It has taken me years to really put a name or a word to what it is that bugs me about AI and about the ubiquity of multi-tasking. I was not even aware there was a connection until that thread began to make itself known. The answer presented itself in a moment of awareness as I was listening to an unintentional ASMR from a spiritual teacher named Neelam. She talked about noticing presence and argued that we are, “Used to paying attention to something else. Used to getting involved in what arises.”
There it is. There it is in full. Thousands of years of faith and teaching handed down by eastern philosophers boiled down into a simple phrase–presence. It was as if the problems of today are the problems of always. It is about presence and paying attention. Specifically, it is about being able to hear your inner voice. I argue that multitasking and AI silence your inner voice. To take it one step further, multi-tasking silences that voice while AI seeks to replace it and through doing so, silences that voice.
If you can look back to your childhood, perhaps you can remember that inner voice. Perhaps we can recognize the energy and intention of that voice, and how it shaped who we are. That inner voice continues to guide and fuel us. However, through the use of these external tools and through the multitasking we are so inclined to participate in, we lose that central mooring. We become cyborgs in nature, the machine becomes our inner voice–our mooring.
I’ve slowly lost my own inner voice by interacting with so much media and even AI. It has become natural to reach outward as opposed to reaching inward. That shift away from the self silences the inner voice, which is where creativity and self-belief is grounded. I need to turn back inward. From here is where the truth and true story shall be rediscovered.