Post: #1

"You should welcome it into your mind"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/1...-mind.html

Next week, Dr Tom Insel leaves his post as head of the US National Institute of Mental Health, a job that made him America’s top mental health doctor. Dr Insel is a neuroscientist and a psychiatrist and a leading authority on both the medicine and public policies needed to deal with problems of the mind. He’s 64 but he’s not retiring. He’s going to work for Google.

More precisely, he’s going to work for Google Life Sciences, one of the more exotic provinces of the online empire. He’s going to investigate how technology can help diagnose and treat mental health conditions. Google doesn’t just want to read your mind, it wants to fix it too.

It’s not alone. Apple, IBM and Intel are among technology companies exploring the same field. IBM this year carried out research with Columbia University that suggested computer analysis of speech patterns can more accurately predict the onset of psychosis than conventional tests involving blood samples or brain scans. Other researchers theorise that a person’s internet search history or even shopping habits (so handily recorded by your innocuous loyalty card) can identify the first signs of mental illness. Computers can now tell when something is about to go terribly wrong in someone’s mind.

"We now live in a world where your phone might observe you to help assess your mental health."

That development is striking enough in itself, but the way in which researchers like Dr Insel want to use this new technological power raises even more questions.

Wearable technology has been a hot topic in medical innovation for several years now. A growing number of people choose to track their own physical condition using FitBits, Jawbones and other activity trackers, tiny wearable devices that monitor your movements, pulse rate, sleep patterns and more. Once the preserve of obsessive fitness fanatics, “self-monitoring” has the scope to transform healthcare. The ever-increasing number of people with chronic conditions can track and electronically report their symptoms, reducing the number of routine (and expensive) consultations they need with medical staff and ensuring a quicker response to changes that do require direct professional attention.

Self-monitoring will also surely play a bigger role in preventive public health. Wearing a pedometer that counts the number of steps you take in a day has been shown to spur people to walk more. What would happen to your consumption of alcohol and sugar if a device strapped to your wrist displayed a continuous count of your calorie and unit intake for the week?

Dr Insel is part of a school of thought that suggests this technology is even better suited to mental health. The symptoms of depression, for instance, are inconstant, ebbing and rising without obvious pattern. A short consultation with a doctor once every few weeks is thus a poor means of diagnosis. But wearable technology allows continuous monitoring. A small portable device might monitor your tone of voice, speech patterns and physical movements, picking up the early signs of trouble. A device such as a mobile telephone.

Yes, we now live in a world where your phone might observe you to help assess your mental health. If you don’t find that prospect disturbing, you’re either fantastically trusting of companies and governments or you haven’t thought about it enough.

But that feeling of unease should not determine our response to technology in mental health. In fact, we should embrace and encourage the tech giants as they seek to chart the mind and its frailties, albeit on the condition that we can overcome the enormous challenge of devising rules and regulations protecting privacy and consent.

Because, simply, existing healthcare systems are failing and will continue to fail on mental health. Even if the current model of funding the NHS was sustainable, the stigma that prevents us discussing mental health problems would ensure their prevention and treatment got a disproportionately small slice of the pie.

We pour ever more billions into dealing with the worst problems of physical health, and with considerable success. Death rates from cancer and heart disease have fallen markedly over the last 40 years. Over the same period, suicide rates have gone up.

Even as the NHS budget grows, NHS trusts’ spending on mental health is falling. If someone with cancer went untreated, we’d say it was a scandal. Some estimates suggest one in five people who need “talking therapies” don’t get them. In a rare bit of enlightened thinking, some NHS trusts are supporting Big White Wall, an online service where people can anonymously report stress, anxiety and depression, take simple clinical tests and talk to therapists.

Technology will never be a panacea for mental illnesses, or our social failure to face up to them. But anything that makes them cheaper and easier and more mundane to deal with should be encouraged.

If you think the idea of Google assessing your state of mind and your phone monitoring you for depression is worrying, you’re right. But what’s more worrying is that allowing these things is the least bad option on mental health.
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So how many facebook and twitter users will be labeled mentally ill now? (hopefully most of them). I know counselors that have been pushed out of the mental health industry from their lack of embracing counseling online and through skype etc, as they say you can't truly and accurately gauge a person's thoughts and feelings remotely and without personally interacting with them...but let's let the computers decide for us now.
It's also too bad that so many things in the DSM & mental health industry have already been re-defined in recent years as it has largely been infested with SJWs. They have already re-classified things like being transgender that was once a severe body-dysmorphia disease into being perfectly normal now, along with homosexuality, pedophilia, pathological altruism and other severe mental health disorders that have been normalized. But we should wholeheartedly let tech giants in to probe our minds as it's the "least bad option on mental health". It's the final frontier to total control

Post: #2

While a small portion of apple fanatics and hipsters embrace this shit, I seriously doubt your average person does.

I'm waiting for the day that people start saying no to this crap. I enjoy technology, just got a bachelors of science focusing on tech and security, but some of this shit is just getting too god damned intrusive.

