Reflections on AI and Humanity With Arianna Huffington
Arianna Huffington was hosted at Lehigh University for a wide-ranging discussion centered on AI, but covered much more. I certainly will not try to summarize the entire conversation, but will focus on three key takeaways and my reflections on them as she told stories and shared perspectives.
Learning from Every Opportunity
The first was fundamentally the opportunity to learn from every experience, even from failure (if failure is even the right word). Huffington states, “Failure is not the opposite of success, it’s the stepping stone to success.” That applies to many different things, but one of my favorite and most compelling stories that relates to this theme was when she ran for governor of California.
She was one of a wide swath of candidates who eventually lost to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and she was only in the election for one and a half months. However, during that time, they did an online campaign which got picked up by other media, including national media, and essentially went viral.
She learned from that experience the power of online media, and that insight eventually led to the starting of The Huffington Post, which of course really helped accelerate her career, her influence and impact on the world.
The lesson we should all take away from this is that we should be open to a pivot, open to possibilities, and open to opportunities. We should learn from all of them because you never know when a lesson may appear that may set you on a different trajectory.
Democratizing healthcare coaching with AI
The second takeaway centers on AI and her focus with Thrive AI Health. Her belief is that she can democratize healthcare coaching. It’s important to note we’re not saying healthcare, but healthcare coaching.
In part, her focus with Thrive is on fundamentals of health that are often not treated and ignored by healthcare professionals, such as sleep. In Thrive, in her book, and in Thrive AI, she has a lot of focus on habits, nudges, and microsteps.
The goal is to be pragmatic and make things fit within your life in a way that actually makes sense and is likely to be implemented. As that happens, habits are small, little things that start to become routine. For example, as she focused a lot on sleep, my phone is never next to my bed. It is often two floors away. This is a very significant habit where she believes it’s an excuse that many people use, needing their phone as an alarm clock or a backup alarm clock. But that really just helps support a bad habit instead.
Nudges, of course, are things that just move us in that direction and help us adjust our habits. Microsteps are essentially actions that we take, but they can be very small actions that move us in the right direction, whether that’s around hydration, sleep, or stress.
While Thrive AI isn’t democratizing healthcare, it is meant to democratize healthcare coaching, where you can get personalized coaching while AI learns your lifestyle, preferences, history, and so on. Most people do not have access to coaching, which means they often end up just learning tips and tricks without verification on social media.
A new scientific dethronement
The third takeaway is that she talked about the history of dethronement, with ideas originating from Freud’s 1917 paper A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis, where we essentially dethrone a core idea (almost a collective identity) from a scientific or technological viewpoint, and new ideas and new perspectives come along that dethrone old ones.
The first major dethronement was overthrowing the idea that the Earth was the center of the universe. This was the Cosmological Blow brought about by Copernicus and Galileo. The second dethronement was the Biological Blow brought about by Darmin. The third is the Psychological Blow, which is what Freud was promoting around psychoanalysis and the unconscious mind (which is incredibly bold to position his views and his stature as equivalent to these other giants, but I digress).
But where this leads is that AI is possibly another dethronement moment, where AI essentially dethrones human intelligence as a core part of our identity. If AI fundamentally becomes more intelligent than humans, then we have to have a conversation about who we are. Are we all about our intellect, or are we more about our consciousness?
Do we have to focus less on making a living and more on making a life? She believes this is the key to education and perhaps, in fact, in an AI-heavy world, we need more focus on the humanities, even the study of classics, to help develop that consciousness around what it means to be human.
As many things that are simply jobs to be done, knowledge to be held, or knowledge to be wielded in a raw intellectual world, AI may eventually significantly replace humans. And so humanity actually becomes what’s fundamentally more important.
A last thought…
These were interesting takeaways from the conversation with Arianna Huffington, and I encourage you to go listen to speakers wherever you have a chance, whether you agree with them or not, to help stimulate your thinking and your own ideas around how you view the world.