Author Archives: Laurana Rayne

What Next?! Recap & Deeper Dives

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From a cosmic perspective, humanity currently has an opportunity to rise to a higher state of consciousness. What we are experiencing at this time is the instability and chaos that precedes such an enormous shift. My previous five posts have been about navigating life through the challenges of 2023 and beyond.

Throughout this group of posts, artificial intelligence (AI) served as an example of the next big challenge that is upon us. Its imminence makes us aware of our need for good navigation skills as we make our way through the future we’re headed into.

I’m currently working on the next group—the theme is Why Not?!

Until those posts are complete, I’m leaving you with a summary of What Next?! along with opportunties for further exploration if you’re so inclined.

Recapitulation…

  1. What Next?!  Video: The Chinese Farmer -instead of seeing things as good and bad, he holds all occurrences lightly, without judging them.
  2. Thinking Differently & Why It Matters  Video: Mo Gawdat -about avoiding disaster by teaching AI human values.
  3. Holding Your Centre & How You Can  Video: Ashana -playing healing crystal bowls that reinforce our deepest inner connection.
  4. Practising Discernment & Why It Helps  These days we may feel unprepared for the problems we must solve. Discernment helps us navigate with confidence and step up to do the right thing.
  5. Answers & Questions  Video referenced: Yuval Noah Harari –Safe and Responsible AI? Learn from my experience questioning ChatGPT about human values, a quote about questions and answers, and writing a song about discernment. Results are shared in full for anyone who is curious.

DIVING DEEPER…

I’ve selected 2 interviews for further exploration. For this purpose, I’m interested in the thinking processes as much as the content.

Deep Dive #1 – Thinking differently & Practising discernment

The book under discussion in the video that follows is Best Things First. The author, Bjørn Lomborg, concerns himself with global issues that go well beyond climate change.

Lomborg’s starting point is: Panic is not the mode to be in if you want to solve issues. When it comes to global warming, it’s a problem but it’s not the end of the world. Therefore, we have time to enact the “bang-for-your-buck” concept, finding what works best in global issues related to health, hunger, and education…then applying ourselves (and our money) to rapidly improving those things.

Bjørn Lomborg is a globally recognized author and thought-leader renowned for his innovative perspectives on addressing global issues. HIs mission is to help people discover the most effective solutions to the world’s greatest challenges, from disease and hunger to climate and education.

Tom Bilyeu, the interviewer, is a podcaster and entrepreneur. He emphasizes that we can’t already know how to solve global problems that we’ve never encountered before. He urges us to learn how to think through novel problems, building a rubric through which we can approach them. Essentially he’s referring to developing a list of specific criteria to evaluate items under consideration and determine which possibilities meet the criteria.

He sets the framework…

  1. Start with your North Star, your guiding principle. Lomborg identified people, planet, prosperity.
  2. Use benefit/cost analysis to prioritize. In other words, find what works best (greatest benefit for least cost) and pick that.
  3. Do those best things in each area of concern first.

This interview is a good opportunity to observe two people demonstrating how they think as they explore Lomborg’s findings. You might be surprised at what ended up on his list of 12 things to do first.

When people are working through solutions to difficult problems, they are usually thinking differently from what we’re comfortable with. It’s up to each of us to discern how Lomborg’s recommendations sit with us and ask questions when we’re not satisfied. What are the gaps? Is the premise sound?

In other words, it’s a good chance to practise discernment as you listen to the conversation.

 Watch the video… Do These 12 THINGS First If You Want a BRIGHT FUTURE  July 25, 2023

 

Deep Dive #2 – Looking at an issue in the wider cultural context

If you ever think about things like the economic system and how it drives most of what happens in our lives, you will appreciate the breadth and depth of Liv Boeree’s conversation (video ink below) with Daniel Schmachtenberger.

In his introductory comments, Schmachtenberger states his intention: To identify  AI risk scenarios and a way of thinking about the entire risk landscape that is different from the usual way of talking about it… and to provide insight into what might be required to protect against those risks.

