#092 - The Sovereign Psyche: AI Chatbots & The Currency of Fear with Dr Aaron Balick

Forrester technology and innovation forums (Austin, London, New York). Promo code "GAEATECH" for 10% off. Visit https://forrester.com/events/#tech to book your place.This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Dr Aaron Balick, psychotherapist, cultural theorist and author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking. Aaron is one of the very few people in the world who thinks about AI and the human mind with equal fluency, and this is one of the most useful and quietly unsettling conversations we have recorded.Aaron grew up in Delaware, studied at the University of Colorado Boulder, moved to the UK for a master's in continental philosophy, and then trained as a psychotherapist. His clinical work sits in the very traditional two chairs and a room. His writing and public work sit at the other end of the spectrum, tracing how technology now mediates who we are, how we relate to each other and what we absorb without noticing. In 2013 he published one of the first serious books applying psychoanalytic thinking to social media. He is now revising it for a new edition, and the story has become far bigger than social media.Filmed in our new London studio.The premise Graeme opens with is that fear has been the single most weaponised feature of modern technology, and if we can see that clearly we can start taking back some agency. Aaron picks it up from there and does not let go for the next hour. He walks through Dunbar's number and why we are being asked to relate at a scale humans were never built for. He explains Melanie Klein's paranoid-schizoid position and why fear literally regresses us into black-and-white thinking, making it easier to be manipulated, polarised and lonely. He revisits Cambridge Analytica and the NRA anxiety-targeting example as case studies in how personality data is used to shift intention, not just spend. He introduces his term "digital impingement". He walks through what AI companions are actually doing to attachment. He argues, sharply, that many of these systems are psychopathic in the strict clinical sense of performing empathy without having any. And he closes on the sovereign psyche - the idea that everything Graeme talks about in Sovereign AI has a mirror inside every one of us that we now need to defend and rebuild.