Though, I can see how the wearable tech could be really handy for older folks. I spent about half of my 20s taking care, to one degree or another, my grandmother who had dementia. There were a few times she fell and hurt herself and I and other care takers weren't around at the time. So, I definitely see some upsides. I am just getting tired of some of this shit.

Post: #3

Post: #4

Dr Tom Insel

Close enough. All in the name I guess.

Post: #5

I hope they name the app something like Minority Report or Thought Crime.

Post: #6

Good find, DamienCasanova.

The definition of "mentally ill" is very subjective and dependent on trends. In 1955, being gay was a mental illness. Now it's celebrated.

Today, we have a bunch of liberal psychologists attempting to do what the government of the Soviet Union did: Define dissenting opinions from the mainstream as mental illness. Since the mainstream media is liberal, you know what that means.

It means articles like this 2012 piece in Psychology Today, "Conservatism as a Mental Illness." If you Google variations on this, you'll see it turn up again and again.

This reminds me of the school system, where if you disagree with teachers a little too vehemently or if you're just different, they send you to the school psychologist.

Wikipedia has an entry on the political abuses of psychiatry. Considering the direction mainstream Internet companies are headed (i.e. letting feminists police Twitter; the constant bans of videos on YouTube), it's worth wondering whether things are headed in this direction.

Post: #7

Michael Savage always said liberalism is a mental disease.

Post: #8

Soon to come:
Google wants to monitor your sexual wellbeing.

Well, a psychologist can commit you to a mental hospital if he deems so you see where this can go.

Post: #9

This sort of reminds me of the intro sequence to Inception, only this time they're not breaking into people's minds to steal shit, they're breaking in to sell you something.

Post: #10

(10-29-2015 10:24 AM)DamienCasanova Wrote:  He’s going to investigate how technology can help diagnose and treat mental health conditions. Google doesn’t just want to read your mind, it wants to fix it too.

...

Other researchers theorise that a person’s internet search history ... can identify the first signs of mental illness. Computers can now tell when something is about to go terribly wrong in someone’s mind.

No, they do want to read your mind. Sounds like a justification for more mass surveillance to me. A genuine concern for public mental health is not the driving force. Rather, this is an attempt to control people's thoughts and actions under the guise of some sort of big data mental health project. You can bet there is money to be made.

Post: #11

I wonder if this is a response to mass shootings.

Post: #12

Online privacy is going to be an even bigger issue if things like this keep up.

For privacy's sake, I use an add-on for Firefox called AnonymoX (http://www.anonymox.net). As the name suggests, it allows you to browse and comment anonymously. It lets you choose from a bunch of IP addresses, including ones in US, England, and the Netherlands.

The only problem with AnonymoX is that it causes you to automatically get logged you out all the sites that require sign-ins, since you don't maintain a continuous IP address. The way I avoid constant sign-ins is to use a second browser for all these types of sites.

Post: #13

1984 is becoming realer and realer every day.

Post: #14

(10-30-2015 11:55 PM)eatthishomie Wrote:  1984 is becoming realer and realer every day.

That's an understatement.

For the younger guys born in the 90s is that book even required reading anymore? I make references to it sometimes with college educated millenial girls and they are completely unfamiliar with it.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a conscious effort to remove it from school curriculm its just too prophetic and frighteningly accurate, albeit the year 1984 was a little premature.

Had it been titled 2024 im sure people would be worshipping Orwell as a true prophet a la Joseph Smith.

Post: #15

(10-31-2015 11:16 PM)azulsombra Wrote:  That's an understatement.

For the younger guys born in the 90s is that book even required reading anymore? I make references to it sometimes with college educated millenial girls and they are completely unfamiliar with it.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a conscious effort to remove it from school curriculm its just too prophetic and frighteningly accurate, albeit the year 1984 was a little premature.

Had it been titled 2024 im sure people would be worshipping Orwell as a true prophet a la Joseph Smith.

Due to the nature of the narrative in 1984 & compared to the world of today.
I'd say it would have been more succinct to title it 2084.
They'd need to wipe the memory of today's world from the next generation first.

Post: #16

Frankly the risk here isn't with the government, it's with the job market.

Think about it this way, the NSA is already basically scanning every packet of data transmitted on the internet. They have every ability to detect malcontents and haul them off to reeducation camps if they wanted to, they just don't because it isn't worthwhile. Once you start acting like the Soviet Union, people notice that half their neighbors are disappearing, and you get a society where no one works hard or does anything innovative because they fear sticking their neck out. Same reason slaves in the south were lazy as shit, what possible benefit would there be for picking more than the minimum amount of cotton necessary to avoid getting whipped?

That said, Google providing psychological analyses of their user base (i.e. everyone) is going to make employment at the middle and upper middle class levels extremely difficult for a lot of people. Figure the two main threats that a new hire isn't going to work out are incompetence and instability. Incompetence is fairly simple to catch if you have adequate testing at the interview (for example programming questions other than "reverse a linked list", which is rote memorized by all the members of a certain subcontinent for the very purpose of b.s.ing their way through tech job interviews...).

