Grow your best life
The issues with AI are personal
AI's impact reaches beyond harmful environmental impacts straight to our humanity.
CLZúñiga
8/14/20262 min read
The rapid evolution of AI has tremendous potential. How that tool's potential impacts our lives is up to us and how we use it. It can uplift our humanity or destroy it. There are obvious positive and negative possibilities for AI to be sure, yet it's a more subtle threat that I address here.
When written, photographic, audio and video recordings are intentionally designed to deceive, doubt is cast into our capacity to discern reality from fantasy in the world around us. Our ability to perceive truth from falsity can falter, causing our sense of security to waver.
Without truth as our guide, we may inadvertently build our lives on false structures that don't actually support us like we want and need. In fact, we may discover that we acted against our own values without realizing it. This reality undermines our freedom and sovereignty.
In a world where malicious AI in particular distorts our capacity to identify what's real from what's fake, inaccurate and misleading, we seek places to turn for a "reality check." We generally turn to the people, places and things we know we can trust. Long-standing, trusted relationships with family, friends, spiritual mentors and nature can remind us of what's real and what matters to us.
Yet it is just as important to do our own investigating, to question our sources, and to not only look more deeply into them but to look beyond them. There is so much information distortion and manipulation today that blind faith and narrow-minded convictions are more dangerous than ever. It no longer serves us to rest into many of our trusted sources without asking ourselves a few important questions, such as:
Are we living in an echo chamber or are we investigating the larger reality beyond it?
Are we making assumptions or are we challenging long-standing beliefs?
Are we staying within a narrow scope or doing broad-reaching research?
Are we seeking personal validation or are we open to challenging our perspectives?
Are we intent on being right or are we open to being mistaken?
In my opinion, we are not seeing the best of humanity right now from many of us. Everyone I know is feeling tired by the deceit, division, tension, and chaos of the past several years in America. We all want something better and I believe we owe it to ourselves and our futures to do better. Yet many of us struggle with how to feed positive change in such an overwhelmingly negative world climate.
When humans feel threatened, unsafe or unsupported, our defenses kick in. We feel protective of our comforts and sense of security. When our instincts push us into defensiveness, we struggle to stay open.
It takes a strong will and good self-awareness to override that instinct and maintain our sense of humanity and humility in the face of challenge. Yet to create a harmonious reality in which to live, it is essential we choose to do so. These four changes can help build the road to a better shared future:
First, we must unclench our fists, open our hearts and soften our minds.
Second, we must honor our shared humanity, humility and desire for happiness.
Third, we must embrace our differences and similarities.
And fourth, we must restore our civility, respect and integrity.
Each of our actions create ripples in the world. Each of those ripples feeds the reality we build together. Positive change happens when we unite in a common desire for worldwide peace, health and happiness. It's within our reach. We just have to choose it every day in every way we can.
CZ Mentoring, LLC
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