Trust in Yourself, by Jade Kulhawy-Bartlett, R.Ac.
In recent months the only thing I have had any motivation to post about on my personal social media accounts is so-called Artificial Intelligence. That is, exclusively hollering about its negative attributes, celebrating its economic and political stumbles, and enumerating its many deleterious impacts on humans and the world around us. What is the main use of the internet these days if not as a forum for our grievances seamlessly interwoven with advertisements? As gratifying as it is to vent I am also trying to challenge myself to express my values more in terms of what I am for rather than only what I am against.
There are so many things to be against in this world – an endless supply by design when we are actively being manipulated toward overwhelm and over-activation by those who wield political and economic power. The excess of information we have available at hand commonly leaves most people feeling de-centred/ungrounded/whatever other common therapy-speak we want to use to describe the profound sense of disconnection from our bodies, from our interiority, and from what we want out of our lives.
This is where trust comes in.
Connecting with that little voice inside us that expresses our needs and desires requires a degree of implicit trust. Much the same as a voice that originates from without, we have to learn through reinforcement and positive experience that our inner voice is trustworthy and reliable. We are all capable of being diverted away from our core self by the many influences around us; a complication of humanity’s essentially social nature. Even 15 years ago the amount of information we were exposed to on a daily basis was far less than today, meaning we had more space to listen to and interrogate our own feelings about a situation or an event.
I believe that one of the central pillars of the destabilization we are enduring is the erosion of trust in oneself. I think this piece might be at the core of my discomfort with the main uses of AI in people’s personal lives, and most mundane professional uses. When we use an AI chatbot to write an email to a friend apologizing for some relational disrepair, to summarize a long series of texts we were sent in the family group chat, or to write our resume we are implicitly trusting this large language model algorithm to do so accurately and efficiently. In so doing we are transferring the trust we would normally confer upon ourselves to achieve one of these relatively basic tasks onto an Other, outside of ourselves.
On the scale of a single task this transfer is no big deal, right? We ask people to build us items or make us food at restaurants, tasks of which we could be capable – even if at a slower speed or a lower technical capacity than what they can achieve. However we each have hundreds of moments in our heavily-online lives every day where we have the opportunity to offload the effort, and the trust, involved in executing a task. Up until this point in history we may have externalized minute tasks adjacent to the process of creation – eg. checking for proper spelling and grammar, counting the number of words in a document. While we have automated the auxiliary tasks, the sentences and the words would have to be written by us, or at least copied from text another human wrote.
It isn’t merely the displacement of self-trust I would call attention to, but in whom that trust is being alternatively invested. At a restaurant or a shop we are trusting a human who is at least overseeing the process. With generative algorithms we are placing trust in an un(human)supervised technology that is created by corporations with financial incentive to limit our world view to one that benefits them. This would seem to preclude any perspective not aligned with continuous profit growth or the idea that ever-expanding technological development is unquestionably positive.
Part of the way we develop trust is by demonstrated competence. The more we place our trust outside ourselves to perform any less-and-less-small tasks, the more distrustful we will become of our ability to execute said tasks when we need to rise to that occasion. So not only are we losing the ability to competently perform the task, I argue we are also fostering a lack of trust in ourselves. We are investing ourselves in a future where we have both contributed to the atrophy of our abilities and made it less likely that we will continue to try to build those abilities in the future.
I’m okay with atrophy in my ability to create a fancy meal or sew clothing, because I currently live in a society where I can ask others – however indirectly – to do them for me. I am not okay with outsourcing my ability to query, contemplate, communicate, or discern; these faculties are much more foundational and to lose them would have a much more devastating impact on my ability to think for myself.
The lack of trust encouraged by the use of consumer generative AI models runs counter to the work we are trying to do with our clients. We may be treating each person for different signs and symptoms, but in every session we are ultimately trying encourage you to foster a deeper sense of trust and connection with your body. We rely on you to be able to report on your experience in words that will help us understand your inner world. In a culture where experiences with medicine can be alienating it is beneficial to carve out spaces in our lives where we are being trusted to be the expert in whatever is going on in our innermost selves. As acupuncturists we are able to receive and affirm those more subjective elements of human experience because our medicine was formulated to rely in large part on the subjective reports of patients. This is our strength in the face of many of the contemporary challenges humans are facing in a globalized and over-technologized world.
Ultimately it seems to me that anywhere in our lives we can increase our self-trust, and decentre the opinions or priorities of large corporations, the better off we will be in weathering the challenges ahead for us as a species. It helps me to remember that deep in our beings is a group of animals that survived and thrived and built up so many tools and skills because of the ways we worked together in community to overcome our individual shortcomings, to be stronger and more well-protected in collectivity. These social technologies are the ones that I want to be consulting when faced with an increasingly fractured and atomized world.
Needing to reconnect with your inner voice? Let’s work on some trust, together.
