Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. First AI: Narcissists, Psychopaths (2014 Lecture) (Vaknin Narcissism Summaries)

1. 00:03 What is artificial intelligence? It’s a machine, a computer that can convince another human being that it is a human being. That’s Turing’s definition of artificial intelligence. Now, ladies and gentlemen, this happened last [Music] year. A machine, a computer convinced
2. 00:25 three Harvard professors that it is a human being. That’s not easy. The questions are not stupid questions like do you have two legs? Questions are very complicated. Write a poem or let’s talk or how do you feel today and why and so on. So the questions are very nonstructured
3. 00:45 because machines computers have advantage when it comes to structured uh okay chess mathematics. So there are no such questions. Questions are highly human questions. And so the computer for instance wrote a poem. What is it? Try you try. You’re humans. You try to write
4. 01:02 a poem. Wrote a poem. Described this mood. It’s mood. Sorry. Described it mood. Chatted chatted with the three professors and so on. And in last year, for the first time in human history, a machine, a computer based on Watson, IBM’s Watson, cheated, deceived three
5. 01:23 professors into believing that it is the human and the human is the computer. And now we have finally according to the surely artificial intelligence. And this leads us to a very interesting question that is a question known in French philosophy and French psychology because
6. 01:48 in France by the way philosophy and psychology are very mixed disciplines where there is no distinction like in United States where everything is very technical between technical philosophy and technical psychology but it’s very mixed. So if you have people like derid
7. 02:04 and so on they would write fuko they would write equally on philosophy and psychology and mix the two and it’s flowing flows all the time as used to be the case before scientific psychology was invented in the middle of the 19th century before the middle of the 19th
8. 02:21 century the two twin disciplines totally mixed so in France it’s called the question of the other daughter, the other. Now that computers can cheat us and convince us that they are human, why will we not accept them as human? Why? Because they have metal and
9. 02:48 silicone and we have cargo, why are they less human than me? If they are sufficiently good to convince a Harvard professor, let alone three, that they are human, why aren’t they human? In which sense these computers are not human? They don’t reproduce. They don’t have
10. 03:09 sex. Question of time. Not yet. Yes. They don’t. And many and many humans don’t have they don’t fall in love. Also question of time. Did you see the movie Bladeunner? Bladeunner. Androids. Androids. Philip KD the famous author do electric ship dream. Androids there fall
11. 03:29 in love and have sex and so on. It’s really a question of time. It’s no doubt about it. Finally, 50 years from now, 100 years from now, there will be androids, robots, machines, computers, whatever you want to call them, who will look exactly like you. They will be with
12. 03:43 artificial skin or real skin because today we have 3D printing machines that print real screen, real skin. Today, I repeat, we have 3D printers that print real skin. So they will have real skin, they will have a body that will look exactly like him and it will be if we have a Tony
13. 04:05 Nookski robot and I might get confused and it’s not a question of only getting confused but in which sense that Tony Naoski robot is not human be very difficult. So there’s a question of the other. But it goes even deeper than that because if I relate to a robot as a
14. 04:26 human, I relate to all humans as robots.
15. 04:32 What are you to me? Each one of you a package. You’re a package. You’re are nerves and muscles and other organs packed nicely in in shrink wrap skin and that’s it. You claim that you’re human. I take your claim as it is or I take your word for it that you’re human. You
16. 04:57 talk to me. I talk to you. We have inter subjective agreement which I can have with the machine tomorrow. What is your advantage over robots? In which sense are you not robots? And the answer is after many decades of thinking and analyzing and so on that
17. 05:13 there is no way for you to prove that you are distinct in any way shape or form from advanced robots of the future who will look like you, smell like you, act like you, talk like you and think like you. So there’s question of the other. Now why am I mentioning this?
18. 05:34 I said that we relate to others with empathy. The interubjective agreement who is human the interubjective agreement about who is human what constitutes human we call it empathy if I have empathy I relate to you by thinking how is it to be you how is it
19. 05:55 to be you as I’m thinking how is it to be you can relate to you it’s projection it’s not true it’s but it’s what it works okay we we’ve gone through What happens with people who have no empathy? Some people have no empathy. Some people have no sex drive. Some people have no hair.
