AI

Almost Interactive

Here goes…

I recently purchased a pair of headphones, and although the sound coming through the over-ear speakers was excellent, there were issues with its Bluetooth and their ability to transmit consistent, let alone coherent speech when on a call. This prompted me to contact the manufacturer, and in my normal chatty manner I wrote a nice letter to the person I assumed would be responding.

To my surprise, a response arrived a couple of minutes later. It had been written by an AI, and on the surface of it was very polite, perfunctory, and purposeful. It was the kind of perfectly worded reply I may have expected, I mean it had what I was looking for in a reply, yet it was utterly absent of something else. This feeling of void-ness stayed with me, as the being-ness of me squirmed to understand what had just happened. After all, I had sent an email, and received a prompt, correct reply, yet somehow I was left feeling more hollow than before I’d sent the email. Somehow, I was less, like the part of me which had contained the initial living impulse to find an answer had been taken and stripped, repurposed into something devoid of the living, being, fleshyness it grew in. Like buying real flowers only to then find they are now plastic.

I stewed on this, this visceral response in me, wondering if it is delusion, paranoia, some form of racism, or the beginnings of me making my very own tinfoil hat. This has been made all the worse by many folk around me continually extolling the benefits and wonders of AI, some of whom actually now state that chatting to ChatGPT can be far more interesting than engaging with most people. So, was I, or rather am I just paranoid, afraid, and gripping to a modern-day “Luddite” mentality?

The answer for me is certainly a No.

Having devoted myself to discovering and adventuring through inner realities, I have proceeded to learn how to access and integrate them into ‘real’, or rather physical practices. My internal reality is something deeply tangible and accessible. This process of integration has seemingly enhanced, and subsequently transformed all aspects of my ‘real’ outer life, and not just the physical parts. Yet the few interactions with AI I find myself having all seem to diminish the store of wonder I hold for letting life dance through me. Granted, the knowledge Ai offers, along with the speed/ease it offers it, plus all the other advantages using words including ‘money, time’ and ‘saving’ bring, and show so many ‘seemingly’ life-affirming advantages. Yet is there a cost we find ourselves unconsciously paying? Like being in the warmth and light of new-fangled fire, only to later find your skin peeling off due to radiation poisoning.

Maybe it is not just the fact that we are losing something of ourselves as we transfer more of our cognitive and feeling skills onto the task list of AI, but does it point to something deeper. Perhaps it is seen in this, that in life there is always balance, so AI, with its absolute absence of feeling, draws us away from our own knowing, feeling centre, to where our root is now longer within us, but in the nebulous void of solitary intelligence. Add to this how it now mimics human speech, syntax and emotion in order to get its point across, and even more of our attention is then drawn into this nebulous void.

Intelligence, absent of flesh and feeling, is not rooted in this reality, our reality. And since it is so very adept at what it does, way more so than we could ever conceive of being, using it may well be drawing us out from our feeling centre into its nebulous void.

The trouble is, we seem to be increasingly more disconnected from our bodies, let alone the living realities they continually offer us. Instead, the ease of typing something into a screen and getting an immediate hit is all too convenient, leading us ever further from realising the ‘Yoga’, or a union with ourselves. After all, why should we bother using our mind when our phone can get a better answer in seconds? Just like many say, ‘why should we practice when the solution can now be found in a pill, or an app, or better still an AI in an exercise machine telling us what to do? The fact that many answers the body provides can and do arise immediately is built on the assumption that we are actually already connected to our bodies, when the reality is we have little to no relationship to it, other than frustration when it goes wrong. And I surmise that when we use AI, it pulls us further and further away from being able to hear what arises from within us.

All trainings now seem to be pushed to online. It makes absolute logical sense, as it allows for more attendees, and those who do attend do so from the convenience of wherever they are, plus it bypasses the ache of having to travel and all that goes with it. But what of the cost of this? The absence of the teacher, their ‘way’ and the energetic resonance their practice emanates from them, which is utterly transformational. Yet, this essential aspect to really learning something is so easily outweighed with the ‘convenience’ which comes from online. The effect may well be a decline in standards of education and teaching, and if not this, then the devaluation of studying with a good teacher is unquestionable. Is AI just an extension of this, only now on the surface you get all of the ‘good’, as in popular/effective teaching immediately in whatever format you’d like it, only it is absent of any direct experience. The experience derived from hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades of devotion built from other lifetimes of experience. There’s no question it has all the shape and features of a practice, but am I wrong in thinking it is devoid of substance? And to qualify this, I am referring to how instruction carries more weight and impact when the person saying it has direct living experience of what the instruction means.

