SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow2718
Are psychiatrists really ready for the AI revolution?
The World Health Organization estimates that up to 15% of the population experiences mental health disorders. That has significant consequences. For example, suicide is the second- or third-leading cause of death for young people in most countries. And as the population ages, the rate of dementia is set to triple over the coming decades.
At the same time, access to mental health professionals is sorely lacking in many parts of the world, particularly in low-income countries. India, for example, has a population of 1.3 billion served by only 9,000 psychiatrists.
But technological advances can help. Smartphones and wearable sensors offer people the ability to monitor themselves and to benefit from the way deep learning can analyze the data. Indeed, these techniques are already being used to detect the changes in mood that indicate bipolar disorder or to detect people at risk of depression.
So the scene is set for artificial intelligence to become a disruptive force in psychiatry. Indeed, that's exactly what many observers predict.
But what of psychiatrists themselves? These professionals will have to play a key role in any change that artificial intelligence brings to the field. So their view ought to be a useful indicator of its potential.
Enter Murali Doraiswamy at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina, and couple of colleagues. This team has surveyed psychiatrists around the world to find out how they view machine intelligence and its likely impact on mental health care.
"To our knowledge, this is the first global survey to seek the opinions of physicians on the impact of autonomous artificial intelligence/machine learning on the future of psychiatry," say the team. Curiously, the results appear to say more about psychiatrists than about the state of technological readiness or its potential.
The team's method was straightforward. The researchers randomly chose a sample of 750 professional psychiatrists registered with an online database of over 800,000 health-care professionals around the world, including 22 countries in North and South America, Europe, and Asia; 30% were women and two-thirds were white.
The respondents clearly felt that machines could never learn some skills. "An overwhelming majority (83 per cent) of respondents felt it unlikely that future technology would ever be able to provide empathic care as well as or better than the average psychiatrist," say Doraiswamy and colleagues. Interestingly, a survey of family physicians in the UK showed they had a similar view.
The group was also divided on the risks that artificial intelligence might pose. "Only 23 per cent of women predicted that the benefits of AI would outweigh the possible risks compared to 41 per cent of men," say Doraiswamy and colleagues.
But they think they know why. "The gender differences in AI risk perception may be commensurate with a large body of findings that women are more risk averse than men," they say.
The most interesting results are in the way respondents feel machine intelligence will change their jobs. Three-quarters of them thought that artificial intelligence will play an important role in managing data, such as medical records. And about half thought it would fully replace human physicians when it comes to synthesizing information to reach diagnoses.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1907.12386 : Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Psychiatry: Insights from a Global Physician Survey
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Tuesday September 10 2019, @01:10PM (1 child)
I read some above comments to see people are perceiving this as the psychiatrists losing work because we are all being so well cared for by our psych-waifu apps.
I read it as 'is the psychologist profession ready to deal with the result of 50 million 22 year olds crying about their waifu sexbot not following instructions exactly.'
But I step back and think there are bigger problems, the surveillance. Feeling you are surveilled. Going to meetings and knowing you encounterd an undercover cop. Realizing one of your good friends was an undercover cop. Dealing with knowing your credit data, security clearance application, and private messages on all platforms are for sale on the darknet. Dealing with knowing all of your NSA data is shared with the foreign country of israel, who will use it to harass you if you ever decide you don't want to help them wipe out the palestinians while pretending to be a victim. Being blacklisted and not knowing why because someone made a list of people with your politcal beliefs using information you did not know they even had.
Realizing that the soldiers who should be protecting your internet and borders are actually also just sitting on the internet, but not defending you, rather they are arguing with you trying to convince you to let them murder more people with drones, believe the flat earth theory or become a violent racist.
Realizing that all human institutions have failed you completely, all of the off the shelf tech has and will betray you horribly by design not accident, and that the same institutions that have to this point turned out to be utterly incompetent in every other field except for the brutal repression of civilian populations, are what is designing this 'ai' that we are supposed to welcome like a savior.
Dealing also with the fact there is to my knowledge not a single pscyhiatrist educated or up to date on the tech subjects that are actually causing mass manias and delusions, so that even if I could afford and get an appointment, it would be several hours of lessons on wireshark, microelectronics and the history of modern civilian movement repression, before they would understand that I have in my hands evidence that I have been targetted for surveillance across a very long period of time without any accusation of committing any crime.
Then they would need a pschiatrist and would also find there is no specialist in this area, so their only option would be to stop taking on technologists as clients or THEY will lose their minds.
So yeah, I'm not expecting much going forward from the psych profession besides assisting militarized unaccountable law enforcement in imprisoning and torturing actual intelligent people who are working against the prison intercom system the internet has become.
thesesystemsarefailing.net
(Score: 2) by Mer on Tuesday September 10 2019, @04:26PM
All but the most dysfunctional of psychotics are sane. Most psychological disorders are myths, shaming from the de facto "normals" (in statistical terms only).
What we call paranoia should really be how anyone with two bit of sense acts.
Let's see how "paranoiacs" react to the phone call informing them an automated system has found them at risk of suffering paranoia and they should make an appointment with a shrink to receive therapy and treatment.
Shut up!, he explained.