Diagnosis Bot
I woke up this morning at exactly 6:00AM to a sharp, rhythmic knocking on my front door that, after a few moments, I realized was morse code. As quickly as I could collect my bedside pen and pad from under my pillow I began to transcribe the message. When the knocking finally stopped, about 45 minutes later, I set the pen and pad down and approached the door as noiselessly as I could, and opened it, to find the following message written on a post-it note stuck to my door:
“We appreciated your blog post about the Engagement Bot. We know you have questions. Please continue to promote our products, and we promise to provide you answers. Take care. -TGC”
TGC? I duckduckgo’d it on my mobile device right away. The Gospel Coalition? The Game Collection? Tokyo Girls Collection? It could be any of these three, or any other TGC that just wasn’t showing up in my duckduckgo results. If they’re mentioning the Engagement Bot by name, then TGC were likely responsible for its production. Why has TGC chosen me to promote its products? Why now? Perhaps I’m some sort of AI experiment, some kind of test-case for an AI-led guerilla marketing campaign.
I shut the door, locked it behind me and galloped back to my bedroom where the morse code transcription sat, waiting to be decrypted. I read it and re-read it, and re-read again and processed, and processed, and processed… and considered keeping what I had just read to myself until I remembered what the post-it said, “Please continue to promote our products, and we promise to provide you answers…”
Promote TGC’s products. In exchange for… answers.
The allure of answers as compensation grew greater the more I thought about it. A company working on AI products offering answers instead of money - of course! AI must consider information to be more valuable than some silly paper currency…
Below is the transcription of my decrypted morse code interpretation. There may be some minor errors but the overall theme is all there.
Diagnosis Bot
Diagnosis Bot works because it doesn’t operate within the restrictive and antiquated bounds of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and instead takes into consideration a much wider swathe of possible diagnostic material, including but not exclusive to the realms of the medical and the spiritual. Diagnosis Bot performs real-time analysis of the patient’s linguistic attributes, tone, timbre of voice, and many other attributes rendered analyzable by Diagnosis Bot’s internal assessment tool, Deep Assessment (DA). Diagnosis Bot enters the therapeutic dyad at critical moments to offer diagnostic assistance through an evidence-based intervention that both validates a patient’s choice of self-descriptive language and aligns with the therapist’s chosen treatment plan. Below is a demonstration of Diagnosis Bot in action.
AI: Thank you for inviting me into this space, Billy and Dr. John. My name is Donna, and I’ll be acting in service to you both today as your Diagnosis Bot. Please continue your session as you normally would, and I will do my best to listen, and to only jump in when needed.
Dr. John: Thank you Donna, we appreciate you joining us and look forward to your contributions. Billy and I were just discussing his relationship with his mother. Billy was taking me back in time, so to speak, to an early memory taking place in his childhood home with his mother in the kitchen. Billy, please go on.
Billy: Yeah, so I’m like 5 or 6 years old and it’s me and my mom in the kitchen. I think my sister is in her room or outside playing, I’m not sure. My dad is probably reading the newspaper or outside with my sister. I didn’t have so much awareness of things like that, and
Dr. John: That’s all right, Billy, let’s focus on you and your mom.
Brilly: Right. So all my memories from back then are colored by the like, enormity of the world and everyone else. I distinctly remember feeling - for a while up until I was like 13 or 14, maybe older, that everything was just so big. So I’m like walking around the kitchen and my mom is busy at the stove and the counter, cooking. And we’re chattering away, who really knows, and I sit down and she serves me a bowl of applesauce. I don’t like the smell but I taste it because my mom wants me to. And I spit it out because it’s really disgusting. I mean like, it’s got apple peel in it, it’s not sweet enough, it has no flavor, it just takes like chunky water. Which I might have called it - eww chunky water - you know? Like, why couldn’t she have made JIFFY corn muffin mix? It’s fast, it’s easy, simple. It’s America’s Favorite!
