The same AI in Star TrekOften, similar topics have recently come across on social networks. Indeed, can this happen, at least in the next 5-10 years, as supporters of artificial intelligence and neural networks claim? There is no doubt that the neural network has been taught to do a lot - draw decently , imitate a human voice with intonations in a conversation, write texts and even books, copying someone else's author's style. AI helps interpret CT scans and X-rays and make diagnoses more accurately than specialized doctors. So why shouldn’t AI soon replace the psychologist or psychotherapist, coming close to the dream of the creators of the Star Trek series: EMG - Electronic Medical Hologram, successfully replacing the doctor and other crew members, in fact - a separate full-fledged digital personality? And here on the path to such a replacement will become several insurmountable obstacles in the near future.1 - moral and ethical restrictions and the first two of Asimov's laws of robotics. The topic is complex, highly dependent on the moral qualities of the creators and developers of AI and many others. However, over time, this must be resolved .2 - great difficulties in teaching AI something that a person himself still does not understand - the work of the human brain. If we do not fully understand how a number of mental functions work, and even more so - how to successfully cure severe mental illnesses, how can we teach AI for what we don’t know ourselves?3 - and the most important. Features of complex mutual perception by one person of another. At the moment of perception, we have a whole system of instant recognition of information, where all the functions responsible for non-verbal perception are simultaneously turned on. One of the main features of contact between two people is kinesthetic empathy, which is responsible for instantly deciphering the state of the interlocutor through his perception. In simple words, this is how we feel the state of another person on ourselves. Kinesthetic empathy allows us to understand each other without words, feel the joy and pain of another, empathize with the characters of the film and understand the language of dance. Currently, its study is at its very origin, and it has been established that it plays a key role in the psychotherapeutic process. Recreating something like this at the AI ​​level, it seems, will be a problem for a very long time. So the capabilities of EMG from Star Trek, achieved by the way, already in the 24th century, judging by the chronology of the series, will remain for a long time are not available to us. Of course, there are already attempts to do something in this direction - for example, applications for smartphones that allow you to provide support during panic attacks, chat bots in Telegram that imitate a psychologist, etc., but they are also far from full-fledged psychological assistance from a psychologist, just like the events of the mentioned series. So the profession of a psychologist will not die out soon (if at all), and people will also use psychological counseling, with all the pros and cons - after all, it’s not easy to find and choose the right one the first time specialist. To simplify the process of finding one, I have prepared for you a mini-book “How to choose a psychologist correctly?”, which you can download here. Yours, Dmitry Surotkin, psychotherapist