23rd November - "It's not thinking!": PHaR meets MYLO.

In this week’s PHaR, we tried something different. Taking the digital hand of MYLO (Manage Your Life Online; Gaffney et al., 2014), a computerised 'therapist' or “problem-solving program”. In an online setting, MYLO utilises principles similar to Perceptual Control Theory therapy. We wondered if MYLO could help us make sense of our life/work balances. Prior to our meet, we had all spent some time talking to MYLO, individually, before printing our conversations and reflecting on our experiences.

We found ourselves struck by the seemingly insatiableness of MYLO. Questions kept coming, questions that seemed close to repetitions, or to be shifting focus without reason, until becoming trapped in loops. At times, and because of the questioning style, we had thought back to our reading of Petitmengin’s (2006) method of becoming aware of the pre-reflective (particularly given MYLO’s commanding tone, evident from the first question onwards: “please tell me what’s on your mind”). Despite this, some personal insights were gained via questions that seemed poignant, but which may have been reached by algorithm rather than insight. MYLO, with its lack of feedback, caused us to reflect on our role in its questioning with some of us assuming the fault lay with us (“I was wondering if I’d ‘misanswered’ an earlier question”) others presuming the limits of the software had been reached.    

However, and despite our varied (some limited, some lived) therapeutic experiences, we found a number of differences in MYLO’s approach. In one canny metaphor, we saw in the looped questioning time becoming a “flat circle” rather than the inverted spiral cone shape that therapy can take; that is metaphorically over time moving towards a goal or the identification of an issue. We felt that a lack of a sense of growth, that no therapeutic “journey” seemed possible, did limit what we could have achieved with MYLO. We assumed that this sense of progression, with another person (the therapist), would not be able to be reproduced using artificial intelligence (AI). Or if it were we would need to be made to believe we were speaking with someone/that some thing was thinking. We considered the role and implication of AI within wider contexts, discussing therapeutic robot animals (such as “PARO” the seal, pictured above, Marti et al., 2006) and the boom in self-help, mindfulness apps. Despite the (perhaps closing) gap between interaction and capability we saw “functionality” as an initial driving force, but one that would repeatedly come to lag behind the human need for “growth”.   

References:

Gaffney, H., Mansell, W., Edwards, R., & Wright, J. (2014). Manage your life online (MYLO): A pilot trial of a conversational computer-based intervention for problem solving in a student sample. Behavioural and cognitive psychotherapy, 42(6), 731-746.

Marti, P., Bacigalupo, M., Giusti, L., Mennecozzi, C., & Shibata, T. (2006). Socially assistive robotics in the treatment of behavioural and psychologicalsymptoms of dementia. In Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics, 2006. BioRob 2006. The First IEEE/RAS-EMBS International Conference on (pp. 483-488). 

Petitmengin, C. (2006). Describing one’s subjective experience in the second person: an interview method for the science of consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive sciences, 5(3), 229-269.