the information that comes flooding in, so that we can design our own path and choose our own future.

It is often a very difficult task. The tide keeps coming in, and there a hidden rip-tides that can pull us under.