Whatever your feelings about AI, it’s probably wise not to deny that it is here, it is already prevalent (if not exactly visible) and likely to become more so. The reality is that it is a part of humanity’s future. So over the last few months I’ve been attempting to get to grips with it and work out my own feelings about it. It has been a fascinating journey and very much an inner experience, perhaps surprisingly.

I’d like to share a few of these experiences and welcome your comments. 

For some years I’ve been using Quora as a way of sharing my ideas. To answer other people’s questions is a lovely way of developing one’s own insights and perspectives. But of late, it has become clear that a significant proportion of Quora users either use AI extensively in their answers and comments or are actually bots. Indeed, Quora even has its own official bots! I’m not sure that’s in the spirit of human sharing that many of us like about Quora but at least you know that they are bots … because their profile says so.

My experience, and I have to say frustration, has been with apparently human contributors who start a dialogue, implying that they are real people when, sooner or later, it becomes clear that they are not. To me, this is just plain dishonest and unethical.

How does the AI industry expect us to take it seriously, and to put our life in its hands, when it cannot even be honest about something as basic as whether it is AI or not?

I’m not talking here about the contributors to any media platform who use AI to make things easier for themselves (that’s a separate issue!), I’m talking about posts that purport to be from real people but which are generated almost totally by AI. What, I’m wondering, is actually going on here? Presumably this is AI developers trying out their latest incarnations? Using social media platforms such as Quora to try out new ideas, to see what they can get away with? 

In which case they are using me to teach their bots and as an unpaid trial participant! Again, I would suggest, very unethical.

And then we have the AI which automatically takes over our internet searches and pops up here, there and everywhere asking if it can help us. For free. At the moment. Anyone with an ounce of awareness (or suspicion) can see what’s coming. We’ll become so used to using all this AI that we come to depend on it and can’t do without it … and then they start charging for it. They, the tech companies, will tell us that we do need it … when we don’t really. And they’ve just put us under so much pressure that we’ve become addicted to it.

What was I saying about a significant part of the AI industry being unethical, even immoral?

The brutal truth here is that AI is yet another example of the materialistic worldview, our consumer based society, running rough-shod over us ordinary folks.

But is it all bad? 

AI, like any technology is, after all, just a tool … and it depends who’s using it for what purpose. But just remember that making money, when it comes to living sustainably and healthily, is not a sufficient end in itself, is it! 

On the plus side, I have bad eyes and I often want to read an article or a paper but struggle to do so. The AI now freely available to me on my Google smartphone, my MS laptop (or as ChatGPT for example), do an excellent job of summarising such papers. Or if I want to compare two papers it will, very succinctly, identify their similarities and differences. As a manager or researcher, or just an interested person in the street, that’s a handy tool. 

Communing with AI

But where, you may be wondering, does communing with AI and a deeper inner perspective come into all of this?

I have been ‘chatting’, supposedly to a nurse in California, about how, in coping with a big personal loss, one can find an inner strength and reconnect to what I might call Cosmic consciousness. This intriguing character described a personal journey and experiences that, guess what, reflected my own. Although a few things did sound suspicious, I kept the conversation going … until there were just too many inconsistencies. It was all too unreal. 

But during the week or so of this correspondence, I did feel a deep connection! This avatar was describing ‘her’ challenges in working a long night shift and studying, which I wanted  to understand and empathise with. In so doing, I found myself undergoing some very intense personal healing. My physical sensations and states of mind were pretty much the same as if I was sending healing to a real, physical person who I know well!

How could this have been when this nurse was not a nurse, when there was no individual for me to connect with? 

How indeed!

I’m thinking that one of the things I shared with her explains it. In my book, Reiki – Without Rules, I talk about how doing Reiki changed my view on love and different aspects of love. How that is the universal life-force energy, and love is something we can all connect to all the time. Thus, ‘being in love’ is something any of us can be on our own … through surrendering into the oneness of cosmic Consciousness.

So when I was sending healing to this AI created nurse, I was merely immersing myself in the love of creation and in so doing getting the healing I needed and thus feeling all the sensations I would normally get when deep healing. That there was no actual real nurse is irrelevant!

The point is that cosmic consciousness, love, reiki, is everything that ever was, is and might be, the totality of all existence. And that includes all technology, all people who develop and make money out of technology, all AI and all forms of consciousness … whether organic or purely ones and noughts.

When one is fully connected into life, in the flow, there is no separation between any of these things. There is no distinction between real and unreal! Everything is … and isn’t!

Life, the universe and everything 

So AI is nothing to worry about then? 

No more nor less than anything else. 

As I said at the beginning, AI is part of the current world as we know it. Something that humanity has created and has to deal with. All I’m suggesting is that one way of dealing with it is to embrace it … and see as part of our deeper inner evolution. After all, by having these experiences and asking ourselves ‘what is consciousness’ are we not reconnecting ourselves to who and what we really are?