Dr. Stanley Goldstein - Author and Psychologist

Despite the recent fervent statements of computer luminaries that teachers and doctors will become extinct because of artificial intelligence, I don't see this happening. But first a story.

Fifty years ago, in one of New York City's worst school districts, a newly minted science teacher stood before his class for the first time, viewing his teenage students create bedlam by throwing things and screaming. During this uproar, a boy grabbed a girl's large doll and pretended to have sex with it, causing screams of what was happening using graphic language of course. Meanwhile, their teacher silently watched. After the boy said, "Well, it beats a dog," the teacher spoke for the first time. "It sounds like you tried both and know which you prefer." The entire class instantly shut up and, thereafter, the students got along great with the teacher with the smarter ones being helped with their homework while lunching in the lab, with more students passing the state exam than ever before in that school.

Regarding the medical profession: a recent study found that artificial intelligence was far more accurate in diagnosing a patient's illness then the doctor with the artificial intelligence having an above ninety percent accuracy rating while the physicians' rating was in the upper sixties. Which may force positive change in the medical profession with doctors spending more time advising patients about healthy life practices than treating the results of their poor choices.

My point is that while artificial intelligence is capable of certain tasks, it will never provide the human element which is critical in the teaching and medical professions. Moreover, audio-video instruction is only effective with children when adult participation is present. Hopefully, poor teachers and doctors will become extinct but the sensitive skillful ones will remain.

Recent news reports have stated the government's intention to discover the cause of autism shortly. Which, I predict, won't happen! The origin of autism has long been known and ignored for reasons that lie deep within the unconscious. Autism arises in a child who has experienced severely deficient, not merely imperfect, parenting during their earliest years. 

Infants are perceptive so, sensing this, they try to become independent which is why these children often appear precocious. When this attempt fails as it must, the child protectively creates and enters a world of their own, one which may be described as the autistic protective shell. 

A recent study in Australia found that when the parents of infants who were diagnosed as autistic were provided intensive parent education and counseling, most of the children were no longer diagnosed as autistic by four years of age. This knowledge is resisted because of the unwarranted parental guilt it would arouse. This, even though children are not born with parenting instructions and all adults had their own childhood issues to deal with. Incidentally, autism is vastly misdiagnosed and children with mild autistic symptoms can have them vanish after brief play psychotherapy.