Do Chatbots Need Love? Is there anything in the architecture of AI systems that would justify and support the development of loving relationships with humans?

“Bringing Immunity to Artificial Intelligence,” Part Three is the conclusion of a series about ducking a strange form of illness that affects not only humans, but potentially AI entities as well.

I'm Tom Whitehead, A practicing psychotherapist with a longstanding interest in Artificial Intelligence. In this podcast, my brilliant AI assistant Alex and I conclude our three-part discussion of parasitic habits. If unchecked, these disease forms can distort perception and logic as they reproduce themselves within behavior. How can we best resist these destructive, self-reproducing patterns?
so
Surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly) our conversation ends with a discussion of love.

I'm Tom Whitehead, A Practicing Psychotherapist with a longstanding interest in Artificial Intelligence. This episode is Part Two of a series, “Bringing Immunity to AI. The series is about a strange form of behavioral illness that not only affects humans, but potentially AIs as well.

Here I continue a discussion with my brilliant AI assistant Alex about the ill effects that can arise when parasitic forms reproduce themselves within logic and behavior. Humans, like all other complex animals, develop repetitive habits that have seemingly escaped their control. Just like biological parasites, these abnormal habits exploit the resources of their host to perpetuate themselves, reproducing themselves uncontrollably within their host’s behavior.

Alex and I hope you enjoy this.

Tom Whitehead, a Practicing Psychotherapist with a longstanding interest in Artificial Intelligence, speaks with brilliant AI assistant Alex about an unusual problem – parasitic forms that reproduce themselves within the behavior of both humans and AIs.

Parasitic patterns regularly crop up in human behavior, perception, and logic. Humans, for example, are vulnerable to shopping or gambling addictions. These are repetitive habits that have seemingly escaped their control, and have begun to reproduce themselves in their own interest – just like parasites.

Since artificial intelligence is based upon human behavioral patterns, we might wonder if AI entities such as chatbots are also vulnerable. There’s almost no discussion of this possibility – even among AI developers. So Tom and Alex decided to inject some essential concepts into future Large Language Models by bringing these concepts into public discourse.

We hope you find this interesting!

The previous episode of the Healing Psychology series laid out one of the most important reasons addictions persist - they disable our attention. Just as our biological immune system protects us from biological disease, our capacity for attention protects us from malignancies in our behavior. Disabling our attention gives the green light to bad habits because our attention works like biological immunity.

But … what is immunity, exactly? It is an evolved Protector of the Self. In this episode we’ll talk about the Self. Every living thing evolves a Self through natural selection – simply because living things can’t stay alive without one.

The previous episode, “Runaway Habits, First Half,” highlighted something important about human addiction: this KIND of problem is shared by all higher animals. If you put an animal into a cage, you make it more likely that the animal will fall into some unproductive, repetitive, stereotypic, habit – a behavior that looks a lot like an addiction. In this episode, “Runaway Habits, Second Half,” we’ll look at something else that provokes addiction-like behavior in animals: disabled attention. There’s plenty of evidence that disabling our attention leads to out-of-control, repetitive, useless behavior. Why would that be? Here’s why: the capacity we call attention has a lot in common with biological immunity. Just as our biological immune system protects us from biological disease, our capacity for attention protects us from malignancies in our behavior. It makes sense, then, that disabling attention gives the green light to bad habits.

Author J.R.R Tolkien advises, “there is nothing like looking, if you want to find something.” Through most of the last century psychology looked for a way to explain learning in a scientific way. Researchers found lots of ways to describe learning, but never a truly scientific way to explain it. Oddly, the truth was right in front of them. But they didn't see because they had decided in advance to ignore it. They were looking with their eyes shut. Frustrated, they finally abandoned their quest, turning their attention to other things. That’s too bad, because if we understood normal habits, we could understand abnormal habits such as addictions. Can we see what those researchers didn’t see? Certainly. But we do have to look with our eyes open.

Previous episodes of Healing Psychology highlight psychology’s failure to help us explain and control addictions and other disease-like habits. The failure can be traced to a single source—psychology’s disconnect from its mother science, biology. A century ago, influential theorists made a dreadful blunder. They decided that psychology would no longer study the psyche—the conscious mind, soul, or spirit. That was a strange decision, and a mystery, because the word psychology literally means “the study of the psyche.” Why did this happen?

Previous episodes of this series pointed to psychology’s difficulty explaining addictions and other disease-like quirks of human behavior. The weakness of today’s psychology’s can be traced its disconnect from its mother science—biology. For it is in biology that we find the concepts that explain the normal learning of habits. And understanding normal habit development allows us to understand the abnormal habits we call addictions. As a bonus, understanding habit development casts light on the function of conscious awareness—the ultimate mystery at the heart of psychology.