Recent SF/F about Machine-Assisted Therapy

October 1, 2017 6:41 PM

Xia Jia's story "The Psychology Game" (Clarkesworld, 10/17) contemplates a familiar sort of Turing test in a new venue: "This is a globally popular reality TV show ... The patient and the therapist are not in the same room." But she mentions Hector Levesque's "On Our Best Behaviour" / "The Winograd Schema Challenge" [PDFs] as a greater hurdle for AI. Recent news from Apple and Google suggests more near-term realities for automation. Meanwhile, David Burr Gerrard's "The Epiphany Machine" (Guernica, 2017; standalone excerpt from the novel) imagines machine-based insight from a magical realist perspective: "1. The epiphany machine will not discover anything about you that you do not, in some way, already know." [Siri, previously.]
posted by Wobbuffet (2 comments total)

As someone trying to make this happen...thank you for briefly distracting me from replacing therapists with machines!!

Now, how does that make you feel?
posted by DCCooper at 9:05 AM on October 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

Clarkesworld is on my mandatory listen list.
posted by doctornemo at 10:20 AM on October 2, 2017 [1 favorite]