AI is coming for your job. Or your art. Or your husband (if he’s freaky that way). Depending on what article you read today, you may feel the sudden need to create a startup or begin researching bunker ventilation strategies.

I’ve been seeing increasing chatter around AI, and Substack being rich with writers, artists, and other creators, the slant clearly leans one direction. The conversation tends to be around whether we should be for or against this technological tsunami. From my position, however, I can’t help but feel this may be the wrong question to ask.

The Wrong Debate

Is AI good or bad? The answer probably boils down to a few factors such as what you do to make money and what your weaknesses or strengths are. There are other factors, but those tend to be the big, unacknowledged elephants in the room.

It makes for a spirited debate that often rages out of control and keeps us from asking a question that I feel is much more valuable: How do we stay human in the face of change this fast? How do we stay human when this disruption aims to alter the very thing that we consider makes us “human” in the first place?

As a distractible, curious person, my draw to AI is often seen as a pro-AI agenda. After all, we must be either for or against things. This is the human way.

In truth, I’m simultaneously fascinated and terrified of where we’ll end up, which is partly why the “for or against” arguments seem so misguided to me.

The Threat of Disorientation

AI, it is commonly argued, is an unnatural abomination. The problem, of course, is humanity’s been evolving away from “natural” since we learned to stand. What is a spear if not the claw we couldn’t grow?

Through fire, religion, agriculture, electricity, and the internet, we’ve been slowly upgrading our external systems. But our inner software hasn’t kept up.

Sending a difficult email leaves my hands sweaty—an evolutionary callback to a time when danger or discomfort meant you may need a bit of moisture to grip a tool or weapon. I don’t need to brain Gareth in accounting with a stone axe. I just need that file he promised.

Sometimes the hair on the back of my neck will rise in the face of a threat… useful when you have fur all over and you look suddenly bigger, but more of a strange feeling when you don’t.

Our external systems have always been updating at a blinding pace in comparison to our internal systems. If you gathered a line of people, each one representing a single generation, you'd only need about 70 to reach the time of Christ. Seventy handshakes. That’s all that separates us from the Roman Empire.

How about the advent of agriculture? Surely one of the most critical turning points in the development of our species was an inconceivable number of generations ago? It’s about 400.

That means your direct ancestral chain to a time when everyone was a nomadic hunter-gatherer only goes back a few hundred people. It’s not millions. It’s not even thousands. They’d all fit in a gymnasium.

This is a very long way of saying our external hardware has always been updating in real time, while our internal software is still troubleshooting the spear. And we’ve now introduced one of the most aggressive shifts in human history. The first one, in fact, that stands to replicate what makes us “human” in the first place. Meanwhile, our biology is still trying to figure out why it wants to brain Gareth with that axe.

Enter: Mindfulness

Mindfulness isn’t just breathing exercises. It’s the purposeful paying of attention to what’s happening around you without judgment. It means noticing what’s happening right now in your body, your thoughts, and your surroundings without immediately trying to fix, fight, or flee.

This may seem like an odd tool to require when faced with an existential crisis riding a wave of ones and zeroes, but in fact, it’s probably precisely what we’ll require.

Mindfulness is a glorious catch-all for when shit goes absolutely sideways. And friends, regardless of what side of the debate you find yourself, things will soon be sideways.

In times of crisis, you will never find a suggestion to lose your head and melt into panic. You need to breathe, take an inventory, and forge a path forward. Doing those things without a mindful practice (whatever that is to you) may prove impossible.

The Good or the Bad

So will AI be our savior or destroyer? The obnoxious answer from mindfulness advocates like yours truly is that it doesn’t really matter. You can’t plan for the weather in six hours, let alone the thousands upon thousands of micro events that will unfurl over the next few years.

Good events could be the elimination of many terrible diseases, jaw-dropping levels of abundance, and the rollback of horrific climate catastrophes. Bad events could be the loss of most jobs and robot wars.

You’re going to need mindfulness for either (and there’s no promise we won’t get both scenarios). If things go well, we may have to grapple with a crisis of meaning… when meaning comes from struggle, how do we develop meaning in struggle’s absence? If things go bad, only the steadiest of aim will be of benefit in the robot wars.

How to Stay Grounded

It feels legitimately stupid to suggest the following steps to deal with a potential war with robots, but it’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Attention is the superpower very few of us possess and appears to be rapidly draining from our toolboxes with every tap, swipe, and dopamine ding from our glossy hate machines.

These are your training reps—not just for the ensuing AI shift, but for whatever upheaval life decides to throw next:

Build an attention trigger
With every feeling of excitement, fear, anger, or whatever, greet it with a level of subtle curiosity. Where do you feel it in your body? How long does it last? Does it change as you give it attention?

This can be a great way to see that no emotions are constant. They swell and recede like tides, and much like tides, without your involvement. This can be a powerful way to keep yourself from becoming too high or too low in any given moment. That’s the thing with moments… there’s usually another one coming soon.

Monotask
We want to be able to do three things in one go, but that’s not how we operate. You can’t recite the alphabet backwards and count from 1–26 at the same time (you are free to try). Once you witness that, you can let go of the compulsion to do everything at once.

Once you release that compulsion, you can better answer the question: what matters in this moment? If you do that thing with your full attention, you might find you actually accomplish something, rather than flailing through a 14-item to-do list like a frenetic muppet, arms waving in the wind to zero positive outcome.

Digital Sabbath
There exist perspectives that say three days in nature is enough to “rewild” a human brain, which is to say, it’s enough time to reconnect to a more natural ecosystem than the one we’ve created.

Three days is a bit much, but there’s nothing saying a single day with your phone in a lockbox and a hike through the woods can’t get you some of the way there. How many problems have you had that felt insurmountable but ended up requiring only a slight tweak to turn around? Consider for a moment things aren’t actually as bad as you think, and that your ecosystem has turned a little toxic.

We Just Don’t Know

How mindfulness happens within your ecosystem is up to you. Perhaps you adopt a meditation practice, or maybe you simply take a minute to feel what’s happening within your body. How you do it doesn’t matter; we needn’t complicate things.

Despite how we all feel (myself included, shhh), we don’t truly know how any of this will turn out. The only constant we can probably bet on is that of rapid change, and that change will probably be uncomfortable.

Mindfulness can be a balm to such change. It can’t stop it from happening, but it can perhaps alleviate our burning demand that it cease.

The robots are coming. Let’s at least meet them with steady hands and full lungs.