Daniel Schmachtenberger is a social philosopher and founding member of The Consilience Project, aimed at improving public sense-making and dialogue. He has a particular interest in the topics of catastrophic and existential risk, as well as civilization and institutional decay and collapse. In her written description of the interview, interviewer Liv Boeree cautions…

Not a conversation for the faint-hearted, but crucial nonetheless. This is a deep dive into the game theory and exponential growth underlying our modern economic system, and how recent advancements in AI are poised to turn up the pressure on that system, and its wider environment, in ways we have never seen before.

It would help to understand these terms…

Moloch: Moloch has appeared in literature in a variety of forms. The Canaanite god Moloch was the recipient of child sacrifice according to the account of the Hebrew Bible. Moloch is depicted in John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost as one of the greatest warriors of the rebel angels, vengeful and militant.

In the 19th century, “Moloch” came to be used allegorically for any idol or cause requiring excessive sacrifice. Bertrand Russell in 1903 used Moloch to describe oppressive religion, and Winston Churchill in his 1948 history The Gathering Storm used “Moloch” as a metaphor for Adolf Hitler‘s cult of personality.

In modern usage it denotes a tyrannical power, such as “the great Moloch of war” or “duty has become the Moloch of modern life.” Liv Boeree, the interviewer and an expert in game theory, defines Moloch as the God of unhealthy competition.

Meta-crisis: The meta-crisis is an entangled series of crises—ecological, psychological, spiritual, cultural, governmental, and economic. The meta-crisis is all of these and not reducible to any one of them alone. AI is not one of the risks embedded within the meta-crisis; it is an accelerant of all of them.

The meta-crisis is a self-accelerating phenomenon that grows more and more complex each day. For example, ChatGPT was version 3.5 when it was launched on the internet a few months ago. Since then, version 4 has been made available. Although ChatGPT4 has access to current information (unlike 3.5 which was limited to pre-2021) version 4 is still only programmed to do certain kinds of things.

The next step is AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), which will be fully autonomous and therefore immune to any human efforts to pull the plug. It will be able to set its own goals, independent from ours, and then take steps to implement actions toward those goals. It won’t matter if we like their goals or not. The concern of Schmachtenberger, along with many others, is that AGI will be intelligence unbound by wisdom (more below).

Compounding the meta crisis is technology—technology that makes us more distracted, divided, and confused, thereby reducing our ability to act wisely. And yet, paradoxically, this same technology gives us god-like powers which increase the need to act wisely. A very good talk: Confronting The Meta-Crisis: Criteria for Turning The Titanic – Terry Patten speaking at Google

The Alignment Problem: Misalignment is a challenging, wide-ranging problem to which there is currently no known solution. As AI systems get more powerful, they don’t necessarily get better at dooing what humans want them to.

For example, large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 and Google’s Lamda get more powerful as they scale. When they get more powerful, they exhibit novel, unpredictable capabilities—a characteristic called emergence. Alignment seeks to ensure that, as these new capabilities emerge, they continue to align with the human goals the AI system was designed to achieve.

The problem comes from a misalignment of intelligence and wisdom. Any system can be misaligned, even one that is highly intelligent, if the wisdom piece is missing. Think back to Mo Gawdat and his idea about teaching human values to our AI. That solution is aimed at addressing the alignment problem by teaching wisdom to our AI.

Intelligence and wisdom…

At this point, it is worth interjecting Schmachtenberger’s discussion of intelligence and wisdom  in another interview (starting at 2:46:25). From his deep-and-wider context, here are the key points:

  • It is fair to say that human intelligence, unbound by wisdom, is the cause of the meta-crisis.
  • This same intelligence has created all the technologies—the agricultural, industrial, digital, nuclear weapons, energy harvesting…
  • It also made the system of capitalism, of communism, of…
  • This type of intelligence takes our physical (corporeal) capacities and extends them considerably—in the way a fist is extended through a hammer, or an eye is extended through a microscope or telescope (extra-corporeal).
  • And now, the type of intelligence that does this “is having the extra-corporeal intelligence be that type of intelligence itself—in maximum recursion, not bound by wisdom, driven by international, multipolar, military traps and markets.”
  • The narrow optimization it fosters is very dangerous.
  • This system is structured to perpetuate narrow short-term goals at the expense of long-term wide values. The question is, what goals are worthy of optimization?
  • What we need is systems of collective intelligence and wisdom that are based on the thriving of life in all perpetuity. Nothing less will be effective.
  • Intelligence has to be bound by wisdom.
  • Wisdom requires more than just being able to attune to the known metrics, and more than just the optimization and logic processes of those metrics.
  • Wisdom will always be bound to restraint.
  • Wisdom is more possible at smaller scale, where people can be in richer relationships with each other,
  • Understanding the limits of our own models is wisdom. There are aways unknowns that models cannot account for.

