- Hindustan Times
April 2023
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2023
Famous rapper Snoop Dogg is well known for his love of the herb: He once indicated that he inhales around five to 10 blunts per day—extreme even among chronic cannabis users. But the habit doesn’t seem to interfere with his business acumen: Snoop has sold 35 million albums across the globe and has collaborated extensively with numerous other successful celebrities, including domestic doyenne Martha Stewart. He’s hardly alone in his cannabis hobby. In Canada, where I live and work, about 9 percent of residents use cannabis three or more times per week.
It might seem strange that AI can even attempt to offer this kind of assistance. But millions of people are already turning to ChatGPT and specialist therapy chatbots, which offer convenient and inexpensive mental health support. Even doctors are purportedly using AI to help. Some experts say this is a boon. After all, AI, unhindered by embarrassment and burnout, might be able to express empathy more openly and tirelessly than humans. “We praise empathetic AI,” one group of psychology researchers recently wrote.
But sometimes—whether it’s running a marathon, climbing a mountain, or assembling furniture—we willingly choose difficulty over ease. Michael Inzlicht, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, calls this the effort paradox. While we often eschew hard work, other times we value it, viewing things as more rewarding if we have to work for them. We hike mountains even though we could see the same view by gondola and willingly spend more on furniture we put together than on preassembled pieces. “Both things seem to exist at once: we avoid effort, we also seem to like it,” says Inzlicht.
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