Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?
My field is hypnosis, or more generally, &quot;changework&quot; which is jargon, but essentially hacking the psychology of clients to get desired outcomes.<p>There&#x27;s been a renaissance of study in placebo effects, meditation, and general frameworks for how people change belief for therapeutic purposes or otherwise, but to me, that&#x27;s been going on for a long time and is more about acceptance than being a new development.<p>One of the most exciting developments that&#x27;s been coming out recently is playing with language to do what&#x27;s called context-free conversational change.<p>Essentially, you can help someone solve an issue without actually knowing the details or even generally what they need help with. It&#x27;s like homomorphic encryption for therapy. A therapist can do work, a client can report results, but the problem itself can be a black box along with a bit of the solution as well since much of the change is unconscious.<p>It works better with feedback (a conversation) of course, but often can be utilized in a more canned manner if you know the type of problem well enough.<p>I&#x27;m working on putting together an automated solution that&#x27;s based on some loose grammar rules, NLP, Markov chains, and anything else I can use to help a machine be creative in language to help people solve their own problems, but as a first step as a useful tool for beginner therapists to help them get used to the ideas and frameworks with language to use.<p>So essentially, I&#x27;m getting a good chunk of the way toward hacking on a machine that can reliably work on people&#x27;s problems without having to train a full AI or anything remotely resembling real intelligence, just mimicking it.<p>Before you go thinking, &quot;Didn&#x27;t they do that with Eliza?&quot; Well yes, in a way, but my implementation is using an entirely different approach.