AI is a Spiritual Problem
May 15, 2024
“co-written by Lela Tuhtan & Amy Jin”
It’s a relentlessly sunny afternoon in LA. About a hundred Hollywood writers are stomping down Sunset Blvd in front of the Netflix office, tenuously holding cardboard signs, striking. Cars drive by, honk, and the group is enlivened. The writers span a gamut – young, parents with children, alone, with friends. On everyone’s minds is their livelihood – the ability to make a living from their art and craft, from storytelling and writing – juxtaposed against corporate profitability and a loud reigning threat: AI. There’s something real to protect here. The writers want assurances that their work will not be used to train their replacement. Do they believe that they can be replaced by AI?
As a species, we are struggling to understand AI’s impact on our jobs, our societies, our planet… but the struggle is gripping us at a far deeper level, too.
Fundamentally, each of us is wondering, “Can I be replaced by AI?” And if the answer to that question leans towards yes, “Then what really am I?
In the hullabaloo of the AI arrival, there hasn’t been enough conversation around what matters most: us. The humans.
Whether you think that a human worker can be replaced by AI fundamentally asks you to wrestle with a deeper question: What does it mean to be human? And why does that matter?
The arrival of AI is going to split humanity in two directions: towards enlightenment or redundancy.
If we try to compete with AI on intellect alone, we will fail. We already have.
But if we don’t grow towards enlightenment, we will deprive the world of the wisdom it needs to lead it.
We must grow towards enlightenment, which means we must grapple with our interior worlds: What am I?
In other words, AI is a spiritual problem.
It forces us to look at parts of ourselves that many of us aren’t accustomed to valuing. Yet these parts are our birthright, and as essential to the human condition as breath.
The word “spiritual” can be problematic. What we mean when we say AI is a spiritual problem is that it’s not something we can understand with data and intellect alone. To assume that a human being is nothing but intellect is the core of the problem. This is not a foregone conclusion. It’s where our exploration begins.
We will need leaders who have done this internal journeying. Gone are the days when we followed leaders because of where they went to school, or their height. We need leaders now who are advanced in their awareness, wisdom, and compassion.
This is good news. Humans have been attempting to answer the question, “What am I?” for millennia. The fields of biology, sociology, literature all give us a version of this answer. In this age of AI, amidst the accompanying angst, we are being pushed to examine ourselves in a very specific way: spiritually. That is, somehow, we are greater than the sum of our bodies and minds.
So let’s dive into what AI puts into stark relief for us, so that we may better understand ourselves, our potential, and therefore how to lead our future world.
To begin, consider this story as it illustrates the six core attributes of being human:
You’re on a stroll in your neighborhood and you come across a beautiful flower.
It’s a rose. It’s a gorgeous, soft, buttery yellow rose.
You take a moment to smell the rose and its sweet scent brings you back to your teenage self and a memory arises. This very type of flower was given to you by your ex, your first love from school.
Suddenly you’re flooded with memories about this relationship and how it abruptly and painfully ended in heartbreak. You’re awash with nostalgia and regret because you loved this person deeply, even though you were so young. You feel a surge of warmth course through your body and your heart begins beating rapidly. Feelings of both grief and passion pulse through your chest. Tears well up in your nose and throat. You can’t go back. This love is gone.
All of these thoughts, feelings and sensations happen because you stopped to smell this little yellow rose. A whole symphony of experiences synthesized into a cascade of feelings, transporting your past into the present. The energy that arises is capable of being transmitted, capable of influencing your future.
Enlivened, you go home and take out your laptop and begin typing. What you start that day becomes the screenplay for a movie like Before Sunset, and your whole life changes.
On opening day, you’re sitting amidst hundreds of people watching your movie for the first time. All at once, everyone in the theater is tearing up, connecting with the feeling of young unrequited love within them. A flood of shared understanding, recognition, and culture is born. A collective experience of transcendence has occurred due to YOUR smelling of that rose.
This story is not unique to our fictionalized screenwriter. It’s happening all the time, in a scent or a song; a glance or a glimpse. But do not confuse its familiarity to mean that it’s ordinary. This story demonstrates what artificial entities lack, but are ubiquitous to humans.
Here are the six attributes that set humankind apart:
- We have lived story.
- We have embodied intuition/sensation. We are animals.
- We love.
- We suffer.
- We transform through shared experience and connection.
- We die.
Let’s explore each one in turn.
1. We have lived story.
The teenage, unrequited love is an indelible mark on our screenwriter’s life. It’s a real life, lived forward, vulnerably, with all the real stakes that a real life takes.
AI cannot smell a flower and suddenly be taken on a journey within its proverbial mind or throughout its proverbial body in the way that a human can.
Yet this is fundamentally how we live. Humans are meaning makers, and we make meaning of our lives through the stories we hold and share.
We are living, breathing beings and our stories are just as alive as we are. As we change and grow, our stories do too. It is our lived experience that empowers every story we tell to be wholly original. No one else is exactly like you. No one else has had the exact experiences you’ve had. Thus, no one else can tell the same story. This is our originality.
