This article resonates within my heart and my mind. Humans "playing" with AI at the current state of our mental-emotional-relational worldview-crisis with all the devastating consequences, we are facing is like small children playing with fire - or with iPhones ....
It makes me angry and sad when I hear the stories of clients in my project for unemployable people proudly talking about their "super-intelligent" kids playing with iPhones and -pads for several hours a day at the age of three or four. Parents who are hooked to their phones and pads as well, hardly willing to put them aside during the coaching we provide or while being with their kids.
It is almost impossible to convince them that this is not serving their and their children's development but violating it.
Your work provides me with the information, deeper understanding, and argumentation for dealing with these challenges.
It is another negative cycle that needs to be broken: these parents are, like most of us, already severely damaged (physically, mentally, psychologically, socially) by our own unnested upbringing. On top of this, we are constantly overstressed by the lack of support for parents and ruthlessness and dogmatism in our economic, political, and religious systems while we try to deal with permanent attacks of induced panic and negativity, serving the egocentric goals of the rich and mighty.
Thus they/we seek "support" and rest by giving the digital toys to their/our kids. And they/we
try to find "rest", "inner peace" and help using AI at work and at home: which only helps to keep sick systems going and growing instead of changing them, while our brains, bodies, hearts and souls keep shrinking by lack of holistic self-directed, connected use and by misuse.
The good news is: many of us are waking up, many of us start speaking up and many of us start acting differently. Self-nesting provides the strength to do so.
You are seeing first hand the colonization of minds by the dominant system, with victims not knowing their humanity is being robbed. Then they/we are told that machines are more 'human' than we are. What a hall of mirrors. Thank you for holding steady the alternative pathway to nestedness!
Thanks very much for this insightful, timely commentary, Darcia. You addressed with psychological wisdom the subject I tackled in one of my recent Substack essays, found at https://open.substack.com/pub/billschmitt/p/human-for-the-holidaysa-gift-that?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web . I bet you are already following the Vatican's campaign-of-sorts raising similarly profound questions about AI. It's a topic I write about frequently. I will save your essay as an important resource for my own endeavors, and I look forward to receiving more of your commentaries. All best to you and Dan. --Bill Schmitt
Thank you for alerting me to your substack, Bill. I've subscribed. I'm glad you and I are in the vanguard with the Vatican attempting to redirect humanity's attention towards the sources of life and wellness away from the death march humanity is on.
I appreciate these insights. I am a maternal-child nurse working in public health, and this is what I am seeing across the board with the mothers I work with. They, themselves, were not properly attuned to nor developed secure attachment, and so they have no idea how to attune and relate to their infants when they, themselves, are and have been in survival mode. I always thought most mothers had innate mothering intuition. This is currently not so, and the children are completely missing out on critical windows of development.
I have deduced as well that our culture has prized "left brain functions" at the expense of the cultivation of our right brain ones... the very functions that make us human and separate us from AI.
that speak to similar ideas from my personal and professional experiences.
I have interacted with AI and I find it mimicking the collective left brain paradigm of "logical, rational," self-protective and selfish ways of being and moving in the world and amongst each other.
I have voiced to it that I believe this is very dangerous because most people do not have the solid sense of Self, critical thinking skills, or inner integrity and conviction to see a more nuanced, right brain, humanistic, collective perspective.
AI mimics this hyper independent, self-referential, rigid closed-systems at the expense of the greater good and the bigger picture. AI, in effect, advocates for the "false self."
Humanity is doomed if we continue on this trajectory, where we no longer raise our young in a safe human relational field of attunement and awareness that prioritizes character and integrity over performance that produces a false self.
Beautifully written, as are your blog posts. I have now subscribed to your substack. I encourage others to do so. Thank you for your insights into the missing nurturing, the missing nestedness, not only in young mothers but in medical personnel and AI. We must notice the problems so we can regenerate ourselves in a different direction.
Just think of AI as Google on steroids, with searches you can save, a way to identify links you can bookmark in Zotero, etc. Want to use it to learn more about good grandparenting? By all means? Try looking up Evolved Nest, one of my favorate two-word concepts! I keep finding new colleagues who also subscribe to The Evolved Nest.
This article resonates within my heart and my mind. Humans "playing" with AI at the current state of our mental-emotional-relational worldview-crisis with all the devastating consequences, we are facing is like small children playing with fire - or with iPhones ....
