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Re:Psychiatry’s Incurable Hubris by tsimionescu on Friday March 22, 2019 @04:09AM (#19460414)
I can't comment on the parts about psychiatry and recreational drug use. However, machine learning and other AI technologies have nothing to do with the study and understanding of the human mind at this point, beyond a very vague metaphor.

While in theory AI could have been explored as a science, trying perhaps to simulate human or animal thought processes in hopes of understanding them and perhaps coming up with useful abstractions that could help us reason about them, the field has never really evolved in that direction.

Re:Psychiatry’s Incurable Hubris by marssaxman on Friday March 22, 2019 @03:00PM (#19465764)
Perhaps you're right - I'm no scientist and I'm not involved in research, I'm just an engineer working on building machine learning tools. Maybe I'm reaching too far. From where I sit, though, the concepts I hear people talking about when we discuss the design of machine learning systems, especially the sort of cutting edge research on concepts like attention and adversarial networks, sounds a whole hell of a lot like the ideas and techniques that come up when people try to sort out the conflicts and malfunctions that occur in the pattern-matching and story-telling mechanisms inside their own brains. Metaphors they may be, but they seem to work, and that tells me that we're on to something. I look forward to learning more about what's going on as this work proceeds.