20. 06:21 Some people, especially in politics, have no holes. But what is it? What do you do if you can laugh if you want what what what do we do when there’s no empathy? There are people who have no empathy. We are not sure yet whether it’s because of genetics,
21. 06:41 upbringing, childhood abuse, combination of the three. But for some reason they lack empathy. They are unable unable to sign the inter subjective agreement. They cannot put themselves in other people’s shoes. What happens with these people? We just said that in order
22. 07:06 to relate to each other as human beings, we need empathy. If they don’t, if you don’t have empathy, you cannot relate to other people as human beings. You have to relate to them. You have to relate to them because you need something from other people. You work with other
23. 07:23 people. You sleep with other people. You have children with other people. You know, you need other people. You can’t isolate yourself completely. My store comes fixes your television. You can’t avoid people unfortunately. But you can’t avoid it. But some of them
24. 07:40 But if you don’t have empathy, how do you relate to these people? You don’t have the inter subjective agreement when you you relate to them as robots. Simple. You relate to them as avatars
25. 07:59 as symbols as representations as representations. Symbols functions functions if you wish. avatars you know robots for you other people I mean if you don’t have empathy other people are there as kind of function that comes and goes there is also no object constancy object
26. 08:28 constencancy means that even when I when you’re not with me you are still in me babies have that babies don’t have object constencancy when the mother leaves the room they begin to cry because there. If mother is not there and they don’t see mother, there is no
27. 08:44 mother. Mother goes, no mother. So people with no empathy don’t have object constancy. If my wife if I’m don’t have empathy and and my wife is here, she is here. But if she’s not here, she is not in my mind. They have no object policy. Some politicians, politicians,
28. 09:05 politicians, it’s questionable whether they’re human at all. Stop. You need a different kind of German. Now the people without empathy are called are called narcissist.
29. 09:24 [Music] Narcissist and people with extreme form of narcissist in a way that is still debatable. But an extreme form of narcissist is what we call psychopaths. Now this is a complex issue psychopaths because there is a big debate. The official category official
30. 09:48 diagnostic category is antisocial personality disorder. There is no psychopath. There is no psychopathy in the diagnostic and statistical manner. Only antisocial personality disorder. Psychopathy and sociopathy are terms used mainly by the media and a
31. 10:07 few scholars a few psychologists who are not considered automologists
32. 10:16 that they insist that there is something called psychopath but the mainstream orthodoxy says there is no psychopath there is antisocial person and in the DSM5 in the latest edition of the diagnostic and statistic Mexican manual published last year. Narcissism and
33. 10:33 psychopathy are conflated. They are not amalgamated. They’re not put together completely but they are kind of on a spectrum. Okay. Narcissists and psychopaths have many traits but the most important thing one if I have to choose a single thing that characterize
34. 10:51 they have no empathy. They don’t have empathy. So they are unable to relate to other people. They relate to other people only in as much as these people give them something in as much as these people are functional in their lives. So mostly it’s what I call narcissistic
35. 11:10 supply attention attention admiration adulation affirmation but not only services so only then they relate to other people they don’t care about other people’s emotions partly because they have no access to their own emotions needs other people’s needs priorities
36. 11:33 preferences wishes are non-existent because they don’t really relate to other people. They relate to the function that other people fulfill in their lives. They relate it’s like through a through a glass. They don’t really touch someone else. They touch the glass
37. 11:57 beyond behind which there is someone else. And so they need the glass. They need to interact with the glass not with the person. So they don’t care about the other person’s priorities and so on. It makes it of course very difficult also to communicate with them because in
38. 12:12 order to communicate we must have an interubjective agreement. Communication is based on being similar. That is why it would be very difficult to communicate with an octopod from Neptune because an octopod from Neptune is not likely to be similar to you and you will
39. 12:33 not have a dictionary. But it’s easier for me to communicate with Lydia or Zoan or Tony because we have a lot in a lot in similar we have a lot together common the interubjective agreement. Narcissists have no empathy. They have no inter subjective agreement.
40. 12:52 They cannot communicate. For them, for the narcissist, everyone else is an alien. Everyone else came from another planet and they cannot talk to aliens. Extraterrestrials. They use the extraterrestrial for services, for narcissistic supply, attention, these things, but they can’t
41. 13:15 communicate with the enemy. Aren’t they lonely? Not really. They’re not object because the narcissist is his own object. As we say in psychology, when we grow up as children, we begin to notice that there are other people except us. You know, until the age of
42. 13:36 about two, we are totally solucistic. We are we know only that we exist. Even mother is our extension. Mother, there’s no mother and we mother we. Mother is our continuation. As we grow up, there is a break. It’s a very traumatic break. And there is a whole sea of literature.
43. 13:59 After the age of two, when the child suddenly notices that the mother is not part of him, the mother is not part of the child. The child suddenly sees that there is mother and there is me. So child break, traumatic break, second birth. And we call this object
44. 14:16 relations. This is when we had suddenly an object and we relate to it. Narcissists and psychopath of course start stop before this stage. They don’t progress beyond this. They have no object relations because they have no objects. They are the true soypes.
