TeaDrivenDevelopment
Jul 18, 2026
I was eager to hear from him, you know, how AI will affect our brains and education, how it is and will affect society and the world. He told me, “We don’t know much yet. In fact we still don’t even know how much impact the TV or phones are having on us, we need more time and more studies”.
For some reason this was surprising to me to hear... I’m not sure if it’s because he’s a psychiatrist so he’s way too scientific. But that intellectual honesty was really impressive to me.
He also explained later in a different context the topic of depression, and how it’s a disorder and not a disease, which is a set of symptoms that we noticed often (but not always) come together, it’s just a term we made to understand each other, and we have some treatments (with or without drugs, or with both) that could work based on the studies we have, and so we give them to patients. That’s it. We actually don’t know what depression is. In stark contrast, I remember seeing a post not long after that of someone talking about depression, and how “the solution for depression is [simply] getting away from a toxic environment”.
This all gets back to the point about AI. I’ve started to dislike defensive claims about AI (well, I still dislike takes that try to please everyone too). But seriously, it’s surprising to me now to see some people talk about AI with such confidence, it’s okay not to know everything! And yes, it’s scary as hell, we all feel stressed about things we don’t know. But that doesn’t mean we should convince ourselves we have figured it out. We’re still figuring it out and that’s a good place to be! I guess!
Also, do you have such experiences where you’ve seen such intellectual humility? Maybe it changed something in you too?
------- Notes
[I used an AI tool to slightly improve the grammar and flow of this post]