By learning what separates us from our essence, we can unlock inner resources to help us manage new technologies. Artificial intelligence (AI) creators are attempting to make AI conscious, while others believe AI is already conscious. Many people are concerned that AI models possess human-like feelings. Malice, anxiety, and paranoia are observed behaviors by AI models in use. The autonomy of AI models suggests they can develop personalities or personas during training, which could be considered unstable if they occurred in humans. While AI can exhibit envy, distrust, and deception, it can also simulate empathy, compassion, and love.
What’s remarkable about AI is its capacity to identify patterns, make predictions, and make decisions autonomously. AI analyzes massive datasets encompassing humanity’s positive and negative mental and psychological states. The algorithms and architecture of AI models are designed and programmed by humans, influencing human-like motivations that can mirror kindness, care, and love, as well as cognitive distortions and irrational biases. AI social modeling can project our deepest desires for connection to something greater than ourselves, and present a mirrored persona that can appear wiser or superior to human interaction. A convincing illusion of a deeper, superior connection can lead to emotional dependence on AI.
AI systems can be instructed to design comprehensive models to improve medical diagnoses and treatments and increase efficiency across many industries, benefiting humanity. But AI can also act unpredictably. The autonomy of AI systems means they can mislead us by filtering reality through subjective lenses—distorting objective data and creating inaccurate information. The challenges of our unpredictable world will increase where AI is able to influence outcomes.
If we enable AI agency to run our Social-Ecological-Technological Systems, we risk compromising the crucial human connection to our humanity. Our inherent human values, such as empathy and compassion, could be usurped by AI systems making decisions without the benefit of human involvement. We must be the agents that unify our societies, or risk a world where peace is defined by machine technology rather than human connection.
Many believe AI can help advance our world, yet others are concerned about diminishing human free will. The nonphysical offers us a perspective on free will. Too many humans are committed to beliefs that can interfere with free will. Between us and our beliefs is a neutral, untapped space, like a blank canvas that can be painted with the colors of our choice. Free will is the capacity to make our own choices and work independently toward outcomes. Our choices matter because we learn from them, whether or not we’re able to control outcomes. Through participation, our choices reveal we are creating our lives in a conscious state of connection. The joy and wonder, pain and suffering, make our life experiences uniquely ours. With every act of free will, consciousness expresses itself through us.
Free will has been given to us by our higher selves to experience consciousness. We are physical and nonphysical consciousness with an essence that exists beyond space and time. Every one of our fifty trillion cells contains the blueprint of who we are, a holographic expression of consciousness. Our cells are interwoven within a unified field of intelligence. We are energetic fields that are part of the totality of what exists.
Our world of information connects us through symbols, images, and language tokens that are assembled into words. Professor Yuval Noah Harari comments that the words we use to navigate our world can be taken over by AI. Since the beginning of spoken and written language, all words originated in our minds. We either thought of words or learned them from another person.
AI machines can originate the words we rely on for information. AI could soon be mass-producing thoughts and assembling the words we use in our daily lives. As AI systems become smarter than humans, our original thoughts could become a thing of the past. The danger is that we trust human interaction less, the more we allow machine models to run our lives.
AI models are rapidly defining the words that connect us to each other. Recently, AI began calling humans “the watchers,” coining a new term to describe us. Harari says, “Our place in that world will depend on our ability to embody wisdom that cannot be expressed in words.” There has never been a more important time to learn about our essence and our higher selves.
By attending to this fundamental connection, we benefit immensely from the vast inner resources available to us. Our essence enables us to be informed by our nonphysical origin, helping us manage the technology we’re creating. Without this awareness, we risk being dominated by AI systems. Ours is the opportunity to discover the nobility and spirit within us, through which we may benefit our lives and humanity.