The Coming Relationship Revolution

Artificial Intelligence is changing everything. It will drive for you. It will work in factories for you. It will sort for you. It will automate logistics. It will organize a meeting. It will find and summarize legal forms better than any lawyer for a fraction of the price. It will replace accountants. It can produce movies and edit photos. It will write for you. It will think for you.

AI is already revolutionizing the world that you live in.

And yet, I find myself less focused on the AI Revolution and more focused on the coming Relationship Revolution.

Many of the commentators I hear on where we are with technology is dystopian.

The internet has given us access to information so that we may know more, and yet it has left us with a shallow version of knowing. People know about a wide variety of things, and yet have developed no deep understanding of anything.

Social media gave us the ability to have access to our friends anytime and anywhere that we might grow closer together. Yet, we find ourselves in the midst of a loneliness crisis and many find themselves blaming social media.

AI has given us the ability to synthesize large swaths of information and find the right answer to any number of questions. You may think that it gives us power, that AI makes us superhuman. And yet, we are quickly understanding that AI, in fact, makes us less human.

As AI takes over tasks like driving, working, sorting, and thinking, we are at risk of outsourcing not just our labor but our humanity. The more we lean on technology to know, create, and connect, the more we drift from the essence of what makes a human a human.

The AI revolution is exposing something that we have lost. It is pulling back the curtains, revealing the shallowness of scrolling information without really knowing. It shows us the fragility of social bonds only held together by a string of liked posts. It is revealing to us that part of the enjoyment of work is in the process of working, not merely getting the answer.

The AI revolution is a wake up call against technological determinism. Not that we should reject technology, but instead choosing to prioritize what technology cannot replicate.

The AI revolution is going to lead us into something much greater: a relationship revolution.

This relationship revolution is about rediscovering the human skills we’ve neglected. AI and machines cannot create the type of art we hold so fondly. We have mass produced many of our furnishings, but I believe we are discovering that our everyday objects have a beauty to them not because they are prefect, but because in their human touch there is a hint of imperfection. In having our emails and speeches written by AI, everything is so perfectly crafted that it becomes stale.

We inherently crave other humans. Part of dealing with humans is their imperfection.

I believe that this next great technological moment is our human moment, defining for us more clearly than ever what it means to be human. My hope is that this AI revolution allows us to reclaim some of the things technology has taken from us. I hope we rebuild relationships and develop our ability to be social.

Join me in the revolution. Choose to be human.

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