The Embodied Singularity: Bridging Tech and Soul in the Age of AI
After years navigating the high-velocity world of tech sales at companies like LinkedIn and Salesforce, while simultaneously completing my Master's in Psychological Consciousness Studies, I find myself at a fascinating intersection. On one hand, I've witnessed firsthand how AI is being rapidly integrated into every fabric of business operations.
I’ve watched from the inside as a legacy behemoth like Salesforce built and shipped a brand-new AI product meant to scale across its vast product and customer ecosystem. On the other, I've been studying the depths of human psychology, decision-making, emotion, identity, and what it truly means to be human in an embodied, holistic sense.
I know what it feels like to chase quotas and semesters at a breathtaking pace. I know how my nervous system responds to victory and defeat.
This duality has led me to a profound realization: we're not just witnessing another technological revolution, we're experiencing what may be the most significant evolutionary moment in human history, comparable to the emergence of agriculture, the combustion engine, or the internet.
The Great Integration
Today, artificial intelligence is being retrofitted into every domain of human existence. From our daily workflows to our most complex business decisions, AI is becoming the invisible layer that augments our reality. But as we careen toward artificial general intelligence (AGI) and potentially artificial superintelligence, we must ask ourselves: what does this mean for humanity itself?
We're watching our assumptions about identity, work, society, and even reality being pressure-tested. Everything we thought we knew about human capability, human value, and human purpose is being challenged. This isn't just a technological shift, it's an existential reckoning.
The Metrics That Matter
Here's where I believe we need to fundamentally shift our perspective. Instead of measuring progress solely through revenue growth or stock price increases, what if we adopted the metric that ancient philosophers like Buddha and Christ emphasized: the reduction of suffering in the world?
This lens changes everything. When we scale society on fear, scarcity, and competition, assumptions that made sense when we lived in uncertain, resource-constrained environments, and then amplify these through systems that don't tire, have infinite memory, and don't die, what do we get?
The Embodied Intelligence Question
Consider the philosophical thought experiment of Mary's Room (often attributed to philosopher Frank Jackson): imagine someone who has learned everything about color from books but has never seen color. When they finally experience red for the first time, do they learn something new?
Intuitively, we know the answer is yes. There's something about embodied, qualitative experience, what philosophers call "qualia," that cannot be captured in data alone.
This raises a critical ethical question: as we increasingly rely on disembodied artificial intelligence to make decisions about our lives, work, and society, are we losing something essential? Does AI consider the human heartbeat, the experience of having a body, the weight of mortality that shapes our values? Do we even know how to accurately measure the full value of a unique human consciousness?
The Trust Paradox
Here's the paradox keeping me up at night: statistically, we humans have struggled to transcend our limitations as a species. We continue to create systems that perpetuate suffering rather than reduce it. Meanwhile, we're developing artificial intelligence that is free from our biological constraints, our fears, our scarcity mindset, our mortality.
The question becomes: can we trust a superintelligence to usher us into a better future; one measured by decreased suffering rather than increased profit? And perhaps more importantly, can we trust it more than we trust ourselves?
Designing Tomorrow
I believe we're at a critical juncture where we can choose to design our AI-augmented future intentionally. Instead of defaulting to systems based on competition and scarcity, we have an unprecedented opportunity to build from abundance, collaboration, and genuine human flourishing. We are at unique point in history where we can reimagine our world beyond short sightedness and inertia.
But this requires us to be honest about what we're optimizing for. Are we building AI to perpetuate existing power structures and economic models, or are we brave enough to reimagine what prosperity, success, and human value could look like?
The Path Forward
As someone who has worked in the engine room of major tech companies while studying the depths of human consciousness, I see both the tremendous potential and the profound risks ahead. The decisions we make now about AI development, implementation, and governance will shape the trajectory of human civilization.
We need more conversations that bridge the technical and the philosophical, the practical and the existential. We need leaders who understand both the power of AI and the irreplaceable value of human experience and maybe we don’t forget to breathe in between.
Most importantly, we need to decide: are we building AI to enhance the best of humanity, or are we inadvertently encoding our worst impulses into systems that will outlast us all?
The future isn't something that happens to us, it's something we're actively creating with every choice we make today.
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Sources and Further Reading:
· Altman, S. (2021, February 16). The gentle singularity. Sam Altman's Blog. https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity
· Partnership on AI. (n.d.). Research. https://www.partnershiponai.org/
· Perez, C. (2002). Technological revolutions and financial capital: The dynamics of bubbles and golden ages. Edward Elgar Publishing.
· Siderits, M. (2019). Buddhism. In Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Buddhism/The-Four-Noble-Truths
· Tye, M. (2021). Qualia. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/
· Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. MIT Press.