Instability is a lot harder to flush out. This is where work history and references come in, but those don't necessarily give perfect information. Is that work gap because the interviewee burned out and ran into the woods, or because they had a sick mother that required stay at home care? Is this glowing recommendation real, or is it because the interviewee's current manager can't directly fire him and is hoping he'll switch jobs?

Just like HR departments jumped on facebook-stalking new hires, they'll take to google psychology like flies smelling shit. Even if it turns out to be a modern version of phrenology, or rather once it's definitively shown to be a modern version of phrenology, you'll already have had a lot of people driven out of the professional working class by being labelled as mentally unstable in some fashion. And in the same way that someone who is acquitted of murder will still be assumed to be a murderer by most people, if you get tagged by google as mentally ill people will permanently consider you crazy even if the theory is later debunked.

This shit is always sold to everyone as a way to help them first, but google's business model is collecting data on people in order to sell ads. They aren't doing this to help people who need it, they're doing this because a trusted list of all the crazy people in the world is valuable and they can sell it.

Post: #17

It is not about how Google/Facebook/twitter/Instagram want to monitor your health (because they already do) but more about how to use it at your own advantage.

Google/Facebook/twitter/Instagram already know what your hobbies, sexual deviances, work and life look by what you watch and share on social media.
Social Engeenering policy is about building and maintaining an unequal system where some are seeing without being seen and others are seen without seing.
The goal of the move is to take over the perception system of someone without being seen.
As a consequence oneself can only attribute what Social media (or anything else) is imposing on him as his own choices. Approximatively translated

Worshipping Apple ==> Good sheeps
Watching Documentary about psycho/Sociopath ==> Might have some dating problem
Interested in Machine Guns without having Social Media account ==> Might be a killer
Liking all Wendy's McDo KFC WaffleFactory FB pages ==> Chance of dying from type 3 diabete
And on and on and on...

(11-01-2015 06:42 PM)BortimusPrime Wrote:  Frankly the risk here isn't with the government, it's with the job market.

When we worry more about who is using the information than How it is used we're already 2 steps behind.
The job market already have and use our data as the new smart carreer move in IT is to get a job in the Big Data sector (Sort/Aggregation/Analysis of million Tera Data).
They already can predict what you gonna buy before you went to the store based on what you already bought.

Quote:It’s stunning the extent to which our behavior as consumers is utterly predictable, and many marketing companies and retailers are becoming much more efficient in grouping us not only by who we are and what we like, but by what we’re about to do. This is how they do it.

By now, everybody’s heard the term “data-mining” and its kissin’ cousin “predictive analytics” being thrown around. But they still have a black-box quality to them. I give you my customer transaction data, you run it through your “predictive analytics”, say the magic words, and the computer spits out exactly how to manipulate him or her into spending twice the money he was originally going to spend. Right? Well, not quite. So it might not be a bad idea, without getting too bogged down in the math, to demystify this process a bit and pull back the curtain on mathematical mind-reading... [If you want to read a little more about it]

The real skillset here is to learn how to stand out and attract the like of you, as if you stop browsing shit on internet and start selecting what you really need to know that will benefit you (a smater way to use FB/Google and shit.)

Post: #18

People vastly overestimate how much Google knows about them specifically. Or rather how useful this is to Google. They're good at taking vast amounts of data and drawing statistically relevant conclusions, but in my opinion they are weak at using this to enhance individual life. Or even just to use it to target someone with a specific ad, webpage etc. I am not saying they are not powerful. They clearly are. It's just that effectively using the masses of data at the individual level is so difficult. Maybe impossibly difficult.

Consider the banner ads you see when surfing the web. If you're anything like me it's a doddle figuring out why they are showing that ad. e.g. If I search for air tickets to ABC city on XYZ airline, you can be sure that for a week or two after that I will see banner ads of XYZ airline, populated with the latest fares to ABC city. For all their smarts (And believe me they are smart. The smartest person I've ever known or even met, a childhood friend, was a reasonably early-stage Google employee. And there are many like him there) I just don't think they have added much at the core individual level when it comes to targeting, whether it be ads or other content. Their search algorithms and ability to draw statistically relevant points from masses of data are unprecedented. But in my opinion they can't actually use this data to target ads and do other stuff like that that in the sophisticated way they pretend to be able to do. It's a sales pitch to get advertising $'s. I'm not saying that their ads and data are useless. Far from it. But most of the value is simply that someone has seen an ad and may respond. Just like other forms of advertising. And they have created an environment where a lot of people are looking. To be honest for actual marketing advice I'd go to an old school marketer who may have figured out things like where to put what in a supermarket before I go to Google. Especially if I was targeting an individual or a small group, but even large populations as well.

Anyway, I wouldn't worry too much. They aren't anywhere close to developing smart-phone apps that can legitimately diagnose mental illness in all but the most extreme cases. It makes good headlines, but they don't have the know-how. And even if they had the know how, the chips fast enough to process the kind of input necessary are years away from being developed.

About the only way something like this could work right now is if the app came with a device that attached electrodes to your head and measured your brain waves (There is a correlation between certain brain wave patterns and mental illness). That would be relatively simple and doable with current technology, but I don't see people walking around with electrodes attached to their heads.