AI Is Not the Problem

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been coming more and more to the forefront of our lives every day. It's not just in the news, but showing up in products being invented—like glasses that project your screen in front of your eyes, or technology that can see what’s in your fridge and tell you what meals you can prepare with what you already have.

The more we see how technology, especially AI, has integrated into what we do—and how we then feel we can't live without it—the more we both demonize the progression of technology, yet at the same time desire more of it.

Because AI is intertwined with so much of our lives, it's easy to blame it—and the continually changing landscape of technology for reshaping our world, not just by improving parts of our lives, but more recently by affecting our humanity. We talk about our longing for human connection and how AI seems to erode personal interactions, making them more impersonal, especially with the shift and expansion from in-person to virtual connection.

The Myth of Technology as the Cause

But the reality is the lack of human connection started long before technology, or AI ever existed.

Technology and AI—especially when personal computers began appearing in our homes—have simply magnified and brought to our awareness the human connection (or the lack of it) into our consciousness. I say it began before personal computers because I remember when they first entered homes in the early 1980s.

I remember when my dad bought our first personal computer when I was around 12, in 1980—and it was a big deal back then. Few homes had them, and to use them you had to learn DOS commands (which I absolutely disliked learning at the time).

My dad has always been very future-oriented; he was an electronics engineer who worked on the electronics of the NASA rocket years before. He saw the importance of keeping up with technology, having been directly involved in working with it, and he recognized that when personal computers came into the home, we needed to learn how to use them to stay current.

Sure enough, by the time I was in high school, I was using Microsoft Word and Excel on screens with black and green displays and printing my school papers on a dot matrix printer. By the time I was in college, computer interfaces had evolved to the point where you no longer needed long, complex prompts.

Beyond Blame to Deeper Awareness

Now, fast forward to today.

Technology has advanced so rapidly that many have started to blame AI for what's happening to our humanity.

But what most don't realize is that these changes in our humanity began long before AI and even before the invention of personal computers, telephones, or even cars. With every invention—each technological advancement of our civilization—there has been an expansion of our human awareness, in which we start to see ourselves differently through a different perspective within the context of the evolving civilization we live in.

Yes, we can continue to blame AI, our smartphones, televisions, laptops, and streaming services for the decline of our human connection. But doing so only focuses us on the outcomes—the symptoms we feel from the advancing technology—and not the root cause.

And what is the root cause? It's what lives in each and every one of us.

Because even without technology or AI, the roots of our disconnection from our humanity, from each individual—and how we choose to live as human beings—have always come from projecting our sense of self onto what we see in others instead of reflecting just on ourselves alone.

Reconnecting With Ourselves

What we are experiencing now in this era of humanity, of human disconnection, is not new when we look at the evolution of our humanity over the centuries.

It's just happening at an exponential speed, which magnifies the patterns not only within humanity as a whole but within each individual—patterns that have been passed on from the generations before us.

But now, our humanity is asking us to break those patterns.

Having AI so prominently in our lives is asking us to take a deep look within ourselves through a lens that is no longer filtered by someone else's reflection. And a lens that has been passed on to each of us from those who have lived before us. 

Because now, with AI obscuring our lens even more, it is further clouding our ability to connect with our own insight and our reflection to truly see who we are.

That is the dilemma facing not only our humanity but also deep within each and every one of us.

Choosing a New Way Forward

You can continue to place the blame on AI, and you can continue to lament what others are doing to create more chaos and havoc in your life and to you—or you can choose to walk your path differently.

You can take charge of what you do for yourself, strengthening the human connection within yourself first—regardless of what is happening around you.

As I shared with a business group last year, and as I often share with others: "We will always have chaos around us. What's more important is who you are in it."

In contemplating this thought, what would it mean for you to see yourself through a clear lens despite the chaos of change happening all around you?

The world is always evolving, and chaos will always exist—because without it, there would be no creation.

And now I leave you with this final thought here: the most important human connection you can make is not to strengthen your connection with another person. More importantly, it is to strengthen the one you have with yourself first.