The Silicon Shrink; How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum (1876)

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Why the race to apply AI in psychiatry is so dangerous, and how to understand the new tech-driven psychiatric paradigm. AI psychiatrists promise to detect mental disorders with superhuman accuracy, provide affordable therapy for those who can’t afford or can’t access treatment, and even invent new psychiatric drugs. But the hype obscures an unnerving reality. In The Silicon Shrink , Daniel Oberhaus tells the inside story of how the quest to use AI in psychiatry has created the conditions to turn the world into an asylum. Most of these systems, he writes, have vanishingly little evidence that they improve patient outcomes, but the risks they pose have less to do with technological shortcomings than the application of deeply flawed psychiatric models of mental disorder at unprecedented scale. Oberhaus became interested in the subject of mental health after tragically losing his sister to suicide. In the book, he argues that these