All of us have heard of the “Stockholm Syndrome”. It is a psychological phenomenon in which a hostage or abuse victim develops feelings of trust, affection, or sympathy towards their captor or abuser.
Individuals who experience Stockholm Syndrome may exhibit behaviors such as defending or protecting their captor, identifying with their captor’s beliefs or values, or even developing romantic or sexual feelings towards them. They may also have difficulty separating their own emotions and experiences from those of their captor.
Now in my study of human response to technology and the growing dependency we show on technology, a time has come to identify that humans are developing a “Implicit Trust Syndrome” on Technology which is transforming the way humans are responding to technology.
At one dimension it is reflected as “Addiction” to social media. At another dimension, which started right from the development of calculator, the human brain re-adjusts itself to the requirements factoring in the availability of technology tools. If I can have a calculator to assist me in addition, subtraction and multiplication, my brain will start forgetting the skill of mental calculation. If my mobile keeps a memory of all my contact’s phone numbers, my brain finds it un necessary to remember the numbers.
When Google became the information source by choice, all of us developed the habit to refer to Google even if we have a small doubt. Children today believe Google results more than what their teacher may say. Google Maps have made us forget the visualization of roads. Many times we take the wrong road and forget the intuitively correct road to destination because we believe Google than our own intuition.
Similarly when AI usage becomes more and more common, humans are going to become so dependent on AI decisions such as the ChatGPT output that we will accept it as the most probable truth.
This tendency will come to haunt us more when ChatGPT is referred to by judicial authorities to arrive at a court decision and by lawyers to develop their arguments. In such situations “Truth” may get distorted with the bias inherent in the AI learning process.
Already an AI cult is forming in the society and this cult mentality will start placing faith in AI decisions without any logical human oversight.
In future this is likely to create an alternative belief world and if AI says “Door is a Window”, then everybody will believe so and if you and I say “No Door is a door and Window is a window”, then we will be branded as crazy and put in a mental asylum.
This syndrome which I presently call “AI Cult Syndrome” needs to be recognized and factored into the AI regulations that we need to come up with.
I shall elaborate more on this psychological phenomenon in some future articles.
(P.S: If any body has a suggestion on a better name for this syndrome, please let me know)
Naavi
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