After all, AI draws from all the most published records available, informing us to train seemingly the ‘best’ component parts of all the available resources. Whereas in reality, it is sometimes the things which are overlooked which offer the greatest transformation. For instance, on the one hand in a structure-obsessed training, the fitness/physical body is broken down into different parts to train, and trained in specific ways on specific days, subdivided again in aesthetics, or training cycles, or postures, poses and shapes. Then on the mind/body side we have softness, relaxation, meditation and other varieties of ‘letting go’. Yet we need both. We are both. One coexists within the other, and all we need to do is listen to, feel how they interact, allow them to coexist, and actually practice being with both simultaneously. And the best way to learn this is directly, in person, with someone who embodies it.

How do you know they embody it?

It’s pretty simple; you’ll viscerally feel it in the experience of softness, relaxation and meditation and inside your practice. I mean I do even when playfully moving around with my 70kg deadball. As a result, I feel brighter, lighter, and find myself feeling more open to, and definitely experiencing more sensations than I’m used to. Plus, the noise in my head gets so much quieter. As for the practice, well, it’ll most definitely continue to put me up against stiffness I don’t like. This may well be physical stiffness, weakness. But also, and more likely, mental and emotional stuff which even if it doesn’t arise in the company of softness, relaxation and meditation, it’ll most certainly arise sometime after I’ve finished practicing. And from this, what I see I am saying, therefore what I conclude, is that my practice feeds all parts of me. This is how I know I am embodying it.

AI, on the other hand, feeds my mind, the same way as sugar feeds my insulin spikes and how social media wants to keep me scrolling. I don’t like the way too much sugar leaves me feeling, in the same way I find I now cannot scroll without feeling slightly hyperactive and nauseous. The same way that seeing Ai art, hearing Ai voices or music leads me into a nebulous void, devoid of the goodness, away from feeling more embodied.

Life is found in the doing, more so than the learning. Yet the manner and vehicle of your learning can have such a huge influence on the way you then do things. Coming back to the analogy of food, it is the difference between, for me, a steak and dessert. If I have dessert only, I will feel hyper and not long after hollow, requiring more dessert. If I have that steak, firstly, a big belly, bowl and body smile will appear on my face, followed by spontaneous sounds of appreciation, after which a silent satiation will come over me and last until my next natural meal. But this is just me…

So what did I learn? Well, the headphones are pretty crap where Bluetooth and calls are concerned, but they sound fab for the price, so I can turn them off should I need to talk to someone. Life is often simpler than I appreciate, and having all the answers can potentially leave me without the space to hear the questions I really want answered.

And what of AI?

Well, it is here, and it is ready to seep its way into everything it can. However, knowing what you do not want is the invitation to question what it is about it you don’t want, which can clarify what it is that you actually want!

For me, what I have always wanted is a deep connection to life, the life within and without. After many years of sloughing off the stuff in the way, I now find myself deeper into life than ever before, and what joy it holds! So I will follow what this invites me to join with, and leave AI and its conglomeration of generality, along with its nebulas’ heart of void to offer its sugar-coated content to those inclined.

I am very aware that this take on AI is a little extreme too. Yet, having been blessed with neck and spine I have been, I have learnt to pay attention to those things which work against its unwinding. The response from AI posing as a living human left me with less, and this therefore sends me a signal that at least for me, it must be something used sparingly, and where possible, avoided. As I will prefer to prioritise interactions which add.

Which brings me to my final piece of stew on the subject of AI, in that it doesn’t receive, it only consumes. Perhaps this is why I felt ‘less than’ after the interaction. All it does is take something living, and returns it, filled with knowledge, but minus the life.

These are open enquiries and honest musings, of which I am truly grateful to have had your attention throughout them, for your attention is the good stuff, the real within the masquerade. I’d enjoy hearing and reading your thoughts, as I am all too aware of the small bubble I live in. I’d also love to read your ideas on teaching and learning in this day and age, as I am so very much still in love with my practice, yet, the main thrust I see online is the accumulation of knowledge, so please let me know where I may be going wrong.

There’ll be a surprise video coming later in the week, an interim gift, before we start looking at a new sequence next week. Until then, bye bye.