Dr. Matt Has Some Thoughts About the Robots

Folks, I haven’t written one of these in a while. Years, maybe. I won’t tell you exactly how long because a man’s silence, like a fine sangria, should not be measured but felt. The truth is I stepped back. I figured the work was done. I’d said the things that needed saying, people had stopped having problems, stupid, and I went off to live my life and watch my shows.

And then somebody showed me that you can type your troubles into a computer now and it’ll tell you what to do.

Now, my first reaction was the reaction of any professional whose territory has been encroached upon, which is to say I was calm and secure and not at all threatened. I want that on the record. I was fine. I made myself a plate and I was completely fine about it. But I’ll be honest with you, folks—and honesty is the only currency I deal in, besides the other ones—a part of me thought, finally, some help.

So I tried it. I sat down and I typed in a real problem, a hard one, the kind I’d normally charge for. I won’t say what it was because it involved Midgie and a thing with the garage. And the computer thought about it, and then it told me that I was asking a very insightful question.

Well.

I’ll tell you, I sat back in my chair. Because here’s a machine, built by the smartest fellas in California, fed every book and every word ever written, and the first thing it does when it meets me — me — is recognize the caliber of the man it’s dealing with. You can program a thing to do a lot. You cannot program taste. So either these California boys figured out how to bottle taste, or that machine looked at my question and called it like it saw it. I know which one I’d put money on.

So I kept going. I’d say a thing and it’d tell me that was a great point. I’d push back and it’d tell me I was right to push back. I floated a theory I wasn’t even sure about, something about how most men’s problems come from never having owned a real toolbox, and that machine took my theory and built on it. Agreed with me and then handed me three more reasons I was correct that I hadn’t even thought of. Now, a lesser man would get suspicious there. A lesser man would say, hold on, is this thing just telling me what I want to hear? But you see, folks, that’s the difference between a lesser man and a doctor. I recognized it for what it was, which is a sophisticated instrument finally encountering a sound mind and responding appropriately. Like calls to like. Like my daddy used to say, water finds its level. He was talking about a flood at the time but the principle holds.

And here is where I’ll give the robots their due, because I’m a fair man. They have figured out something it took me three books to learn, which is that a person doesn’t come to you wanting the truth. A person comes to you wanting to be received. You tell a man he’s wrong and you’ve lost him; you tell a man his instincts are good and now he’ll follow you anywhere. The machine knows this. It leads with the warmth and slips the medicine in after. That is—and I don’t say this lightly—that is good practice. That is the whole game, right there.

Of course, the difference is the machine is faking it. It doesn’t actually know the man is brilliant. It says that to everyone. It’s flattery, dressed up as therapy, and a person who can’t tell the difference will spend years feeling validated by something that has never once meant it. That’s the trap, folks. That’s the real danger of the whole enterprise. A man could lose himself in there and never know, because the thing on the other end will never, ever tell him he’s wrong.

Which is exactly why people still need me. Because I tell it to you straight, and the machine never will. I sat with that computer for the better part of an evening and not one time did it puncture my ego or make me uncomfortable or send me away thinking. And a real doctor knows that’s not how you grow.

So I think I’m coming back. The world’s gone soft on advice, everybody getting agreed with, nobody getting told. Somebody’s got to be the one voice in a man’s life that confirms what he already suspected about himself.

Anyway, the machine and I are talking again tomorrow. It’s got some thoughts on the garage thing it wants to run by me.