Mental health

One of the most exciting AI opportunities is tackling large-scale mental health.

Loneliness

Kurzgesagt19 stresses the fact that loneliness is a growing problem, which leads to other undesirable consequences like increased cancer risks, ageing and aggressivity.

Impact

KGH14 tweaked the Facebook recommendation algorithm for a week, for three groups of subjects. One was the controlled group. For a second group, 10% of the posts with negative words were removed. For a third group, 10% of the posts with positive words were removed. The experiment showed that the second group then wrote more positive posts and fewer negative posts, while the third group wrote less positive posts and more negative posts. Effects are small. But the treatment and its length were small too. We discussed this paper in RB3.

On the other hand, HOT15 suggest that longer exposure could yield important effects.