45. 14:38 They and they alone exist. There’s no one else there. All of you are for the n to the nist. All of you are kind of dim reflections on distant screens. From time to time, I would touch the screen because I need your function. Touch you, bring you
46. 14:54 forth like a computer. Exactly. Like a touch touch screen. We touch the screen, bring you forward, use you, and remove my finger. You should disappear. If you refuse to disappear, it’s a malfunction. If you insist on being real with the narcissist, if you say, “Hey, wait a
47. 15:13 minute. I’m real. I’m a real human being with my needs, with my wishes, with my hopes, with my fears, with my narcissist. Even I would say terrified as you would be terrified if an icon on the computer would wake up and start talking to you as you would be
48. 15:30 terrified. Exactly the same. Now, in my in my books on narcissism, I suggested that narcissists and psychopaths don’t have empathy. But they have a variant of empathy which I call cold empathy. Cold empathy. So everyone has warm empathy. Warm empathy goes with emotions. [Music]
49. 15:58 Cold empathy is the ability to fully understand other people but without emotions. Exactly like I would read the user manual of a laptop. So I would fully understand the laptop but of course I don’t fully love the laptop. Well, depends which people
50. 16:20 you understand what I mean. So I I say that the narcissist has cold empathy. The ability to read read other people like X-rays. It’s not like the Nazis has X-ray and he’s able to look at someone and read that person but in a cold calculated way like I would read a
51. 16:39 manual of a television set or a refrigerator or laptop and see oh this is the person. Now in order to get him to do this I need to push this button. These are his buttons. I need to push this button. This is his vulnerability. This is his weakness. These are his
52. 16:55 fears. These are his needs. And I can push these needs and fears and vulnerabilities to get him to do what I want. And this is what I call coordinating. So there’s no emotion. But this is a new suggestion, a new and it’s still not accepted. The current
53. 17:14 orthodoxy in psychology is that there is no empathy at all. I don’t think it’s possible not to have empathy at all because if you have no empathy at all, how does the narcissist know to manipulate people? Narcissist manipulate people all the
54. 17:25 time. How can you manipulate if you have nothing in common? I mean, no ability to read. So, so I think there is a but definitely not the classic type of psychopaths are even worse. While the narcissist regards other people as potentialities. So if I look at you I if a narcissist
55. 17:49 looks at you he would relate to you as a potential for let’s say narcissistic supply or you or you all potential narcissistic supply but right now the narcissist doesn’t need supply. So he doesn’t activate you but when he needs supply he will activate you. How will he
56. 18:04 activate you? You need compliments. He will give you compliments. You need to feel intelligent. It will make you feel intelligent. You need to feel beautiful. It will tell you you’re beautiful. Whatever. So, whatever it takes, it will push your buttons. It will read you out
57. 18:17 like a random machine or MRI or computerized tomography sitting and then push your buttons. The psychopath doesn’t bother even with it. Psychopath not only lacks empathy but lacks the wish to interact with people. Narcissist is forced to interact
58. 18:38 with people because a narcissist needs narcissistic supply.
59. 18:46 The narcissist needs to be told that he is brilliant, that he’s perfect, that he is beautiful, that he’s amazing, that he’s one of a kind. Narcissist needs this constant adulation, admiration, tension. If he stops getting it, he falls apart like the vampire.
60. 19:06 No narcissistic supply. No narcissist. Narcissistic supply is used to regulate the narcissist sense of self worth. Self worth some of self worth. Narcissist the sense of self worth of the narcissist fluctuates. One day he thinks he’s is God. One day he thinks he’s one
61. 19:27 day he thinks he’s God. So in order to keep thinking that he’s God, which is a good feeling, to feel God, he needs constantly people to tell him, “You’re God, you’re God, you’re God.” So he needs people to regulate his sense of selfworth and to keep it
62. 19:43 euphoric to keep it on this level. Psychopaths don’t need people at all. They don’t need narcissistic supply. They don’t need people at all. Psychopaths dehumanized very humanize and objectify. In other words, they treat people as total objects. They don’t expect
63. 20:11 anything from people. They don’t want from you attention, adulation, admiration, nothing. They don’t want anything from you. They want to be able to get to you as an object, take you, shake you, get from you what they want. They want money, money,
64. 20:26 whatever they want. Sex, whatever. So, narcissist, psychopaths, the humanize and objectify. The extreme form of psychopath, the one we see in movies, the one we see in movies, is of course the psychopathic, sadistic serial killer. Most serial killers are sexual sadists
65. 20:48 but also have been diagnosed with psychopathy. Robert her made 30 years of studies in prisons and interviewed I think all the serial killers in the universe and all of them were 80 more than 80% of them were diagnosed as psychos as well as some of them small
66. 21:07 minority were sexual sadies. Now the serial killer objectifies to the maximum because it’s very common for a serial killer to take a trophy. What is trophy? Body part. Body part nose and ear vagina whatever body parts. This is the ultimate objectification.
