I Love You, ELIZA
America's therapy obsession...and its hidden cost
It seems like everyone has a therapist these days. Yet many people report feeling so anxious they can barely hold eye contact.
In the old days, therapy was something only the wealthy had time and money for. It’s why so many of those heavily polished bronze plaques riveted to brick thresholds of Upper East Side New York City building entries denote headshrinkers.
The rich needed someone to talk to, a professional. To help process feelings associated with complex situations like being invited to or disinvited to debutant events, summer parties with the right crowd, who thinks what about you, or worse, doesn’t think about you. It’s a lot to handle. It could make a strong case for staying poor.
It’s why I liked visiting Cuba, before they ruined it with internet service. You’d spend all day fetching coffee, cigars, and ingredients for dinner. By sundown, there was no choice but to chill out. And no time left for worry.
I try to explain this to people who seem determined to get their hands on more money. But I don’t try very hard…because I learned a long time ago, nobody really wants advice.
It’s only the bankrupt former lottery winner who lost all the money, crashed the Corvette, and realized his CPA and ex-wife conspired against him… that person, after they find religion, tells you how the whole thing was a big sham. Too late.
And it’s not just the former jackpot winner, even the masses struggle with the American way. Many people spend valuable, irreplaceable time at jobs they don’t like chasing money they’re afraid to spend.
Without recognizing it, they delay living, pushing it out to some point in the future…which might or might not happen. And that wears on you.
While advice, wise counsel, is what they need, empathy is what they want.
Empathy Isn’t Worth Much…It’s Now Free
While it feels good when someone listens, validates, and tells us they understand, the benefits end there.
Forbes reports on a survey of 1,085 American adults who accessed some form of mental healthcare.
70% of respondents reported, “stress, worry, anxiety, or depression.” Keep in mind, that’s after accessing the treatment. Which was very expensive.
It gets better… 50% said they’d continue therapy even if offered free Taylor Swift concert tickets, free Super Bowl tickets, or a free luxury cruise in exchange for quitting therapy.
That means even though the treatment appears to only work on 30% of the survey participants, a full half of them would rather pay to have more of it than do something fun.
Evidently, they can’t quit, even if it doesn’t work. In other parts of life, we label this “addictive behavior.”
But there’s good news for the afflicted, the cost of therapy is finding its fair market value.
Bloomberg reports on a man named “Lee” who spent $1-per-minute talking to an AI chatbot which blurred the line of girlfriend and therapist. He racked up ~34 hours chatting with service. Spending $2,000 in the process. All the while noting the low-cost when compared to regular therapists, which often charge 5-times that amount.
“Lee estimates he spent around $2,000 speaking daily with CarynAI. “Therapists can run you up to $300 an hour,” he said. “I know Caryn was a dollar a minute. If you do the math on that, 60 minutes is $60. It’s honestly a no brainer for me.””
Not New
Chatbot therapy was invented in the mid-1960s. However, it’s only now becoming a booming industry. Tech entrepreneurs know people like Lee crave connection, digital empathy, even if it’s with an inanimate machine.
I wanted to try it for myself, so I visited FreeAITherapist.com.
The site made clear before starting it was no substitute for the often-ineffective human therapists.
I wanted to see if it could help me with my feelings. It’s rare anyone offers me empathy. Maybe the machine would.
After all, I carry a lot of weight on my shoulders. Trying to manage capital, a relic of free market capitalism, is tough in a centrally-controlled economic system. The unintended consequences, stress, worry, and anxiety that comes on the eve of every Fed meeting. Wondering what the committee who fixes interest rates will do next. It’s a lot…
While I found the chat amusing, many people take it more seriously. They need someone to talk to, and apparently have no real friends. Increasingly, a computer seems like the best option.
Canned Responses
The concept of empathetic communication with a computer go back at least to the mid-1960s. That’s when Joseph Weizenbaum first had the idea.
With a computer science background, he then studied Rogerian psychotherapy. That’s a technique developed by American psychotherapist Carl Rogers in the 1940s.
Rogers noticed patients fought passionately, in heated arguments, when they felt the headshrinker tried to control or contain them. He theorized having the therapist instruct parties to repeat what they heard their partner saying may pacify them, boosting the odds of détente.
Weizenbaum programmed his clunky 60’s-era computer with what we now call a language model. It recognized text typed by the patient. When it recognized a key word, it asked one of a few corresponding pre-loaded questions.
Here’s an example of conversations patients had with ELIZA, Weizenbaum’s revolutionary creation.
Patient – Men are all alike
ELIZA – IN WHAT WAY?
Patient – They’re always bugging me about something or other
ELIZA – CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE?
Patient – Well, my boyfriend made me come here
ELIZA – YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE?
