PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI): UNDERSTANDING THE CREATION OF AI AND ITS IMOACT ONS OCIETY AND THE MIND
Amy Levy, Psy.D
Tuesdays, May 6, 13, 20, 27 & June 3, 10, 17, 24
7:00-8:30pm On Zoom
This eight-week course is an opportunity to study the impact of the smart phone and other AI-driven personal technology on our minds and lives and to theorize about the psychoanalytic underpinnings of AI. We will read psychoanalytic texts by Bollas, Searles, Possati, Essig,Tugwell and Knafo, as well as writings from historian Yuval Noah Harari and tech innovators including Mo Gawdat and Mustfa Suleyman. Using Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents as a starting off point, we will consider the human struggle to adapt to civilization and manage our instincts, as well as strategies we employ to ameliorate the pain of reality.
Racing up to the present, we will study the new religions of “Techno-humanism” and “Dataism”, as observed by Harari, and discuss how the smart phone functions as a cult-groomer, initiating users into these new ideological systems. We will explore beliefs proffered by AI creators—such as the likelihood that both new technologies and their absence might lead to catastrophic and/or dystopian outcomes—as we attempt to use “binocular vision” to view their discourse at face value as well as from a psychoanalytic vertex. Self-reflection, clinical and personal vignettes, and student writing will be encouraged and welcome throughout the course.
12 Contact hours = 12 CE credits
Learning Objectives:
- Participants will be able to apply Freud’s views about the function of civilization to current society and the growth of AI technology.
- Participants will be able to define “techno-humanism” and “dataism” as theorized by Harari and explain why they pose a threat to psychoanalysis.
- Participants will be able to explain the three modes by which AI transforms our sense data as illustrated by Levy’s ‘AI Transformation Spectrum’.
Amy Levy, Psy.D. is a psychoanalyst and forensic psychologist who trained in San Francisco and Los Angeles, California. Dr. Levy is co-chair, with Todd Essig, of APsA’s Department of Psychoanalytic Education (DPE) Council on Artificial Intelligence (CAI), and past chair of the Education Committee for the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology. She has taught and lectured on the smart phone and AI, Bionian theory, object-relations theory, psychological and cognitive assessment, and group therapy. Her publication topics include intergenerational transmission of trauma, adolescent Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in the civil legal arena, and the reconceptualization of Wilfred Bion’s concept of alpha-function onto a spectrum. She is currently in private practice in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, faculty at the Psychoanalytic Center of the Carolinas, and a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
12 CE credits
- $640 general admission
- $440 members
- $400 candidates / students
Learning Objectives:
- Participants will be able to apply Freud’s views about the function of civilization to current society and the growth of AI technology.
- Participants will be able to define “techno-humanism” and “dataism” as theorized by Harari and explain why they pose a threat to psychoanalysis.
- Participants will be able to explain the three modes by which AI transforms our sense data as illustrated by Levy’s ‘AI Transformation Spectrum’.
12 CE credits will be granted to participants who have registered, have documented evidence of attendance of the entire program and have completed the on-line evaluation form. Upon completion of the evaluation form a Certificate of Completion will be emailed to all participants who comply with these requirements.
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