We would be wrong to see artificial intelligence as something circumscribed, since this is a phenomenon that is much more than sprawling, with not secondary implications also on the psychic component. We therefore discuss it with Professor Tonino Cantelmi, one of the greatest contemporary psychiatrists and psychotherapists, who was the first in Italy to study the impact of digital technology on the human mind.
Professor Cantelmi, how is man reacting to this incredible tool that is AI?
“I start from an observation: the brain is the most extraordinarily adaptable organ we have. Let’s also consider that the great changes in history correspond to changes in the brain. Humanity’s brain changed when we learned to read or write, or when electricity became part of our existence. Now we find ourselves in a transition of similar magnitude.”
What should we expect?
“From an analog brain we will arrive at a digital brain. The human brain will therefore adapt plastically to a new thought, to a new form of cognition, volition and emotion, which is the digital one.”
Why now and not before?
“Twenty years ago all this would have been unthinkable. We needed the dimension of social media, which promoted this cerebral evolution. Today the human brain is ready to be a co-protagonist of the AI brain, which is not by chance evolving together with us.”
How?
«Proposing itself more and more as that means capable of replacing the human brain, or at least integrating it».
Something different from previous technological achievements.
“Yes, because today’s technological world is increasingly mental, unlike what happened even in the recent past. Robotics comes to mind, which limited itself to replacing the human musculature, but nothing else, and above all not the brain. This is the real novelty: the integration of the human brain with an artificial brain.”
What are the effects on our interiority?
“All this triggers various reactions, including fear, anxiety, anguish. We enter the field of emotionality, which represents the other great frontier of AI, whose research is increasingly moving towards artificial forms of emotional dialogue. For AI, therefore, it is and will be essential to interpret emotions and express them, also in this case in the form of substitution or integration: between human emotions and emotions generated by operating systems”.
Do you think AI can do this?
“It will succeed. After all, work is already underway in this direction. Let’s think about certain experimental practices of emotional care, such as those intended for the elderly, designed through AI applications. These are particular devices, aimed at alleviating the distress resulting from isolation, therefore to dispense advice, to congratulate oneself for something, to encourage one towards a goal that brings well-being. In essence, to correspond to our emotions.”
Don’t you find it very sad?
“I would shift my gaze to another aspect, which is upstream, that is the general loneliness of the current historical period. Net of all the interactions we have, social and non-social, the totality of the indicators clearly tells us that man is more alone, every single person today is more alone.”
Compared to when?
“As a term I indicate the 50s of the last century, when studies on loneliness began. Let’s reflect on a fact: it is scientifically proven that to maintain good mental health one should have at least 2 or 3 true friends, we would say intimate. Currently this average is falling, in general we are already below 1.5 per head, with even lower levels in our Europe. It is precisely in this collective wound that AI inserts itself”.
How?
“Covering, filling this enormous empty room that has been created in the world.”
Is this why AI is so successful?
“Of course. If you want to fully grasp AI, you have to consider the extent of extreme loneliness in contemporary society. From here we understand why AI always promises us only one thing, namely a scandalous ability to keep us company.”
But don’t you think we’re going too far? Take afterlife apps: by paying a monthly subscription, you digitally process the identity of a deceased person, who will become a sort of hologram, a humanoid surrogate capable of communicating with their loved ones who are still alive. Is there something grotesque about it?
“This is part of the so-called digital eternity. It is not a new theme, for at least fifteen years devices have been produced that are able to reconstruct the human through personality, voice, habits, character: the possibility of overcoming a bereavement through virtual means therefore falls into this scenario. The experiment of a mother who had lost her child became famous. After the death, that same child was reconstructed through AI. Wearing special sensors, the woman was then able to move in space interacting with the digital version of her son: hugging him, talking to him, even taking him to the park”.
But this means living an illusion, that is, not living.
“The problem is that humanity is no longer able to accept, and consequently manage, suffering, and in this great fragility AI enters again, designed to facilitate certain processes. I’ll make you a confession: at the beginning of my career I followed a group of parents who had lost their children; one day I discovered that they went to some mediums, who promised to put them in contact with their deceased children. It’s a bit like the behavioral prototype of the experiment I just described to you: first there was a medium who guaranteed the meeting with the lost loved ones, now that meeting is made possible by AI.”
It seems clear to me that there is a need, a sort of common psychic trend: to postpone contact with pain as much as possible.
“That’s exactly right. And that’s the big challenge of AI, like social media: to make us happy.”
A successful bet, in your opinion?
«No. I actually think that society will get drunk on this very point. I mean, thanks to new technologies we only have the feeling of being happy.
And this is confirmed by the data on depression, the leading cause of disability worldwide. A burden of apocalyptic proportions, which however could push us to change, practicing a different grammar of emotions».