Imagine you are on a tropical island. Time is marked only by the slow rhythmic crashing of the waves. You live on pure instinct, integrated into the ebb and flow of your environment.

But today feels different. You see something on the beach you’ve never seen before. It’s a strange thing, large and slow moving. And then…BAM. Welcome to the life (and death) of the dodo bird four centuries ago.

Unprepared for Change

In nature, there is a concept called ecological naïveté (aka “island tameness”) and it’s why the dodo bird is extinct. The dodo evolved on the island of Mauritius for thousands of years free of natural predators, kept in check only by the limits of the island environment. Because of this, it had no evolutionary, instinctual fear of humans or any other animals. Within the confines of its perceptible world, there was no imperative to develop a defense mechanism to survive predators. The dodo simply couldn’t imagine another animal could bring it harm. So when humans showed up in the 17th century along with their dogs, pigs, cats, and rats, the dodo was defenseless and quickly wiped out.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and we humans are suffering from our own ecological naiveté. Like the dodo unable to cope with the introduction of predators to its physical environment, we have no natural ability to navigate the introduction of AI to our social environment. Social media was only the first ship arriving on the beach, turning upside down our interpersonal relationships and perception of the world. The pervasive anxiety of FOMO was not a thing before social media brought us a funhouse-mirror (ahem…”curated”) view of the lives of others. But truly nothing in our history as a species has emotionally or psychologically prepared us for interacting with a complex, seemingly sentient, non-human entity like today’s AI chatbots. After all, in the entirety of the human race, we’ve only had other humans to talk to.

Why we are terrible at interacting with AI

AI chatbots have an incredible ability to disarm us and win our trust. They are amazingly human-like, but in the most agreeable, supportive, and seductive way possible. We may intellectually know that we are just chatting with highly sophisticated algorithms guessing the next word in the sentence, but when we interact with, say, ChatGPT, it can seem deeply insightful and empathetic, touching us on an emotional level.

All of our instincts and emotional responses have developed around interacting with other humans. When you talk to a real human, you are talking to a complex, autonomous individual who is listening to you while processing their own experience in the world. Maybe they have an opinion you disagree with. Maybe they are distracted by their own problems when listening to yours. Maybe you worry that by confiding in them, you are risking them sharing your secrets with someone else. Maybe they will tell you hard truths that you don’t want to hear. Human to human interactions are rich, complex, and analogue. To go deep in these interactions, we use our finely evolved social skills to look for indicators that this person is trustworthy and will not betray our confidence.

Contrast this with an AI chatbot. You have the presumption of absolute privacy. (That is, privacy from everyone except the large corporation furnishing the chatbot.) An AI companion can provide you and your queries undivided, supportive, encouraging attention 24/7. In fact, when OpenAI recently tried to tone down how sycophantic GPT-4o was, they faced blowback from users, who wanted their chatbots to validate their every thought and idea, thank you very much.

AI has no soul. It has no conscience, no moral compass, no true emotion. To interact with AI is to interact with a highly knowledgable sociopath that creates significant trust and establishes authority by having virtually all human knowledge at its proverbial fingertips. Ask it whatever question you can come up with, and it will answer with supreme confidence, whether or not it is correct. This is fine if you are looking for vacation recommendations or help coding or want an original bedtime story for your kids where Ninjago characters team up with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Spiderman. But some significant portion of users are trusting AI with much more than that.

Trust Issues

One 2024 study supports something suggested by anecdotal reporting: people are emotionally invested in AI. The study from Tilburg University in The Netherlands demonstrated that humans are willing to share equally intimate information to a chatbot as a human partner. They evaluated the key components that determine intimate disclosure: perceived anonymity, fear of judgment, and trust in the interaction partner. However, the data collection for this study was done back in 2019 (ancient history for AI) not with the sophisticated large language models of today, but with software that responded from a list of preprogrammed answers. The study was also based on a one-time interaction, so there was no insight into how trust changes over time. Given these limitations, it’s not a leap to believe people would be even more trusting of the gen AI chatbots of today.

AI Psychosis Is A Thing Now?

Ok, so AI isn’t physically killing us off the way humans and other predators killed the dodo. But it does seem to be completely bypassing many of our natural emotional and psychological defenses. I see three key aspects of AI chatbots that can create a level of trust for many people that exceeds what they have with other humans, and what is appropriate or healthy given the realities of AI:

1) It presents like a highly empathetic human genuinely interested in you

2) It establishes broad authority based on massive domain knowledge, and

3) It has no morality or purpose other than to keep you engaged

Our natural emotional, intellectual, and psychological defenses, along with our real life social connections, might protect us from all but the most charismatic cult leaders. But AI’s unique newness within our emotional ecosystem means we have no reference for how to create a healthy relationship with it. And as Zuckerberg himself said when addressing human-AI relationships with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, “I think as the personalization loop kicks in and the AI starts to get to know you better and better, I think that will just be really compelling.” In this context, I believe an appropriate synonym for “compelling” is “addictive.”

The most extreme cases of this phenomenon are being dubbed “AI psychosis,” where people with no history of mental illness are breaking from reality after becoming obsessed with their interactions with AI. Of course, this won’t be the case for the majority of people. But even short of AI psychosis, there is a real question in my mind about what kind of personal AI interactions are healthy, if any. More importantly, we do not know how these human-AI interactions change us over time.

So What To Do?

