I was running a Short Workshop last week, and we were discussing the importance of Presence – and specifically, just how frustrating we each found it when we ended up trying to access help from an AI-powered robot instead of a human being; on banking apps, for example…
The reason we find it so frustrating is that AI has no actual human or emotional intelligence; it has no capacity for empathy, or for connection. When we are using it, it is generally because we need help with something – so we are already stressed, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on our problem. What we are usually needing in this moment is connection and understanding, and what we receive is a blankness… there is nothing with whom we can connect. It’s frustrating, isn’t it…?
As we feel that frustration, it’s easy enough to blame the app, or blame AI, or the company whose help we are trying to access. But here’s the thing… in that moment, there’s no-one else there. There is only ourselves, and AI reflects ourselves back at us, and we don’t like that at all…
It’s so much easier when we can blame the other party for ‘making’ us angry, or sad, or whatever – but nobody ‘makes’ us feel or do anything – we do that to ourselves. Other people may push our buttons, but they do so because the buttons are there in the first place – it’s our ‘stuff’. Deepak Chopra calls this ‘the mirror of relationship’ – we project onto other people whatever it is that needs healing in ourselves – and Carl Jung said much the same thing when he said, “Everthing that irritates us about others can lead to an understanding of ourselves.” But first we need to own it…
So the next time you are feeling frustrated about AI, or with your phone, or with tangled Christmas Tree lights, just take a deep breath and ask yourself, “What is there for me to learn here…?”