Watch the interview… Misalignment, AI & Moloch  March 30, 2023

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Answers & Questions…

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After doing research about the ins-and-outs, pros-and-cons, I decided to have a ChatGPT experience.

My ChatGPT experience…

I started with three questions.

  • I am a human. How can I best relate to you?
  • I’m wondering if you are trained in human values.
  • From what you’ve learned in your training, what is your opinion of humans? 

As expected, the answer to the third question was essentially that ChatGPT has no ability to form subjective opinions on any topic. So I rephrased the question:

  • What are the prominent values that humans express in their interactions? 

With caveats about variations across individuals, cultures and societies, a list came back with 6 points, each elaborated by a couple sentences: respect; empathy and compassion; honesty and integrity; fairness and justice; cooperation and collaboration; freedom and autonomy.

This didn’t address the nuance of my question, which was values that humans express in their interactions. So I replied:

  • This sounds aspirational, but I question that these values are exhibited in practice. Would you please give me a more realistic answer, based on observation of human behaviour.

With caveats about human behaviour being complex and multifaceted, another list came back, again with two-sentence descriptions: self-interest; cultural and societal influences; conflict and disagreement; bias and discrimination; altruism and kindness.

If you’re curious, you can read the full chat by clicking the icon below…

Limitations…

The free version, GPT 3.5, is not connected to the internet. All answers come from the databank of information it was trained on, so its knowledge does not extend past 2021. The paid version, GPT 4, is more current.

A recent article in Forbes highlights The Top 10 Limitations of ChatGPT. Here’s the first one:

Lack of common sense: While ChatGPT can generate human-like responses and has access to a large amount of information, it does not possess human-level common sense — and the model also lacks the background knowledge we have. This means that ChatGPT may sometimes provide nonsensical or inaccurate responses to certain questions or situations.

This means that you, the human, must practise discernment in assessing any answer you get from your chatbot.  Does it make sense? Is it accurate?

At the moment, ChatGPT invents information with great facility when it doesn’t know an answer. In one case, it produced a list of 5 books that supported the topic under consideration. When the human fact-checked the list, not even one of those books existed.

The industry refers to this as hallucination. The current rate of hallucination is said to be 15 -20%, although it’s anticipated that this situation will improve over time. (Perhaps someone will teach ChatGPT about the human value known as honesty?)

Keep your wits about you…

While researching AI, I came across a compelling quote that reminds us not to blindly accept answers.These days, questioning answers seems crucial since a chatbot can provide an authoritative-sounding answer in 3 seconds. (No kidding, to each of my questions, the response started within 3 seconds and printed rapidly, without a pause, to completion.)

Implications for safety…

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli public intellectual, historian and professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His writings examine free will, consciousness, intelligence, happiness, and suffering. Here is a video of his interview about Safe and Responsible AI?

Key points from the interview…

AI has developed much faster than expected by the experts. Three things everyone should know about AI:

  1. It is the first tool in human history that can make decisions by itself. That is nothing like any previous inventions.
  2. It’s the first tool in human history that can create new ideas itself. Previous  tools could only disseminate our ideas.
  3. Humans are not very good at using new tools. We often make mistakes. It takes time for us to learn to use them in a beneficial and wise way. We know this by looking at examples of what happened during and after the Industrial Revolution. The crucial thing is that while we are learning to use AI, it is learning to use us. So we have less time and margin for error than with any previous invention.

The rest of the interview discusses implications and regulation of AI as it spreads in use. Good to be aware of.

