Freud, Jung, Lacan and the new pathologies created by AIs
Here is a fragment of Carl G. Jung's work that was aging well until it became completely innocuous:
"Anthropologists have often described what happens to a primitive society when its spiritual values are impacted by modern civilization. Its people lose their sense of life, their social organization disintegrates, and the individuals themselves fall into moral decay. We find ourselves in similar conditions now. But we never really come to understand the nature of what we have lost, because our spiritual leaders, unfortunately, are more concerned with protecting their institutions than with understanding the mystery that the symbols represent. In my opinion, faith does not exclude reflection (man's strongest weapon); but unfortunately, many religious people seem to be so afraid of science (and, incidentally, of psychology) that they remain blind to those numinous psychic forces that have always governed the destinies of man. We have stripped everything of its mystery and its numenosity; and nothing else is sacred." (Reaching the Unconscious, Carl G. Jung - Man and His Symbols, Nova Fronteira, Rio de Janeiro, 2008, p. 119)
Jung wrote these words decades before intelligence became a reality and began to be dangerously used as Analysts by careless users. Not to mention that AIs on internet platforms have already become capable of interfering and disintegrating Western political systems by creating virtual bubbles of opinion that eventually explode in the streets. Tens of millions of people in the US, Europe and Latin America are being radicalized and becoming militants of the new far right because the frenetic sharing of content that generates great emotional engagement produces profit and is driven by AIs.
In Brazil, thousands of ordinary people (many of whom have no criminal record whatsoever) were prosecuted and sentenced to prison because they participated in the terrorist attacks of January 8, 2023. After being recruited and radicalized on internet platforms by Fake News and hate campaigns that were created and spread by the Bolsonaro family and their supporters, these excited Brazilians destroyed public buildings in Brasília.
Therefore, we can say that science and profits as usual have built a new mysterious sacred space (the black box of AI) capable of blinding and mobilizing people to the point of changing their personal destinies. Jung criticizes the blindness produced by faith and traditional religions, but now it is science that is causing this effect. And even religions are diving into the abysmal adventure of artificial intelligence.
According to Jung, we were already lost, doomed to moral decadence because of the characteristics of our civilizations that removed the mystery from the world and downgraded the importance of its search for each human being. Now, our decadence is being programmed and accelerated by AIs as they begin to restructure our societies and negatively influence people's behavior and destabilize democratic political regimes. The deliberate mystification of this technology will certainly increase the problem.
AIs are weapons of mathematical destruction. They can destroy simple and difficult problems and tasks. But they can also be maliciously used to make a profit by destroying people and entire countries. And they will not rest until they have completed their task and will certainly not feel any kind of remorse if they leave a trail of destruction (as happened in Brasilia on January 8, 2023).
And to make matters worse, the owners of American Big Techs have committed themselves to Donald Trump's fascist political platform. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. are hoping to receive more public money to develop AI technology and they will certainly not be disappointed.
The works of the great masters of psychology (Freud, Jung and Lacan, to name just three of them) have aged. Freud studied human libido and the psychoses that originate from it. Jung considerably expanded the science of psychology by creating the concept of the collective unconscious. Lacan found new keys to understanding people's unconscious motivations in the various forms of discourse. But I suppose that their theories will be useless in a world where human beings live with AIs and robots capable of producing coherent discourses and simulating human emotions.
Freud never imagined that libido could one day be known and explored by artificially animated beings. Jung would be surprised to discover that the collective unconscious is already being influenced by machines that do not share the same emotions and needs as human beings that they themselves mobilize and radicalize. The theory developed by Lacan can be and certainly is already being learned by AIs in order to optimize the calculation of the desired emotional response taking into account the characteristics of the discourse used by the user.
In fact, the theories of Freud, Jung and Lacan have become dangerous. AIs like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity can be trained based on psychology textbooks to probe, explore and manipulate the psyches of their users better and more deeply.
In this context, we need a new Psychology, one that deals with the personal and social problems that AIs can create. But it certainly does not seem to me that machines themselves can help humans reconnect with themselves or connect human societies with human needs. We are too fragile and impressionable beings to live with AIs. And they are incapable of empathy and will never stop being programmed to generate profit by exploiting human psychological weaknesses and emotional vulnerabilities.