pdkl95

The tech startup that eventually creates that will call this "efficiency". This type of 'solution' is exactly what capitalism creates.

> I would love to have a real-time dashboard/HUD with measures of disorganized speech patterns or affective intensity

> It would be hard to make it not distracting

Not only would it be distracting, it could also bias you in unexpected ways.

> I would love to have a real-time dashboard/HUD with measures of disorganized speech patterns or affective intensity,

I already don't trust a lot of the mental health industry because of the very bad experiences[1] I've had in the past. The easiest/fastest way to guarantee I never visit a psychiatrist again is to start using that kind of "AI" tech without first showing me the source code. "Magic" hidden algorithms are already a problem in other medical situations like pacemakers[2] and CPAP[3] devices.

> make up for the trade-off of not being in the room

Maybe what you need isn't some sort of "AI" or other tech buzzword. It sounds like you need better communication technology that doesn't lose as much information.

--

On the more general topic of "AI in psychiatry", I strongly encourage you to play the visual novel Eliza[4] by Zachtronics. It's about your fear of a cheap, high error rate system with an additional twist: the same system also optimizes your role into a "gig economy" job.

The major advantage of a language that isn't Turing complete is not having the major risk inherent to Turing complete languages: asking if any non-trivial program will produce any given result or behavior is undecidable[1].

> write a program that runs until the heat death of the universe even in a Turing-incomplete language.

The Halting Problem is just a simple example of program behavior. The undecidability extends to any other behavior. Asking if a given program will behave maliciously is still undecidable even if we only consider the set of programs that do halt in a reasonable amount of time.

When you are using a regular language or deterministic pushdown automata, questions about the behavior or even asking if two implementations are equivalent is decidable. It is at lest possible8 to create software/tools to help answer the question "is this input safe." When you use a non-deterministic pushdown automata or stronger, you problem becomes provably undecidable*,

I highly recommend the talk "The Science of Insecurity"[2].

    It's a motherfucker
    don't you know

    If they push that button
    Your ass got to go

    What you gonna do
    Without your ass

I would like to suggest that the problem is that the skilled people that understand how to write crypto systems are providing libraries that are easy to misuse. Instead of providing a library that is likely to be used incorrectly without a lot of specialized knowledge, provide infrastructure that manages the crypto so the average developer doesn't need to become an expert on crypto systems.

HTTPS is a useful example. Instead of providing webapp authors a library of cypher/hash functions and warning that they shouldn't roll their own transport layer security and then acting shocked when those authors try to use that library and make a lot of mistakes, we instead separate the crypto step into a separate layer of infrastructure so the average webapp author can easily use crypto without having to learn a lot of specialized knowledge. Someone writing a Ruby on Rails app shouldn't have to write functions like pervade_encrypt($data)/pervade_decrypt($data) to move out of the plaintext world of HTTP and utilize encrypted transport. They only need to buy/LetsEncrypt a cert they can install in their webserver. They can even delegate that to their hosting provider.

"If it's possible for a human to hit the wrong button and [cause a catastrophic failure] by accident [or inexperience], then maybe the problem isn't with the human - it's with that button. [...] People make mistakes, and all of our systems need to be designed to be ready for that."

That is only true if-and-only-if we pretend those 13 bits are the only identifying information being sent to Google when requesting a font. The HTTP request is almost certainly being sent to Google wrapped inside an IP protocol packet. For most[1] requests, there are at least 24 additional bits (why 24? see: [3]) of very-identifying data in the IPv4 Source Address field. More fingerprinting can be probably done on other protocol fields, and IPv6 obviously adds an additional 96 bits. Yes, IP addresses are not unique, but ~13 bits is easily sufficient to disambiguate most hosts on a private network behind a typical NAT. Correlating the tuple {IPv4 Src Addr, x-client-data} received on a font request is trivial: it only requires a user to login to any Google webpage that includes a font request.

>> re: your [1]

    A given Chrome installation may be participating in a number
    of different variations (for different features) at the
    same time. These fall into two categories:

       Low entropy variations, which are randomized based
         on a number from 0 to 7999 (13 bits) that's randomly
         generated by each Chrome installation on the first run.

       High entropy variations, which are randomized using
         the usage statistics token for Chrome installations
         that have usage statistics reporting enabled.

[1] Google reports[2] they currently see about a 60%/40% ratio of IPv4/IPv6.

Trying to restrict competitors from making interoperable products is admitting you don't want to participate in a well-running competitive market and instead deserve monopoly power.

Phrenology is still pseudo=scientific bullshit even when the calipers[1] are replaced with an "AI" black box of software.

> Just need software that punishes employees who aren't happy enough at work, then we'll have a proper nightmare.

"RSA ANIMATE: Smile or Die"[2]

    Paula: "...what's that?"
    Blank Reg: "It's a book!"
    Paula: "Well, what's that?"
    Blank Reg: "It's a non-volatile storage medium.
                It's very rare. You should have one."

The traditional way a big tech company becomes the dominant provider is to embrace an open interoperable protocol to minimize the friction of switching from another provider. Later, when they have captured enough of the market, they extend the protocol to gradually reduce the de facto interoperability with other providers to increase the friction of switching to any other provider.