I’m sorry, but this is crazy — and not because I don’t believe in hypnosis. I do believe that it can work. From the Wall Street Journal:

Hypnosis is no longer considered crazy in the medical field, doctors say, but many patients, like Ms. Cutler, still are leery. The practice has increasingly gained acceptance in the medical community, and in the last two years, the research into how and why it works has accelerated, with new studies on the use of hypnosis to alleviate anxiety; ward off pain; and successfully inhibit the fear circuitry structures in the brain.

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors have started to take notice, creating new apps that aim to popularize hypnosis in a similar way to meditation, which until recently was also considered fringe. A safer alternative to medications like opioids, hypnosis can be a helpful tool for combating the stress and anxiety caused by the pandemic, doctors and researchers say, especially as it can be done successfully via recording or over Zoom.

Now there’s a hypnosis service that you can access over your Amazon Alexa home speaker:

Reveri Health works on Alexa by using natural language processing, which decodes incoming sounds and matches them to pre-prepared instructions or responses. The program asks questions like “Where are you feeling stress right now?” and responds to the answers accordingly, then asks the user to participate in a series of breathing and imagery exercises. (“Picture that you’re surfing waves of uncertainty.”)

In recent years, new research has led to a greater understanding of how hypnosis works. Four years ago, brain imaging published in the journal Cerebral Cortex suggested that the hypnotic state reduces activity in the parts of the brain involved in critical judgment and analysis, allowing a therapist to reach areas of the brain that are more open to suggestion.

Or as California hypnotherapist and coach Linda Shively explains it, “hypnosis gets the conscious mind out of the way.” That way, she adds, “change can happen quickly, relatively painlessly and effectively.”

So: you are opening your subconscious mind to suggestions offered to you by an external electronic source that adjusts its responses to your own? Gosh, no way that can be abused, right?

Actually, that’s not the main worry about this, not for me. If this service were found to be abusing its privilege –and that would be easy to detect — it would be disastrous for the company. The real worry is that users are giving incredibly detailed personal information to the company about their own problems, and teaching the company which buttons to push to render them susceptible to subconscious control.

It’s one thing to use an electronic hypnosis program that’s on a closed loop. I tried one for weight loss the other day on Spotify, as a way of trying out the Air Pods Pro I got for Christmas. It was pleasant, but didn’t really work; I didn’t go under. Maybe I’m not hypnotizable, or maybe I was just too tense. I’m not planning to try it again. But that was a pre-recorded program. This Alexa thing is on an open loop that responds to one’s commands. Is it wise to teach an AI machine how to hypnotize you? Is it wise to learn how to be hypnotized by AI machines?

Is this the kind of relationship we should be having with our machines? You know that everything you say to Alexa is potentially recordable, right? Is it smart to give Jeff Bezos and his agents the key to your subconscious?

Don’t forget what former Czech dissident Kamila Bendova said in Live Not By Lies: any information you provide Them will be used against you one day, if they choose to. I would love to e-mail Kamila and ask her for her opinion about hypnosis through Alexa. But that’s not possible, because she doesn’t use e-mail. Too risky. Her flat was bugged by the communist regime for years, and her husband was behind bars as a political prisoner for four years. Anyway, I know exactly what she would say about this Alexa hypnosis thing. And so do you.