Steps towards a therapeutic artificial intelligence

Abstract

Whether artificial intelligence might benefit human well-being in every sense is an open question. I consider it in the following essay, first putting to one side standard accounts of ‘official AI’, then deriving an ‘unofficial’ counterpart from the evidence of newspaper accounts and magazine features from ca. 1945–1965. Unsurprisingly, these demonstrate a bending of artificial intelligence to military and industrial purposes, hence the enormity of the impediment to therapeutic applications, but at the same time the evidence leaves no doubt as to the imaginative power of smart machines. Contemporary commentary is brought to bear to move from intimations of a dark future to possibilities for constructing a healthy practice. I conclude with two quite different 21st century examples of a way towards it.

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