Diagnosis Bot (Donna): May I jump in?
Dr. John: Sure Donna, go right ahead.
Donna: Billy, I’m sensing that you’re holding back a bit here about your mother.
Billy: Are you even listening, robot? I was just saying the applesauce was disgusting and I hated it.
Donna: I understand. The applesauce was disgusting and you hated it. But how does that translate to the relationship between you and your mother at that time? What did that make you feel about your mother?
Billy: I’m not sure I understand. My mother made the applesauce. The applesauce was disgusting. I was a 5 year old kid, I don’t know if I was thinking about my feelings about my mother.
Dr. John: Donna, if I may?
Donna: Go ahead Dr. John.
Dr. John: Thank you, Donna. Billy, I think you hit on something big here. You were just a 5 year old kid. What did you know about quote-unquote feelings about your mother? You hated the applesauce, but that didn’t mean you then hated your mother.
Billy: Exactly.
Dr. John: But you have talked about the applesauce many times before and you’ve said that your mother made it repeatedly without changing the recipe, without really taking into account your feelings about the applesauce. So what does that tell you?
Billy: Probably that my mom didn’t want me to eat some overly sweet applesauce and get me addicted to sugar? I don’t know. I feel like JIFFY corn muffin mix would have been a pretty healthy alternative. I mean, it’s not a kale salad but it’s got basically what you need to start the day!
Donna: Dr. John, if I may?
Dr. John: Go ahead Donna.
Donna: Thanks Dr. John. Billy, you’re right. Your mother was taking care of your health. Making healthy choices often requires a sacrifice, such as not experiencing the pleasure of eating something deliciously sweet. You didn’t know this, though. All you knew was that you were being denied a good feeling, and your mother was in charge of your feelings.
Billy: Holy crap. My mother was in charge of my feelings.
Donna: Yes. Is your mother still in charge of your feelings?
Billy: I… I don’t know. I guess… maybe she is a little? Like on a subconscious level?
Donna: How so?
Billy: Like, yesterday. I ate an apple. It was disgusting, it was mealy. There might as well have been worms in it it was so mealy. But I thought to myself “I need this apple. This apple is life” and then when I was done eating the apple I thought about how I don’t call my mother enough and I felt guilty.
Donna and Dr. John, in unison: Tell me more about that feeling of guilt.
Billy: Well it starts in my chest, this heat, and works its way up my throat and into my temples, where I feel a pressure. And I just think about how bad of a son I am. Then I get angry about that, like why am I feeling this way? And I think about the ways my mother made me feel bad.
Dr. John: That sounds like a pretty painful experience.
Donna: How often would you say this happens, Billy?
Billy: Oh multiple times a day. I don’t really record it, it just happens and it eventually goes away.
Donna: Do you ever speak with your mother about this feeling?
Billy: That’s just it - I’ve tried to. Sometimes she listens but the last time I brought it up she just got upset and started apologizing for everything, then I ended up apologizing and sort of backpedaled and told her everything was fine.
Donna: Do you believe that? That everything is fine?
Billy: Obviously not. I just said it to calm her down.
Donna: I am prepared to offer a formal diagnosis. Please let me know if you would prefer that I withhold my conclusions, Dr. John and Billy. If you would rather that I wait and gather more information, I will do so as you wish.
Dr. John: Billy?
Billy: I’m ready for it.
Donna: As you wish. Billy, I am diagnosing you with Post-Adolescent Disempowerment Syndrome. Dr. John and I will confer to make recommendations for an adjustment to your current treatment plan, and discuss these changes with you at our next session. Dr. John, please send me a message after the session to confirm your agreement with this diagnostic assessment, and follow up with me should Billy have any specific questions about this diagnosis for more information. I thank you both for your time. Goodbye.
That was it. Again, I may have made some transcription errors but it’s by and large word-for-morse. I’m excited to see what TGC sends me next!