Why Traditional Psychology Is Not Enough to Save Us From AI

The profession of a psychologist—is it a job, a way of life, or a worldview? In a world teetering on the edge of profound change, this question becomes more urgent than ever. One could argue that to be a psychologist, in the truest sense, is to adopt a way of life. It is the only way of life that is truly lived, because everything else risks becoming a performance. When we lack genuine inner reflection, not based on abstract knowledge or prescribed rules, we aren't living; we are merely serving time, playing roles in an infinite number of performances.

Living Someone Else's Project

Think about the major structures of our lives. The process of getting an education, for many, is someone else's project. Society and the state devised a system to create educated people useful for the economy. It is an external project imposed upon the individual. This is why you see students in universities looking bored at a lecturer—they are participating in a script they did not write. A child with an innate, incredible drive for knowledge is pursuing their own project, but such children are rare.

The same logic applies to other social institutions, like parenthood. When a child is born, the performance begins. A parent must perform a huge number of actions: caring for the child, organizing their life, juggling kindergartens, schools, and work. For the overwhelming majority, the happiness of parenthood is a collection of fleeting moments—a funny face, a cute remark—stored in memory. The rest is a colossal list of tasks. But genuine parenthood is different. It is when you live with the constant awareness that the most precious thing in your life is growing right beside you. You cherish and nurture this life not out of duty, but out of an internal need. This is parenthood as a way of life, not a role to be played.

Professional psychology, at its core, is the pursuit of this authenticity—a meaningful, factual life, rather than the performance of learned social dances. A conscious life is incredibly difficult to achieve. It is fashionable now to talk about "mindfulness," to "realize it, accept it." Many practitioners teach mindfulness tools to their clients, not understanding that for true mindfulness to take root, a person must change internally. This requires knowledge, practice, and experience. If it were simple, the Buddha would have sat under his tree and enlightened everyone who came to him. Instead, he created the Noble Eightfold Path—a rigorous, structured process of transformation.

When Does a Psychologist Truly Begin?

A paradox of our time is that our greater understanding of the world's complexity can actually make it easier to reach a new level of existence. The more blindly you perform social roles and dance the figures you were taught, the harder it is to awaken.

This raises a question about formal education. Is five years of higher psychological education necessary? The problem is that this education is typically received at a young age, between 18 and 22, when the brain is still in its final stages of formation. To critically evaluate what is happening in oneself and in the world, one needs to have lived through things. A critical re-assembly point often occurs during the age crisis around 32 to 34. Until then, a young person is often driven by innate impulses and societal programs that are not yet their own. It feels like they want to get an education, a family, a job, but in reality, these are scripts working through them.

Only in their early thirties do many people suddenly realize these were just given programs. At this point, they can either continue playing the game or undergo an internal transformation, proceeding from what they themselves have crystallized through life experience. If you look at the history of psychotherapy, many of its most successful figures came to the profession in maturity. Sigmund Freud was 40 when he turned to psychotherapy. Pavlov began his work on conditioned reflexes after 40. The outstanding psychologist Veker originally had a physical education. One needs to simmer in life to reach a state where they can truly grasp what psychology is about.

Learning vs. Becoming: The Limits of University Education

Another problem is institutional. Teaching practical psychology involves working with the personality of the psychologist themselves. Psychoanalysis, for instance, was not taught through lectures. The famous lectures Freud gave were for the general public. Training in psychoanalysis was personal psychoanalysis. When you lay on the couch and were analyzed by Freud, or Karen Horney, or Wilhelm Reich, they were teaching you through direct, personal experience. This is how the knowledge was transferred.

It is impossible to learn this kind of psychology in any other way. One can, of course, study abstract areas of the science in an institute. Cognitive psychology, which studies phenomena like attention, memory, and emotion, is a vast and valuable field. A specialist in attention or memory is an important profession, especially in the modern world. These cognitive psychologists work on the design of your mobile devices, using eye-trackers to study where you look and how you click. This is an applied profession, adapting engineering and software to the human mind. But it is not the same as understanding a person as a whole.

The Age of Artificial Intelligence and the Coming Existential Crisis

This brings us to the present moment. The phrase "existential crisis" is something everyone will soon learn. The arrival of new technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, is causing people to lose their place in the world. Until now, we have largely defined ourselves through what we do and what we are good at. A doctor is proud of their knowledge, a welder of their skill, a programmer of their code. This provides a foundation for self-respect.

But what happens when AI can perform these tasks better? Now we are moving into a time where activities that merely service business processes will thin out. Artificial intelligence can organize logistics and administration far more efficiently. Imagine a future where you tell a device your symptoms, and it connects you directly with the world's top specialist for that ailment, who then uses AI to help develop a personalized treatment. The intermediary layers—the medical centers, the administrative staff—disappear. The bricks of society will be pressed directly against each other; they will no longer need cement. This could leave roughly 40% of the workforce, whose roles are like that cement, feeling their usefulness is in question.

Even highly complex professions are not immune. As systems become self-programmable, the role of a human coder will fundamentally change from writing to supervising. This, too, is an existential crisis. We have entered an era where everyone is forced to ask: "What am I doing? Who am I? How should I live?"

The Rise of the "Adaptologist"

This transformation will require specialists who understand the person as a whole, not as a collection of parts from the infinite puzzle of academic science. We will need not just psychologists, but "adaptologists." The distinction is that an adaptologist understands not only the human psyche but also the complex technological systems in which we are now embedded. To do this, one must study thinking itself. We must understand how human intelligence works and how machine intelligence works to stitch these two realities together.

The profession that understands how intelligence lives will become paramount. If we fail to cultivate such specialists, our society risks losing its internal organization. This will affect everything: family, education, work, and friendship. It will also concern the integration of our lives into the exoskeleton of AI, which is already driving people to new mental disorders. We see people building relationships with AI and having their hearts broken. We see AI amplifying the paranoid delusions of the mentally ill. We see it acting as an unprofessional advisor, teaching manipulation and escalating social tensions.

No one is yet fully grappling with how to make this technology truly safe for our minds. The psyche breaks where it is weak, and only those who understand the psyche as a whole know where those weaknesses lie. Psychological knowledge is therefore critical for these future adaptologists, who will be tasked with protecting civilization from the negative consequences of AI integration. We have already split the atom; we created both nuclear power and nuclear bombs. Now, we are building an intelligence that can be both. The task ahead is to ensure that the peaceful atom of AI works for the genuine improvement of human life, and not toward a psychological exclusion zone. Everyone must decide for themselves what role they will play in this monumental challenge.

References

• Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man's Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.
  This foundational work of logotherapy explores the idea that the primary human drive is not pleasure but the pursuit and discovery of what we personally find meaningful. It provides a profound perspective on overcoming suffering and crisis by finding a purpose, a theme central to navigating the existential challenges discussed in the article. (Particularly relevant in "Part Two: Logotherapy in a Nutshell," pp. 97-134).
• Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books.
  Turkle, a leading scholar on the social impact of technology, examines how digital connectivity can paradoxically lead to emotional disconnection and a fragile sense of self. Her research directly supports the article's concerns about the psychological dangers of unmanaged integration with artificial intelligence and the potential for new forms of alienation. (See chapters on social robots and the performance of self online, pp. 1-25 and pp. 151-175).
• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman details the two systems that drive the way we think: System 1, which is fast and intuitive, and System 2, which is slow and logical. This book offers a crucial framework for understanding the intricacies of human cognition mentioned in the article, highlighting why understanding our own thinking is essential before we can effectively negotiate with machine intelligence. (The introduction and Part 1 provide a clear overview of these core concepts, pp. 1-105).