67. 21:33 While the psychopath will the regular psychopath will come to you and regard you as an as a bank account or as a sex machine or as a and will treat you as a bank account or a sex machine or whatever until he gets what he wants and if he doesn’t get what he wants will get
68. 21:47 violent in most cases. That’s a classic psychopath. The serial killer psychopath will treat you totally as object. He will kill you, rape you, kill you, cut you off and take you as souvenir in most cases. It’s called trophy. So this is the extreme the extent to
69. 22:10 which it can get. This is the extent to which it can get. Narcissists will not cut you off because they need you for narcissistic supply and so on so forth. But they will not hesitate to damage you in other ways. They will take souvenirs from you in other ways. Maybe not body
70. 22:27 parts but other things. There’s no narcissist and psychopaths deserve their own but narcissist and psychopaths are extreme forms of mental illness. Yes. Uh a question about the cold empathy. So is that something that defines narcissists and psychopaths? It’s only found
71. 22:56 uh in narcissist, narcissists and psychopaths or is that something that they possess? Cuz there are a lot of uh other examples of social manipulators like social mediators and uh the liars. I don’t remember. Okay. Uh people who lie all the time.
72. 23:18 theological lives they do this uh they possess a kind of core empathy but it’s not quite my contention which is now common thinking is that most of these people are narcissist and psychopaths actually social prejudice pathological and so on either narcissistic or
73. 23:37 psychopathic usually if there is a money motivation and so on they’re psychopathic if there is a motivation of advertising to feel great it’s usually not narcissistic The difference between narcissist and psychopath is that the narcissist wants
74. 23:51 one thing and the psychopath another. Narcissist wants narcissist by attention, grandiosity, information, self information, so and psychopath wants practical things, money, sex and so on. Manipulate, what will manipulate, what will lie, what will regard people as object and
75. 24:07 objects and so on. Cold empathy is a new suggestion. by suggestion not part of the but I suggest I I propose that it’s limited to us. You can go to my YouTube channel and there is a there is a video on on my YouTube channel. [Music]
76. 24:34 [Music] Very original. [Music] hard to remember. Narcissists and psychopaths are extreme mental health cases, but dehumanization and objectification are common responses much more common than narcissists and psychopaths. Narcissist and psychopaths together are less than
77. 25:05 2% of the clinical population population who gets to to the claim to the mental health system. So it’s a very small number of people but objectification and dehumanization treating people not as humans but as objects that is much more common. Of
78. 25:23 course a very famous example is the way Nazis regarded the Jews. They they humanized the Jews. They made propaganda films comparing the Jews to mice, to vermin, to fleas, to viruses, and so on. They dehumanized the Jews. Then they objectified the Jews. They treated the
79. 25:43 Jews as objects. They took them off the train immediately, dumped them in a in a gas chamber, killed them in the gas chamber, burned the bodies, processed the bodies, made soap out of the bodies, converted them to real objects. So and objectification and dehumanization
80. 26:01 are very common collective responses to conflict. Collective responses to conflict. Where or dehumanize objectify each other. Whenever there’s a conflict especially eruptive conflict we dehumanize and objectify. Even with the Ebola epidemic, we have dehumanizing objectifying
81. 26:29 reactions to people, especially since we isolated, we put them away. You know, like they’re objects, we put them away. We currently it’s an objective rational response, but it’s also objectifying response. Whenever we whenever it’s a collective, a collective, not individual, we’re
82. 26:46 stressed, we’re in conflict, we react, we become cyclops. Simple.
83. 26:56 The Nazi period was a period of ascendant psychopathy. A psychopath was in charge. But vast majority of Germans became psychopaths as well. Shared psychosis. Coming back full circle. It’s possible for a collective to become psychopath or narcissistic.
84. 27:13 It is an infectious disease, an epide epidemic. We should not think of mental health as something unique or isolated to individuals. Individuals can and do infect each other with Ebola but with psychopathy also with malaria or tuberculosis but also with uh narcissism.
85. 27:38 We have collective responses and collectively mental health issues.
86. 27:47 The final topic. Yay. The final topic is the current state of psychology.
87. 28:04 The dirty secret of psychologist as distinct from psychiatrists. Psychiatrists are also medical doctors. But the dirty secret of psychologist is that when they grow up they want to be scientists. They want to feel that they are that psychology is an exact science. They
88. 28:24 want to feel that they are physicists. They envy physicists. Physicist I’m saying physicist because I’m physicist. So also physicist. So they envy physicists. Physicists deal with quantifiable elements. They have beautiful machines. They get lower prices. They’re famous.
89. 28:43 They appear on Discovery Channel and so on. It’s very unnerving. Huge envious reactions. And so psychologist psychologist psychiatry has always been distinct from psychology. Psychiatrist always held psychologist in low regard. Especially talk therapists.
90. 29:05 Psychiatrists always s thought that talk therapists are quite doctors shamans you know which doctors so whenever you talk to psychiatrist anywhere in the world doesn’t matter where they will hoo they will be raped psychologist and definitely therapist