I’m not afraid of AI….I am more concerned that the humans who will be driving this system of change are themselves not fully actualized and thus are going down a long hall with blinders on.

Recently I was having a discussion with a woman who is heading up an online counseling program — targeting anxiety/depression (the two most diagnosed illnesses). They offer CBT for this and study outcomes/fine-tuning programs etc. They’ve just been awarded significant sums for AI/facial recognition research and while yes, on one level this is interesting/exciting, on another it has a huge potential to narrowly define humans into an efficiency of management/streamlining therapy for quick results. I challenged her — but what about wholeness of human beings — depression/anxiety aren’t simply diseases like pneumonia — they’re a reflection often times of ‘missing pieces’ within their human capacity development experiences. She sort of brushed it off saying ‘well, we have the wellness wheel but mostly we use it as a marketing tool to get people into our programs.”

I left that discussion with a knot in my stomach because the future they’re talking about is reducing humans ever further down into small, controllable measures while ignoring the wholeness of the human capacity system. This is similar to what we’ve done in our food systems — big AG is hugely efficient — but producing a food system that is toxic to humans and the planet through its junk food, highly processed, overly chemicalized production…yet those who created it can only see the efficiency aspect, not the wholeness of the system. Same thing with our financial system — we’ve created a system that is highly efficient for trading, producing massive wealth etc., but it only benefits a few while ignoring the huge destruction it creates for the big system of wealth creation/wealth accumulation for an entire world.

So, we see things now like Slow Food as people want to return to the whole food system — how its grown, transported, cooked etc., and not just the parts; Slow Money as people reinvest in local food systems and realize that wealth accumulation equals more big profits but profits that benefit humans and the planet too. And so I would challenge — it is time for Slow Wholeness….building systems that ensure full human capacity development (physical, emotional, thinking, sexual, spiritual, family, community, environment etc.) vs. the narrow, streamlining of humans as efficient cogs in a tech world. Human Intelligence is but one aspect of wholeness and I am concerned that AI merging with it will repeat a terrible mistake we made in the 1800s when ‘Rational Thinking” was made king as it dismissed the role that emotions play in ensuring a quality of life. Men were trained to reject emotions at all costs — and really at the costs of their wholeness. It has taken us over 100 years to undo that huge mistake and discover that Emotional Intelligence is actually as vital (if not more) than Intellectual intelligence.