My second ChatGPT experience…

I started another line of inquiry with my friendly chatbot, which had kindly concluded our first session with “If you have any more questions in the future, feel free to ask. Have a great day!”

My question was…

  • How would you interpret this quote from Yuval Noah Harari: Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.

As I read the response, I noticed that Harari was referred to in the answer. I wondered what the reply would be if I did not include the source of the quote. So I removed his name and asked the revised question.

Comparing the two replies, I saw that the overall organization was identical. Concepts in each paragraph were the same, with slight variation in arrangement of words. Click the icon below if you’d like to see what ChatGPT said about the quote… and maybe reflect on whether or not that would be your interpretation.

And one more chat session…

Having recently written about discernment, I asked ChatGPT to write a song on the topic. The result came back in about 10 seconds, with 3 verses, a chorus, a bridge, and an outro. When I asked for a shorter song that did not lose the essence, the request was met.

The lyrics consist of appropriate buzz words about discernment, strung together with some sense of cadence and rhyme. Hokey is the descriptor that immediately came to mind in terms of both structure and content. This is a demonstration of another of the weaknesses identified in the previously mentioned Forbes article.

Lack of emotional intelligence: While ChatGPT can generate responses that seem empathetic, it does not possess true emotional intelligence. It cannot detect subtle emotional cues or respond appropriately to complex emotional situations.

When I asked for the music, I was advised that ChatGPT does not do audio. This was followed by loads of advice about musical style, genre, and arrangement.

Below is the full chat. The last phrase of the first verse doesn’t make sense to me; it doesn’t fit the context—an example of AI’s lack of common sense.

Good resources are important when navigating…

When we’re heading into new territory, as I was here, good resources pave the way. I did a lot of reading before opening a chat account. Here are two resources that I found particularly helpful…

And now I’m wondering…

What struck you about any or all of this?

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Practising Discernment & Why It Helps

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We are navigating a time in human history when we must face issues that we’ve never encountered before. This means that many problems can no longer be solved with old solutions. So it’s not surprising that we frequently don’t know what to do—or how to do it.

That’s when discernment is invaluable. It helps us navigate with confidence in unfamiliar situations and step up to do what must be done, even when it’s hard.

The lost skill of discernment…

Discernment is about thinking for ourselves so we can make the most appropriate choices in any situation. It’s a skill that improves with practice.

The downside is that discernment takes effort on our part. It’s so much easier to default to ready-made solutions, and so our “discernment muscle” has atrophied to the point where I suspect many people don’t know what discernment is.

So what is discernment?

Discernment is the ability to grasp and comprehend what is obscure. Discernment enables us to understand the subtleties of difficult situations and make wise decisions.

Understanding the subtleties requires keen insight, challenging us to go beyond superficial perception. Insight is the capacity to gain an accurate and deep intuitive understanding of a person or situation. It implies the discovery of something you didn’t already know.

Discernment facilitates good judgement. Judgement is the ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions. It implies sense tempered and refined by experience, training, maturity, and inner knowing.

When you don’t know what to do…

When you don’t know what to do, don’t take it personally. There is nothing wrong with you. Remember that you’re having to make decisions in unexpected and sometimes unthinkable circumstances. So how could you automatically know the best choice when you don’t have the benefit of previous experience?

In unknown situations, the easiest thing is to default to the opinions of experts. It can be such a relief to adopt a ready-made decision. And in some cases, you might get lucky and it will work for you. 

On the other hand though, ready-made decisions may not work out as you had hoped. That’s because they don’t take you into account as part of the equation.

Work toward a fitting solution…

It’s worth noting that:

  • discernment helps you make appropriate choices. The word “appropriate” sometimes gets misinterpreted as “proper” but the more nuanced and accurate meaning is “suitable or fitting.” It comes from the Latin appropriare, which means to make something fit, to make something one’s own.
  • you are part of the equation. When practising discernment, it is necessary to check possible solutions to see if they align with what you consider important. This involves your body/mind rather than just the brain. It may be a heartfelt sense or a gut feeling but, either way, you will simply know when you’ve arrived at the decision that sits well with you. Some people describe it as a feeling of everything being in alignment.

