Todd Essig: Will Love for Learning Matter Anymore?

Universities are confronting a future in which emerging, alien intelligences promise to augment research and teaching while also threatening a world of professor-bots that can reasonably replicate, even extend, the work of expert educators and scholars. In such AI universities, what will remain for humans to do? The rise of AI companions, lovers, and “therapy-bots” shows the urgency of this question. Narcissistic confidence that “no bot could ever do what I do” is a dead end. Instead, understanding the complex psychology of AI relationality may reveal what is uniquely human and worth protecting. For this purpose, I have been developing the concept of techno-subjunctivity, a psychoanalytic framework naming the new psychic space in which empathy is simulated, asymmetry feels like mutuality, and yet emotional significance remains. It clarifies that higher education’s task in the AI age includes teaching students to value human processes over mere instrumental utility by recognizing that behavior born of a love of learning is meaningfully different from behavior emerging from stochastic computation. Human experience matters.

Todd Essig, Ph.D., is  Faculty and Training & Supervising Psychoanalyst at the William Alanson White Institute, Adjunct Clinical Professor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis, and Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN) Advisory Board member. Widely known as a pioneer in the innovative uses of mental health technologies, he publishes and lectures widely at the intersections of psychoanalysis and artificial intelligence, including screen relations based psychoanalytic care. He founded and currently chairs the American Psychoanalytic Association President’s Commission on Artificial Intelligence (CAI) and the soon to launch International Psychoanalytic Association Committee on Artificial Intelligence. Previously, he co-authored the IPA Task Force Report on the use of telesessions in psychoanalytic education and chaired APsA’s Covid-19 Advisory Team. For 10 years, until the pandemic hit, he wrote "Managing Mental Wealth" for Forbes where he explored the intersections of technology, psychology, and culture. In his clinical practice he treats individuals and couples.