Daniel Cahn, co-founder of Slingshot AI, on the potential of AI in therapy. Why is anxiety and depression affecting a large population? To what extent are these real categories? Why is the mental health getting worse? How often do you want an AI to agree with you? What are the ethics of persuasive AI? You will discover all in this conversation. MLST is sponsored by Brave: The Brave Search API covers over 20 billion webpages, built from scratch without Big Tech biases or the recent extortionate price hikes on search API access. Perfect for AI model training and retrieval augmentated generation. Try it now - get 2,000 free queries monthly at http://brave.com/api. Daniel Cahn (who is also hiring ML engineers by the way!) https://x.com/thecahnartist?lang=en / cahnd https://thinkingmachinespodcast.com/ TOC: 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:56 Therapy effectiveness vs drugs and societal implications 00:04:02 Mental health categories: Iatrogenesis and social constructs 00:10:19 Psychiatric treatment models and cognitive perspectives 00:13:30 AI design and human-like interactions: Intentionality debates 00:20:04 AI in therapy: Ethics, anthropomorphism, and loneliness mitigation 00:28:13 Therapy efficacy: Neuroplasticity, suffering, and AI placebos 00:33:29 AI's impact on human agency and cognitive modeling 00:41:17 Social media's effects on brain structure and behavior 00:50:46 AI ethics: Altering values and free will considerations 01:00:00 Work value perception and personal identity formation 01:13:37 Free will, agency, and mutable personal identity in therapy 01:24:27 AI in healthcare: Challenges, ethics, and therapy improvements 01:53:25 AI development: Societal impacts and cultural implications Full references on YT VD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hwX6OZyNC0 (and baked into mp3 metadata)