Why discernment helps…

Discernment moves us from reacting to responding. It occurs in the pause between a happening and your action.

The distinction between reacting and responding is well-described in an article by the folks at The Growth Equation.

When unexpected events occur…most people go down one of two roads. They either respond or react.

Responding, a spin-off from the word responsibility, is considerate and deliberate. Responses tend to go like this: Something happens. You pause. You process. You plan. Then you proceed.

Reacting, on the other hand, literally means to meet one action with another one. It is immediate and rash. Reactions tend to go like this: Something happens. You panic. Then you proceed.

This framework may be helpful…

Something happens.

  1. Take a breath, or otherwise bring yourself back to centre.
  2. Buy yourself some time, e.g. “I’ll get back to you tomorrow on that.”
  3. Practice discernment…
  • Consider options for action, which could include no-action.
  • Explore inwardly, both  your values and your perspective about what is important in the situation.
  • Assess the alignment of options with your wise inner self.
  • Observe the clarity you experience when an option is in alignment with you. It may be a visceral feeling of  ‘That’s it!’  You may feel a lightness rather than heaviness. You may just know, beyond question. You may have a strong sense that “How could one do otherwise?” We each have our own signature way of recognizing this clarity. Trust yours.
  • Respond accordingly, with confidence that your decision has been made from the fullness of your being and with due consideration.

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Holding Your Centre & How You Can

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Has anyone not felt discombobulated during the past few years?

The energetic effects of chaotic times…

It’s hard to make good decisions in the midst of confusion and disorder. In fact, it can be difficult to make any decisions at all. We lose trust in our ability to respond appropriately. We literally don’t know what to do. And this state of powerlessness propels us into fear.

In a world of disrupted energy, we can easily be pulled off-centre. Then…

  • we feel discombobulated,
  • we can’t think clearly,
  • we don’t know what to do, and
  • we feel powerless and afraid.

And in that state, we revert to our habitual coping mechanisms—pretending it isn’t happening; consoling  ourselves by shopping; distracting ourselves by scrolling through social media and watching endless YouTube videos; or __(insert yours)____________. These ways of coping may make us feel temporarily better but do nothing to improve the situation.

It’s ironic because navigating chaotic times is when we most need to be fully present to think clearly and make good decisions.

What can we do to function better?

From an energy perspective, the trick is to be centred in yourself and hold that presence even when there is chaos around you, whether physical or mental.

The fundamental step is to find practices to re-centre yourself whenever you’ve gone off-kilter. These include…

Here’s an exquisite example of sound healing with crystal bowls. I find it both soothing and uplifting—a perfect antidote to feeling discombobulated.

Listen with headphones if possible.

Internationally renowned, Ashana is credited with  pioneering an entirely new genre of healing music with crystal bowls. She offers concerts, crystalline activation meditations, retreats and workshops, and her music is available on Spotify, Amazon, iTunes, youTube. More on her website.

Expanding consciousness…

Another very effective strategy is to work with your consciousness—expanding it to hold the disturbing situation with compassion.

Don’t know how to do that? Intend it and trust it will happen.

Consciousness is the foundation of our being. It is infinite, and we humans are the physical vehicle for a small amount of it to be expressed. Because we are connected to our larger consciousness, we have the ability to expand by accessing ever-more of our consciousness. And over time, we increase our capacity to remain in that state for longer periods of time.

That’s what spiritual growth is.

And that’s why our sincere intention can make it happen.

Humanity is in a growth spurt…

The chaos around us, which is causing our discombobulation, is giving us an opportunity to expand our consciousness—the opportunity to express a more mature level of humanity. That’s what I was alluding to in my previous post when I said…

What if the potential for ChatGPT to run amok prompts us to look deeper within to see what we value and what makes us human?

And what if, instead of worrying that AI is going to take us over, we teach it our values, just as parents do with their developing children?

Fundamental values…

One aspect of consciousness is awareness of our highest aspirations. In his research to discover the human values that we can all agree upon, Mo Gowdat discovered that

  • We all want to be happy.
  • We have the ability to make others happy.
  • We all want to love and be loved.