2. We have embodied intuition/sensation. We are animals.
We have interrelated experiences that occur throughout our bodies. Through millions of years of evolution, we’ve come to own an intricate system of sensations, intuition, instinct, memories, and emotions that dance together. This is the system at play for our screenwriter as they smell the rose, and flow into a brilliant creative act. It happens so fast and automatically that it’s easy to miss its exquisite magic. Yet this is no small phenomenon.
We have aliveness. It’s the thing that goes missing when someone dies, and an inanimate body remains. We are powered by and transmit energy, and this energy allows us to connect on subtle, nonverbal levels. It allows us to experience visceral yet invisible phenomena such as love.
AI is inviting us to be even more distinguished in our taste. Liking something = embodied intuition/sensation (AI can’t “like” something)
3. We love.
Love is the most ubiquitous mystery of human existence. In Interstellar, Anne Hathaway’s character posits that it’s the most powerful, benevolent force in the universe, as pervasive and important as gravity. Yet as humans, we ourselves don’t understand it well enough to create an equation or algorithm for it, so it would follow that we aren’t able to program any other intelligence with it.
We love as a result of our lived stories and our embodied sensations. We love irrationally, fiercely. We feel love at a level of truth and power that is unexplainable by biology alone. We love, and so we think, act, and create. We are beautiful because we love. Our screenwriter loves, which is the seed of a piece of art that sparks transformation for an entire generation. We love, therefore we are.
We love, therefore we are qualified to lead.
4. We suffer.
Being human means that we cannot escape pain, and therefore we understand suffering. Our screenwriter suffers with regret, grief, and heartbreak. It’s not their choice; it’s endemic to being human. And it leads to their breakthrough.
It’s also the reason why we care about each other’s stories. If the beautiful screenplay was written by an intelligence that never suffered, never put themselves on the line and lived an authentic courageous life, we wouldn’t be moved by it. It’s the difference between seeing a machine win a marathon, versus understanding what an olympic athlete had to overcome in order to even be in the race.
We value human stories because they are lived by human lives. There is meaning in human feats because we have to earn them through pain and suffering, conviction and outsize achievement. Our suffering is what makes us vulnerable, and it’s what makes our triumphs mean anything at all.
5. We transform through shared experience and connection.
Our suffering is the core of connection, a powerful phenomenon that human beings are wired for. We are social beings capable of incredible things because we can believe in something together.
Our screenwriter gave a group of humans a powerful experience of shared connection when they all watched his movie. In doing so, they transformed. It happened when so many humans watched the film, The Day After, when we watched George Floyd’s murder… we evolved together, collectively. The hundredth monkey effect, for example, is the idea that a new behavior or idea is spread rapidly by unexplained means from one group to all related groups once a critical number of members of one group exhibit the new behavior or acknowledge the new idea.
It’s like a system update that we were built for, and it pulls forth the best of us. It is from our ability to understand how we are all connected that our wisdom and compassion are rooted.
6. We die.
Death is limitation. It is what makes living special. Just like any duality, where there is no light without darkness, without dying there’s no living. Having a certain end forces us to question what we want to do with our time here, and it applies pressure on us. Like our screenwriter, we can’t repair relationships with those who have passed, so we learn to forgive, to accept, to be compassionate, to love. We can’t do it all over again with another 100 year life span, so we try hard to find out who we are so we can live OUR life in this life span. We despair over who to marry and what career to choose – these become important, because we may not get another chance. And when we make mistakes, we have to live with them. We learn the taste of bitterness, regret, resentment, and in their pain, we are forced to face reality. This is the gift of having to die. It raises the stakes on our decisions, and in doing so, applies the same pressure that creates diamonds.
Because we must die, we attempt to live beautifully.
So we take risks. We make the best decisions we can, even if they’re irrational or unlikely. We jump from airplanes and fly into space. We only have this one life. And in doing so, we push ourselves and the entirety of humanity forward. We inspire one another, and develop a level of courage that changes the world.
How can AI cultivate this same level of living? If it cannot die, how can it truly be alive? Even if it can be programmed to have a predetermined ending, will it struggle? And therefore, can it ever inspire awe or change the world the way a single human being can?
Conclusion
We are far more compelling and powerful as a species than we realize. Embracing the elements that make us uniquely human gives us awareness, wisdom, and compassion. It teaches us to love, and to lead, which is exactly what is required to live in an AI world.
When AI confronts and conquers us at the singular point of intelligence, it’s actually doing us a favor. It’s saying to us: You’re more than this. Just as we can clearly comprehend that we are not a gorilla, our evolutionary cousin, and appreciate all that differentiates us from the magnificent animal, so too can AI, in all the ways it’s seemingly similar to us, help us see all the ways we stand apart, untouchable.
So, let’s not idolize AI, because AI is just a mirror. If we place it on a pedestal, we will be following an empty guru.
The next step is to re-recognize ourselves by getting in touch with our interior worlds. There, we can clearly see that our inherent value and worth does not come from our intellect, something our Information Age has convinced us of.
Then, we can easily remember the radiant human staring back at us, already equipped with a heart, body, spirit, and soul capable of changing the world.
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