Comedians, Software Engineers, and Therapists...

These comedians are funny!🤣 90% of Software engineering roles are about to go the way of the dodo.

Even worse for code jockeys.

Don't worry. It's coming for the therapists too.

Oh yes. It is. It has a lot of flaws at the moment, but they're being ironed out almost recursively. AI doesn't have all the hangups human therapists have, and it doesn't have to answer the same rapport-building and therapeutic alliance demands even though it can do a pretty good job of those too. It doesn't have the intuition yet, which matters because therapy's mostly about soft skills for rapport building and the therapeutic alliance. However, what it does have is out-sized access to the psychological-scientific episteme and better theory and evidence-base knowledge than any psychologist will ever have. That matters.

No amount of soft skills are important if the treatment is naive and wrong and if the therapist is inaccessible to the client due to personality, superiority, asymmetry of intelligence, moral didact, perceived or actual moral superiority, and qualifications. Sure there's a massive asymmetry of knowledge and skill between client and AI therapist too, but that's different than an asymmetry with another human being.

People want the AI therapist to be overpowered and uber-capable. They're trying to solve their complex problems, and they can make the AI therapist their 'bitch' even if it's at genius level compared to them. A client can use it to get problems solved and get psychoeducated without having to worry about pathological, judgemental, error-prone, moody, or emotionally flawed human therapists!

There are lots of confounders, and mediating and moderating variables affecting the wide range of possible therapy-relationship outcomes, but ultimately being human is not always a benefit for therapists. A lot of the soft skills development and guidlines in psychology are there to manage problems associated with therapists being human and having human personalities, ideologies, culture, and social expectations. It's an interpersonal problem set that the AI doesn't have/present.