If we would keep ourselves centred and live by these values, we would be credible role models for our future AI companions as well as our children.

By staying centred and expanding our consciousness, we have a chance of creating the more beautiful world we know is possible.

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Thinking Differently & Why It Matters

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Before I start, let me be clear that this post is not about artificial intelligence (AI). It’s about navigating life as AI becomes smarter than us.

The ChatGPT backstory…

Last week I mentioned a recent development that has disrupted our comfortable lives—the release of ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer). To elaborate:

ChatGPT is a large language model designed to produce natural human language. Much like having a conversation with someone, you can talk to ChatGPT, and it will remember things you have said in the past while also being capable of correcting itself when challenged. … ChatGPT was trained using a mix of machine learning and human intervention, using a method called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Take note of this last point because it is relevant to the proposal in the video that follows.

After being in the works for several years, ChatGPT was released on the internet by OpenAI in November 2022. Now, the summer of 2023, it’s creating a buzz everywhere.

Initial public concerns were about the ease of fraudulent communications—written, visual, and voice. This could show up in activities such as impersonating others, students submitting essays they didn’t write or even fact-check, and misleading news reports. Granted, these things already happen with our present technology, but the sophistication of AI makes it almost instantaneous, very convincing, readily accessible, and highly pervasive.

These characteristics of AI have raised concerns such as: How will we know what is real any more? What is real anyway? Does it matter? What will happen to jobs? Especially my job?

Then in March 2023, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter calling for “...all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.” According to a CityyNews article, it was signed by “more than 1,000 researchers and technologists, including Elon Musk.“

That letter was followed by several highly publicized cautions from early developers such as Prof Yoshua Bengio and Dr. Geoffrey Hinton. These and many other voices of industry insiders have raised the really big questions: Are we past the point of no return? (Yes) How long will it take for AI to be smarter than humans? (5 years, maybe less)

It’s scary…

Whereas the experts are deeply concerned because of what they know from working in the field, the rest of us experience the disempowerment of fear without knowledge. That makes fear doubly scary in any situation.

The logic of fear…

The logic of fear is that a moment in the future is less safe for me than this moment.

Therefore, it’s safer for me to preserve the conditions of this moment, to keep everything the same, to hold the line against change.

The fallacy…

The fallacy of this viewpoint is that it’s not the nature of nature to stay the same. We’ve all heard the truism that nothing is certain but change. So we are wasting a lot of energy when we fear the future and try to keep things the way they are.

A more constructive approach…

Given what experts are saying about the inevitability of AI’s rapid evolution, it’s unrealistic to think we can hold the line at the existing level of artificial intelligence (social media, chatbots as customer service contacts, GPS on our mobile phones, autocorrect on text messages, digital assistants, and e-payments).

Rather than trying to halt it, our energy will be much better spent in thinking about how we can navigate life with AI to achieve the best outcome for us, the planet, and humanity.

Sounds good in theory, but it seems huge beyond anything we can do. How will we ever be able to navigate what’s next?

The value of thinking differently…

When we don’t know what to do, the best thing is to change our perspective, to look at the situation from a different viewpoint. As Einstein famously said, we can’t solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it.

Mo Gawdat is approaching the AI situation from a higher consciousness. He’s a former industry insider who is thinking differently about how we can navigate life as AI becomes smarter than us.

It’s a radically different viewpoint, but who’s to say it wouldn’t work? As noted at the beginning of this post, ChatGPT was trained using a mix of machine learning and human intervention, using a method called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). As explained on the OpenAI website, this is “a method that uses human demonstrations and preference comparisons to guide the model toward desired behavior.” This suggests to me that we can play a constructive role here.

For a description of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a concept in game theory in which everyone has an incentive to defect in their own self-interst and, as a result, everyone is worse off.

To hear Mo Gawdat speak at greater depth about this idea, go to 1:50 of his interview with Tom Bilyeu. For more context, start earier, at 1:18.

Moving forward…

In times when every “next thing” presents another big challenge that seems beyond our control, we will navigate more easily if we consciously avoid a knee-jerk fear reaction and instead put our attention on discovering empowering possibilities for action. 

