innovation « The AI-Therapy Blog

“Fear of failure prevents us from making progress”
– Garry Kasparov, Oxford Union, 9th of November 2012

Last night I went to a debate at the Oxford Union on the subject “Is the current growth crisis a result of decades of technological stagnation in a risk-averse society?”. One of the speakers was Garry Kasparov, who is famous for political activism and for being one of the greatest chess players of all time. In a 2003 chess match he tied IBM’s Deep Junior (after loosing to Deep Blue in 1997), a machine capable of evaluating 3 million chess positions in 1 second. Given Kasparov’s amazing mind, I felt that it was worth listening to what he had to say.

It was a fascinating debate, and both sides made some excellent points. Garry was on the “Aye” side, and argued that today’s technological advances are slower and less impressive than those of previous generations. In particular, he talked about the great achievements of the cold war era in the 50s and 60s. He pointed out that many of today’s “modern” technologies (e.g. the internet) are a direct result of research performed during this time. He closed with a comment along the lines of “the iPhone 5 is nothing compared to Apollo 5”.

Fear of failure prevents people from taking risks, yet taking risks is necessary for progress

One of the topics that was discussed was the reasons why a society ceases to innovate. Garry offered an explanation quoted at the top of this blog – fear of failure prevents people from taking risks, yet taking risks is necessary for progress. This is undoubtedly true, as most breakthroughs are preceded by countless failures.

Garry was talking about societies as a whole, and the risk aversion of government funding bodies and large corporations. However, the same can be said about us as individuals, and I think it has consequences for mental health. For example, consider social anxiety. Risk aversion is one of the reasons that social anxiety doesn’t just go away without evidence based treatments. Social anxiety exaggerates the cost from being wrong, leading to risk aversion. However, treating social anxiety involves challenging your fears and stepping outside your comfort zone. It is worth mentioning that it is well established in psychology that we tend to overestimate risks and the negative consequences of failure.

Returning back to the original talk, Garry was making the point that if our societies are willing to undertake daring challenges, there can be wide ranging positive impacts outside of the original goals (he used the US space program of the 50’s as an example). I would argue that the same holds true for us as individuals. While the speakers were mainly concerned with economic growth, many of their arguments are applicable to psychological growth: overcoming our fear of failure can lead us to healthier and more fulfilling lives.

Fjola Helgadottir, PhD, MClinPsych, is a clinical psychologist, a senior research clinician at the University of Oxford, and is a co-creator of AI-Therapy.com, an online CBT treatment program for overcoming social anxiety

Nobody sat down and decided to create the Internet

In March 1989 the blueprint for the Internet were sent by Tim Bernes-Lee to his boss at CERN. It had the humble title of: Information Management: A Proposal. The comment he got back was “Interesting, but vague”, but he was allowed to continue to pursue this Information Management System. It’s creation was motivated by Tim wanting to communicate with other researchers around the world. For this he created what we now know as the Internet. It certainly is not exclusive to nerdy researchers anymore, more accurately it takes up most of our waking lives!

The community needs better access to evidence based techniques

AI-Therapy.com came about in a bit similar manner. I was finishing my clinical psychology Internships in Sydney, Australia. However, before my last year had finished I was awarded a prestigious PhD scholarship at the University of Sydney. There was a major dilemma, do I miss out of this exciting scholarship award which was funded to respond to the need for evidence based treatments using the internet, or do I not finish my clinical psychology training/internships?

From this AI-Therapy was born.

My solution to this problem was to generate a fully automated computer psychologist which could be treating people online simultaneously with me working at the various hospital settings for my internships. It turns out, that to solve my problem of doing two things at once, I created a product which helped bridge the gap between the need for access to evidence based psychology techniques in the general community. After many years of hard work, I am pleased to announce that this service is now available to the general public under the name of AI-Therapy overcome social anxiety. You can see how it works here.

If you are interested in the original research for this computer psychology service, please refer to the following research and the associated publications