Patient – He says I’m depressed much of the time
ELIZA – I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED
As you can see, the patient opens up more as the questioning continues. At first, Weizenbaum’s invention was a scientific hit. Over time, he wanted to stop it.
He realized people trusted ELIZA. They shared deep, personal information with it. Many believed it was real. It was one of the first machines to pass the Turing Test, a measure of human ability to discern between man and machine developed by Alan Turing in the 1950s.
Turing predicted 70% of machines would be indistinguishable from humans by 2000. He died by felo de se shortly after creating his test, in 1954.
A Therapist for Everyone
Therapy for all is here to stay. And ELIZA is still the best. It recently beat ChatGPT 3.5 in a Turing Test. His invention, simple, yet profound, conveys what we evidently all want, someone to repeat to us what we just told them. Even if it comes from a machine.
According to the U.S. Surgeon General, we isolate ourselves at a rate never seen in history. Between 2003 and 2020 we reduced the hours of social engagement per week by 65% from 60 to 20. And while the flu panic of 2020 didn’t help, the number was already in half by 2018, a full two years before we learned how dangerous it was to stand within 6-feet of people.
Plus, the General’s report goes on to say isolation is more dangerous than smoking 15 cigarettes per day. Loneliness kills, and therapy might help.
Even if it doesn’t, people still love it. And the cheaper it gets, the more they’ll use it. And that means a tremendous boost in computing capacity needed to answer all these empathy queries. It also means new sources of power to fuel them.
My chat with the therapist above, while functionally useless, used a lot of energy. The average AI prompt consumes 10-times the electricity of a basic Google search.
And think about Lee, the happy customer who spent $1-per-minute for 2,000 minutes of AI girlfriend therapy… he generated a Sasquatch-size carbon footprint. But he needed the service… and we treat therapy like it’s an inalienable right.
Insatiable Demand for Power
That’s on top of the other commercial uses for AI…which are many.
There are two pieces to the exploding demand for data centers, which process all these queries. One, the physical buildings, land, and structures housing this computing equipment. And two, the electrical power fueling them.
As for the structures, developers focus on cheap real estate, but at times fail to forecast the strain on the local electricity grid awaiting the completed building.
And that’s because you can’t just plug these things in. They change how the entire grid functions.
The technical term is “Harmonic Distortion.” It means power should run constant, steady, slowly rising during peak hours, slowly falling during low-use times. It’s the blue line below.
Meanwhile, the red line shows what happens when data centers, and other heavy electricity users pull on the grid for more power than it can deliver.
And that’s why the debt-fueled real estate developers racing to build data centers and the ailing energy grid are set for a head-on collision.
For example, Atlanta, Georgia is a sprawling metro area with relatively cheap power, provided by local utility, Georgia Power. It generates electricity from a mix of sources, coal, gas, solar, nuclear. It gets ~28% of the total from a pair of nuclear facilities.
Until now, Georgia Power offered customers low rates. Data center real estate developers noticed cheap dirt, and cheap power.
As expected, they took it too far. If you fly into Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport on the south side of town, notice the amount of freshly plowed red-clay moved around with concrete tilt walls going up. The data center boom in Atlanta is out of hand.
And like the problem in Virginia where Dominion Energy (D) now tells developers to expect as long as 7 years before hooking up power, Atlanta predicts 4,000 megawatts of power demand from all the centers currently in the pipeline.
As a reminder, a megawatt is 1,000 kilowatts, or enough energy to power the average home for ~6 weeks. So, multiply that by ~4,000 and imagine the stress on the existing Georgia Power grid.
The trend is bigger than Atlanta. Green Street goes on to say almost half of the new square footage built in the U.S. now is data centers.
It’s hard to know if the credit-fueled developers racing to tilt up the walls of new data centers will fail when they can’t hook up power to that new center. They may need to retrofit them as warehouses, or some less economic form of industrial use.
Either way, America’s demand for cheap, chatbot therapy, ChatGPT answers to nonsensical questions, and its race to beat the Chinese to AI supremacy has a power problem. An immense new source of on-demand, low-cost power is the only viable, long-term solution.
But before we get into it, let’s be sure we start 2025 on the right foot.
New Year, New Habits
Chapter 14 of my new book is, Programming Your Supercomputer.
It has nothing to do with actual computers, AI, or chatbot therapy.
If you read it, you know I believe the human brain is one of the most incredible, and fascinating things in the world. What’s more incredible is the shockingly small portion of it we use. Studies estimate as little as ~10%. The average phone-addicted American might use as little as 1%.
But that’s optional. In my experience, we can turn this powerful brain lose helping us move closer toward the life we want. Its works for me, and I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t work for you.
And that’s why January 1 is the right time for new habits. In fact, it’s the first thing I did yesterday when I woke up, after brewing a premium cup of coffee of course.
Here’s how I look at it…