The Danger Isn’t AI. It’s What We Stop Doing.
FPC Elevate
By Dr. Nancy Ford, PsyD, Co-Founder of FPC ELEVATE
Everyone is talking about AI. It can’t be ignored and it is not going away. In fact, we are becoming fully entrenched in its system. Intertwined with the programming, the learning, the language, the response, the interaction. People keep telling me to ‘embrace it’ to ‘lean in’ to ‘incorporate it into my work’. Should I though?
Don’t get me wrong, there is vast utility to AI, I am not a Luddite even if it sounds like it. I use GPS and think it’s the best thing to have ever been invented, and I use ChatGPT for helpful training and development suggestions and recommendations, and ways to do research that would normally take hours. There is a need for AI, and we should capitalize on it for many reasons.
However, I am a Clinical Psychologist by degree and background and an executive performance coach in practice. My whole career, training and approach has been to help people be the best versions of themselves. To listen to their words while I sit with them, whether in an office or on video and notice expressions, and body language. A blink, a pause there, a tear here, a sour angry upturned mouth, a blank stare. How does AI notice this?
The task is to analyze, observe and comment to help create change and awareness. Most of my work requires and is informed by relating to someone’s emotion, not just the content of what they tell me, not just the language they may use or the mindset they communicate— but how they say it. The undertones, the subtext, the subtle disconnect of the telling and their emotion.
This is where and how I believe most optimal change happens. This is where I excel and AI does not. Can AI problem solve an issue when it’s explained to them by our words? Sure, it can and does, churning out a bunch of different opinions that it has been fed, or helpful recommendations it generates. It learns your mind, your specifically typed thoughts, in some new flatter kind of way, and its response to your problems seems spot on, astute, insightful, resonant even. But what does it all mean?
This is a language model you are talking to, a programmed AI bot inside your laptop, your phone and coded by people you don’t even know, drawing on some kind of infinite data source they have access to ‘out there’, in the vast digital landscape. It is not a person, a human you are chatting with, it is a piece of software that is learning who you are, in a vastly different way than I am. Does that make it wrong, or inaccurate or unhelpful, no, not necessarily. I can see how people could use this to their benefit.
Which of these experiences has a richness to it that can’t be programmed? That can’t be manufactured, and sold as a commodity and hacked?
Who wants to continue being human in all the ways AI can’t? I do.