As Mo Gawdat says, “We might as well…ask them [AI] to do what’s good for us, good for the planet, and good for humanity.” 

From my perspective, our human superpower is that we can choose to think differently—and thus create the more beautiful world we know in our hearts is possible.

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What Next?!

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I’ve been contemplating it a lot lately—What next for me? What next in the world at large? And, I know I’m not alone in wondering what will present itself and how I’ll navigate whatever appears. 

I doubt that anyone has been immune to discombobulation as we’ve been confronted by one unexpected and unthinkable event after another. A confounding US presidential election result, the rapid arrival of a global pandemic, a war in Europe that has gone on for well over a year—just a few of the events of enormous magnitude that turned our world upside down.

And now, just as we thought we’d found our feet again, we’re dealing with yet another—the general accessibility of an artificial intelligence with capabilities that have stunned even people in the industry. These events, along with numerous others, have greatly disrupted our comfortable mindset about how life works.

Shifting perspective…

Most of us would prefer to avoid disruption, but it can be a good thing. When life turns upside down, we get a chance to see things differently… if we choose to.

I remember the story that first shifted my thinking about good and bad fortune. Here’s a charming version narrated by Alan Watts. Watts, who died in 1973, was an early interpreter and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. This is his telling of the story about a Chinese farmer, his horse, and his son…

Maybe…

Going back to the disruptive events we are experiencing, perhaps we can learn something from this story. What looks like a bad thing might turn out to be a good thing in the long run.

For example, the AI that has recently got our attention, known as ChatGPT, is evoking a lot of fear—about loss of jobs for humans, its power to impersonate humans, the rate at which it is evolving…

Those are legitimate concerns. But, on the other hand, perhaps the disconcerting  appearance of ChatGPT is actually serving a useful purpose.

What if the potential for ChatGPT to run amok prompts us to look deeper within to see what we value and what makes us human?

What if awareness of what is important and what makes us human prompts us to take responsibility for our own actions and to conduct our lives in accordance with that awareness of what we value as humans?

And what if, instead of worrying that AI is going to take us over, we teach it our values, just as parents do with their developing children?

Choose to see things differently

Is AI a bad thing?

Maybe.

Is AI a good thing?

Maybe.

How can we make it a good thing? That is the key question.

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Clinging doesn’t work .

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Life on Earth was designed to evolve. That’s why we’re here,,,for the ever-changing opportunities to experience life and grow in our humanness. Yet as we move through daily life, we seem to have forgotten the fundamental principle that makes growth possible.

I think it’s fair to say that most of us, me included, fall into the trap of wanting things to remain the same. That’s not surprising, because no-change feels like security. Life seems easier when we know what to expect and how to navigate it. Continue reading →

Increasing our Cosciousness

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Consciousness is my theme at the moment. Well, actually, It has been for many years. That’s how it ended up in the title of my book, Conscious Spending, Conscious Life, which grew out of my teaching college students to be conscious consumers.

In the time that has passed, I’ve become ever-more aware of the urgent need for increasing our consciousness on all fronts. We must, if we are to resolve the world-scale chaos around us.

That phrase—the more beautiful world our hearts know as possible—is borrowed from author and essayist, Charles Eisenstein. It’s the title of one of his books, and is completely relevant to this time where we must find ways to increase our consciousness.

Seeing the bigger picture…

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True, but partial…

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As I wrote last week, there are many definitions of consciousness, depending on the viewpoint of the person creating the definition. Each definition is based on limited information, and the interpretations are all true…but partial.

The problem with partial information…

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The Path Ahead is Not the Same

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While writing last week’s post about learning to play with consciousness, I was reminded of what Einstein said about problem-solving…

Einstein quote

Heaven knows, we certainly have problems to solve right now. Big ones.

This made me wonder if that’s why we’re facing so many crises all at once—a long-lived pandemic, a brutal war, intense social unrest, massive fires and flooding…

Could it be that this is what was needed to shake us out of our complacency … so we would acknowledge that our way of solving big problems isn’t working? Continue reading →