Using AI to Help Us Reclaim Our Humanity! (?!?)

Here’s a picture of the Acropolis, which I took on my trip to Greece in 2016. It was a bit of a vision quest for me, seeking to harmonize my head and my heart. What I found was a crossroads between East and West, bringing together a fortress and religious sanctuary, a key economic hub and a center for civic and cultural expression.

I’ve pretty much spent my whole life trying to navigate such a crossroads in my inner world, building a bridge from science to philosophy, and from the arts to technology and business. Fortunately, as a clinical professor, my job isn't to do deep research. It's to help my students and clients bring ideas to life. And, so I've had the great luxury of studying whatever I could get my hands on to help them do that. Then, AI reared its head!

While the emergence of AI has been exciting, its potential to create a dystopian hellscape hasn’t been lost on just about any of us! My greatest hope is that we can use AI to discover interdisciplinary insights from many fields of human endeavor. And, then, to bring what only humans can do to our Bot/Human partnership. Think Terminator II rather than Terminator I!

Here’s a 15-minute dialogue between two young Bots created by NotebookLM. It's based on some of my research and reflections, which I’ve accumulated over the years. It's not perfect, by any means, but the truth is that it’s better than I am -- at least at some points -- at connecting some pretty disparate dots!

That said, it still needs me to bring the ideas it expresses to life through the stories I’ve lived. So, give it a listen and see what you think. Many thanks to geniuses(?!?) at NotebookLM for helping create this dialogue!

Somewhere Plato is tilting his head! :D