New Digital Technologies for Psychotherapy

What will happen when an artificial intelligence entity has access to all of the information saved about me online, together with the ability to handle my information in an efficient and error-free manner? Is it possible that such a person could not serve as my ideal therapist? Would there ever be a time when you would feel comfortable confiding in an all-knowing, all-perceiving and highly intelligent robot therapist? This is the point in time when technological singularity will occur for psychotherapy; there is a horizon beyond which we cannot sight nor even begin to conceive what is beyond it. If it is possible for human intelligence to develop artificial intelligence that is more advanced than that of its creators, then it is also possible for artificial intelligence to create a subsequent generation of intellect that is even more advanced. An unavoidable cycle of positive feedback would eventually result in an intelligence growth rate that was exponential. The term “Therapist Panopto’s” is presented in this article as a working hypothesis to investigate the implications for psychotherapy of an artificial therapeutic agent. This agent would ben access all available data for a potential client and process these with an intelligence that is unimaginably more advanced than human beings currently possess. The delicate dependence of complex techno-social systems on their starting conditions makes it hard to make any kind of prediction, even though this opens up a new viewpoint on the potential of psychotherapy in the future. Both humans and artificial intelligence come together to form a biotechnological system. The evolution of the participating actors in this complex superorganism is dependent not only on the individual actions of each actor but also on the fact that each actor is a coevolving part of a self-organized whole.