Sobremesa(health): Algorithmic Healing
Somewhere between your last doom-scroll and your next existential crisis, a new industry was born: AI that listens. AI that remembers. AI that promises to know you better than you know yourself.
It has a name: your AI Twin. And it's already being sold to you as therapy.
It sounds like progress. Millions are already falling for it. Yet, our first guest thinks that should alarm you.
Not because AI isn't powerful. Not because people in distress don't deserve accessible mental support.
But because something irreducible happens in the room between two humans. Something that probabilistic language models, however elegant, cannot replicate: the encounter with another person. Similar to us, yet radically “other”. That friction, that resistance, that genuine otherness - which psychoanalysis has long argued is not an obstacle to healing, but its very mechanism.
This first edition of Sobremesa(health) is where psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and artificial intelligence collide - to ask what happens to the human mind when we outsource its care to a digital twin. Expect to tackle questions like:
Is an AI that never judges you actually helping you grow, or just reflecting you back to yourself indefinitely - like an echo chamber?
What does psychoanalysis know about healing that a language model fundamentally cannot replicate?
When tech companies sell "AI therapy" to lonely, struggling people, who is responsible for what comes next?
And what is it that only another human being - flawed, distracted, genuinely “other” - can offer a mind in pain?
For the inaugural event of Sobremesa(health), we're bringing our first international guest to Madrid to sit at the table with us.
Dr. David de Freitas is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst in training at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, and podcast host - who first encountered AI therapy not in a journal, but as a targeted ad in his own inbox. Based between Madeira and Brussels, his practice is resolutely humanistic - dealing with the unconscious, the body, and the interpersonal relationships of the individual.
He will not give you a TED talk. He will sit among us in a small room full of sharp people and ask the question Silicon Valley keeps dodging: What, exactly, are we giving up with AI therapists?
If you’ve ever felt the strange comfort of being understood by a machine, and wondered what that says about us: this one is for you.
As always: snacks & 2 drinks