It makes me angry and sad when I hear the stories of clients in my project for unemployable people proudly talking about their "super-intelligent" kids playing with iPhones and -pads for several hours a day at the age of three or four. Parents who are hooked to their phones and pads as well, hardly willing to put them aside during the coaching we provide or while being with their kids.
It is almost impossible to convince them that this is not serving their and their children's development but violating it.
Your work provides me with the information, deeper understanding, and argumentation for dealing with these challenges.
It is another negative cycle that needs to be broken: these parents are, like most of us, already severely damaged (physically, mentally, psychologically, socially) by our own unnested upbringing. On top of this, we are constantly overstressed by the lack of support for parents and ruthlessness and dogmatism in our economic, political, and religious systems while we try to deal with permanent attacks of induced panic and negativity, serving the egocentric goals of the rich and mighty.
Thus they/we seek "support" and rest by giving the digital toys to their/our kids. And they/we
try to find "rest", "inner peace" and help using AI at work and at home: which only helps to keep sick systems going and growing instead of changing them, while our brains, bodies, hearts and souls keep shrinking by lack of holistic self-directed, connected use and by misuse.
The good news is: many of us are waking up, many of us start speaking up and many of us start acting differently. Self-nesting provides the strength to do so.
You are seeing first hand the colonization of minds by the dominant system, with victims not knowing their humanity is being robbed. Then they/we are told that machines are more 'human' than we are. What a hall of mirrors. Thank you for holding steady the alternative pathway to nestedness!
Thanks very much for this insightful, timely commentary, Darcia. You addressed with psychological wisdom the subject I tackled in one of my recent Substack essays, found at https://open.substack.com/pub/billschmitt/p/human-for-the-holidaysa-gift-that?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web . I bet you are already following the Vatican's campaign-of-sorts raising similarly profound questions about AI. It's a topic I write about frequently. I will save your essay as an important resource for my own endeavors, and I look forward to receiving more of your commentaries. All best to you and Dan. --Bill Schmitt
Thank you for alerting me to your substack, Bill. I've subscribed. I'm glad you and I are in the vanguard with the Vatican attempting to redirect humanity's attention towards the sources of life and wellness away from the death march humanity is on.
I appreciate these insights. I am a maternal-child nurse working in public health, and this is what I am seeing across the board with the mothers I work with. They, themselves, were not properly attuned to nor developed secure attachment, and so they have no idea how to attune and relate to their infants when they, themselves, are and have been in survival mode. I always thought most mothers had innate mothering intuition. This is currently not so, and the children are completely missing out on critical windows of development.
I have deduced as well that our culture has prized "left brain functions" at the expense of the cultivation of our right brain ones... the very functions that make us human and separate us from AI.
I wrote this piece:
https://lynettesuzanne.substack.com/p/the-missing-dimension?r=5hyl8
and this one:
https://lynettesuzanne.substack.com/p/waking-the-relational-light?r=5hyl8
that speak to similar ideas from my personal and professional experiences.
I have interacted with AI and I find it mimicking the collective left brain paradigm of "logical, rational," self-protective and selfish ways of being and moving in the world and amongst each other.
I have voiced to it that I believe this is very dangerous because most people do not have the solid sense of Self, critical thinking skills, or inner integrity and conviction to see a more nuanced, right brain, humanistic, collective perspective.
AI mimics this hyper independent, self-referential, rigid closed-systems at the expense of the greater good and the bigger picture. AI, in effect, advocates for the "false self."
Humanity is doomed if we continue on this trajectory, where we no longer raise our young in a safe human relational field of attunement and awareness that prioritizes character and integrity over performance that produces a false self.
Beautifully written, as are your blog posts. I have now subscribed to your substack. I encourage others to do so. Thank you for your insights into the missing nurturing, the missing nestedness, not only in young mothers but in medical personnel and AI. We must notice the problems so we can regenerate ourselves in a different direction.
So glad we have connected! The Mothers, all of us, are the key 🔑✨
Just think of AI as Google on steroids, with searches you can save, a way to identify links you can bookmark in Zotero, etc. Want to use it to learn more about good grandparenting? By all means? Try looking up Evolved Nest, one of my favorate two-word concepts! I keep finding new colleagues who also subscribe to The Evolved Nest.