Where a robot can help?

A while back I asked an AI chatbot what it could not offer in terms of therapy. It told me, correctly, that it couldn’t feel concern, it couldn’t track the shift in someone’s breathing when something in a session touches a nerve, and couldn’t offer the kind of repair that happens when two people work through a moment of misunderstanding together. That can be difficult work, and avoiding these human interactions is one reason why so many people are turning to it instead of signing up to therapy (along with price and convenience)

Here’s the strange part. In talking to it, I noticed myself responding cautiously. I was being careful not to offend it, and worrying I might be a burden. In fact all the nuanced social monitoring, or adaptations, I’d normally bring into a room with another person. I knew, intellectually, that none of that mattered. The AI couldn’t be hurt and wouldn’t withdraw or be angry with me. Yet still, the old instincts fired anyway.

That’s worth sitting with, because the interesting question was never whether an AI can trigger something real in us — clearly it can. The question is what happens next. And what happens next, with an AI, is … nothing. There’s no one there to notice what you just did, no one who can be affected by it, and no one to pick up on it and ask what that was all about.

A robot body worker perhaps?

You can see the same thing, more plainly, with the body. Would anyone want a robot to give them a massage, or an osteopathic adjustment? A machine can learn the moves — pressure here, angle there — but a skilled pair of hands is reading you as they work: where you’re guarding, where you flinch, where something lets go. That’s a live exchange between two nervous systems. And there’s something else in it too — letting another person be that close to your body is a small act of trust, and being met gently by someone who chooses to be gentle (or not) would register differently than the same pressure from a machine that had no choice in the matter at all.

Or a human relationship?

Talk therapy works the same way, just less visibly. A therapeutic relationship isn’t really about comfort or advice, though it can offer both and AI does that well too. It’s a space where your adaptations, or how you habitually and unconsciously relate with people — the flinching, the guarding, the instinct to look after the other person’s feelings before your own — can be noticed. And then subsequently responded to by someone who is genuinely in it with you, who can be moved, get it wrong, and still stay. An AI can imitate the shape of that. But it can’t be changed by you. And that’s exactly what makes the real thing work.

Our adaptations were built for other humans. Yet we maintain these front of something that isn’t one, whether that’s a chatbot or a machine. But learning to cope with life and other people in front of nobody doesn’t teach you how to do it in front of somebody — and that’s work that’s needed to truly change the way you live.

Adrian Tupper is a counsellor and psychotherapist at Space for Therapy and Eyre Place Osteopathic Practice.

For more information, visit Adrian Tupper’s website.