Why be a person?

Some casual and grandiose thoughts

Bear with me. I’m gonna say something kind of grandiose, then walk it back into something that can be practical and personal, especially for you. 

Artist: Jonathan L Reyes

Here it is: The soul of humanity is in question right now. Few of us will be able to ignore the way that our humanity is up for debate by way of technological encroachment. (Heads up: this is not a screed against technology as such.)

I’m not an expert on techno-futurism, these are just three examples of the tech-takeover that have struck me in the last year — that matter in our daily life.

1.

Our collective awareness of the world, including real time updates on war crimes and genocides committed across the globe has exploded our brain’s capacity to hold “normal life”. We have never been able to feel the humanity of people that we can’t touch more than we do now. 

On one side, this awareness can turn into profound apathy and alienation because we can feel so small in comparison to *gestures to the world* all of this. On the other side, it leads to profound activation in our bodies, when we now know what we cannot un-know. We know we are not different than the Palestinians grieving their children. We know we are capable of banal cruelty, of living “happily during the war” too. Being human, as it turns out, does not mean being nice and or free from harm.

2.

AI is developing incredibly swiftly, and not in the direction that we might have expected robots to go. That is, AI is trained to imitate what makes us most human: art, connection, intimacy. AI is not being trained to assist human intelligence in a distinctly machine-like-way, like a robot maid in the Jetsons, but instead mimic what SEEMS like soulful human intelligence by scraping data and rearranging it into plausible sounding answers for our disconnected songs.

It won’t be long before we rely on AI therapists, AI care workers for the ill. We already have algorithm-written songs and poems. (WHY THOUGH?)

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that humanity itself will actually be diminished through these advances, nor will the quality of human presence ever be replaced. But as AI goes in the direction of hyper-humanity, the gap between imitation soul and the real so it will be much clearer.

3.

Technological implants and genetic modifications, which can be used for miraculous and life-saving purposes like giving children or wounded people their limbs back, will be a regular tool of the elite to give themselves more advantages as the structures of our world become less and less reliable.

The boundary between our bodies and artificial intelligence will blur.

That sounds kind of very doomsday, but I don’t mean it that way.

I only want us to get very honest about where the current will drift so we can ask ourselves better questions. The default question we pose about the future is, “how can I keep up?” And that won’t cut it anymore.

Better questions include:

What about me exceeds the tasks I perform?

Who am I as a soul?

What will I leave behind on the planet as a person, not a task-completer?

You might be wondering, why am I talking about this in a newsletter about creativity? Well, I am creative and I write about what I want. 

Secondly and more importantly, creatives are people who will have to answer these questions first. (Also educators, who DAILY have to wrestle with imparting the difference between mere information and wisdom, bless their souls.)

We cannot think that our jobs are about what we produce anymore, because AI can produce it faster. So what are we doing here??

There’s no one answer. But we would all be better off ATTEMPTING answers to this question, every day: “How am I irreplaceable by AI?”

Answer it differently every day. Answer it until you feel it.

For example, I am irreplaceable by AI because:

- While AI is a plausibility or probability machine, my territory is possibility. Only accessible through the imaginal. Sorry bots.

- My heart emits a frequency of coherence. My clients can feel it, even over Zoom. More importantly, my daughter can feel it when I hug her.

Excuse the colonial metaphor, but we live on the new frontier of soul-making. We get to decide what foundation we want to build on.

If we don’t answer these questions for ourselves, the fantasies of technocrats will do it for us.

Tell me this brings up for you in the comments. I really want to know.

Love,

Maria

P.S. The heavy book-writing phase is over! Now I can take new 1:1 clients!

One client said, “this is most profound shift in perspective I have ever experienced.” Another said, “I’ve never been able to write like this before.” Another said, “My girlfriend wondered why I’m suddenly nicer, more energetic, more alive.” So apply now and let’s talk.