Foreword

Looking for answers

In the summer of my first year at university I enrolled, for reasons mysterious to me now, in an Artificial Intelligence class where we were supposed to teach machines to solve our problems. Our first task was based on the famous ELIZA therapist program that processed a patient’s symptoms using standardised language scripts and offered, in return, a ‘diagnosis’ or intervention. This was in the years before we became glued to screens or talked to our computers and before we became used to relating to each other in the abrupt text that mediates many of our relationships now. So back then I was dismayed. I did not understand or want to be part of a profession that ‘fixed’ human problems as if they were machines with technical faults.

In my program the problems were never fixed. When my patient typed in“I feel depressed” I was not inspired to create a list of multiple choice questions to diagnose the cause or determine the remedy. So I made my Eliza end all her consultations with,“I suggest you talk to someone about that”. I didn’t do very well in the assignment, although I did meet Colin, a long-haired computer scientist, who showed me how electronic mail worked and we whiled away the summer staring at bulky monitors and pinging each other messages. We didn’t know or imagine, as we chatted through our machines, just how much our lives were about to change as a result.

My second memorable experience that year was a lunchtime viewing ofOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In the film, Jack Nicholson plays a criminal seeking escape from a hard labour camp through transfer to a mental institution. Although he thinks life on the ward will be a soft option he is soon subject to the humiliating and, at times, inhumane social and medical regimes of the asylum. The most difficult part was watching the medical treatment of distressed patients which included the administration of electric shocks, large doses of mind-numbing drugs and, in t