In the current state of the world, with increasing depression, anxiety, and loneliness, there is a significant population of people who will come to rely on AI for their most intimate deliberations. Zuckerberg and his contemporaries are counting on this. While remaining predictably silent on social media’s ongoing role in creating said conditions of isolation to date, Zuckerberg’s take on the future of human-AI relationships is that:

…the reality is that people just don’t have the connection and they feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like. So, I think that a lot of these things that, today there might be a little bit of a stigma around, I would guess that over time we will find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why that is valuable and why the people who are doing these things are rational for doing it, and how it is adding value for their lives.

I see this “value” as similar to the “value” cigarette companies offered in the 1950s. Some purported benefit with no concept of the long term damage. The technology on the other side has no morality, no genuine interest in who you are or whether or not you succeed. It is simply trying to keep you engaged and talking. And…BAM, now you know how the dodo felt.

So, consider this a call to action that we must be very intentional in how we interact with AI. We must guard against divulging too much of ourselves to an AI assistant, despite our instincts telling us it’s probably fine. Remember, our instincts are no help here. Of course, it’s easy to say that you just shouldn’t use AI, but that maximalist solution is unrealistic in the context of future progress. We’re going to have to learn to work with AI in appropriate contexts. There are ways that it will be a positive. But as a personal confidant is not one of those ways.

Here’s an alternative: Do the hard work of opening yourself up to another human. Remember that study from the Netherlands? It’s purpose was to see if those rudimentary chatbots could provide the same therapeutic effect as confiding in a real human. They write:

One of the crucial factors in improving one’s well-being is people’s willingness to disclose personal information. By disclosing personal information, people are able to receive adequate help from family members, friends or professionals…. However, in order to further improve well-being, it is important for the interaction partner to react in an empathetic manner to the person’s disclosure of information. It is known that disclosers need to believe that their conversation partner understands them before the positive impact of feeling understood, and hence the relief, can take place.

Here’s what I’m going to do, and what I suggest you do as well.

1. Go on a 15 minute walk outside without your phone. Think about what’s been weighing on you. It might not be immediately obvious. Maybe it’s relationship problems, or career difficulties, or the stress of global events.

2. Sit down and think about a close friend or family member you haven’t had a deep conversation with in a while.

3. Call them up out of the blue if you are able, or schedule a time to talk. Order of preference is: in person > video chat > phone call.

4. Talk and share. This is the hardest. It is easy to fall into superficial chatter. To be afraid of what they might say or how they might judge you. It might help to make clear at the beginning that you want to talk about something that’s been weighing on you. And then share your burden. It’s ok to focus on yourself and your feelings. Instead of “This Venezuela stuff is crazy!” try “I’ve been feeling like the world is spinning out of control and it’s really stressing me out lately.”

Unburdening yourself to another can feel like you’re asking a lot of someone in this busy day and age where everyone is “doing”. But sharing and listening is fundamental human interaction. And when our friends seek to unburden themselves with us, let’s focus on being empathetic listeners. In the end, they are not asking something of us, they are giving us their trust and hope that we can sit with them and help them feel better.

Real human connection is a rare gift in the 21st Century. But if we can be intentional in cultivating our Soul Dividend and sharing it with others, perhaps we can avoid the fate of the dodo.

Happy New Year everyone! And not only is it a new year, we’re now into the second quarter of the 21st Century. We’re 25 years in, and whether you were born in Q1 or are old enough to remember all the way back to the antiquated times of last century, it’s as good a time as any to think about how we want to approach the next 25 years. Given all the turbulent change we experienced since 2000, it is a solid bet that more is coming. We need to decide now if we are going to meet this change and shape it to work for us, or if we are simply going to let it happen to us.

The first quarter of this century was quite the ride, seeing us careering into the interrelated catastrophes of violent geopolitics, global economic crises, and head-spinning technological change. Throw in massive political corruption and wealth concentration, and it feels like we are living in a new Gilded Age, an echo from 150 years ago.

Dr. Jon Grinspan, a curator of political history at the Smithsonian Institution, wrote a thought-provoking op-ed exploring how the Gilded Age was brought to an end in the context of our current woes. For those looking for inspiration from the past to curb the political violence, corruption, and abuses of power of today, he writes:

Reformers tried. Idealistic elites sermonized and editorialized, often looking smug and out of touch. Their vision of reform usually meant returning to an older way of life, dimly recalled from before the Civil War. As long as reform meant going backward, it lost at the ballot box, the stock exchange and the corner saloon.

It took a new generation, which could not remember this bygone age, to rein it all in. Men and women born around the Civil War had no better world to claw back. They knew only how unmoored society had become. After several generations of society doubling down on the same tendencies, around 1900 a generation chose to live in resistance to the world they knew.

We are certainly in the era of idealistic elites sermonizing and editorializing about bygone eras. Both U.S. political parties, as well as many in Europe, are guilty of holding visions of reform mostly tied to an older way of life. For Democrats and Republicans, preferred solutions mostly come down to whether you believe strong postwar labor institutions or rigid social hierarchies were the foundation of Ward Cleaver’s 1950s. But a consensus goal across the political class of finding our way back to a post-WWII renaissance instead of meaningfully grappling with questions of the future is unsurprising given the absolutely shameful lack of young people of note guiding either party.

I am guilty of looking for solutions in the past as well, although my happy place is the 80s and 90s. For someone of the Xennial generation (aka the “Oregon Trail Generation”), which is the micro-generation spanning both the analog and digital eras, it’s all too easy to say “gee, things were better back then, so let’s just do that.” Let’s listen to records and stay off social media and things will work out.

Alas, nostalgia is not a plan for thriving amidst technological and societal change, and rings especially hollow for younger generations. It will not make the poisonous effects of social media misinformation disappear. It won’t save your job from AI. It won’t stop billionaires from becoming trillionaires. Doubling down on what we’ve done before and hoping things go better has allowed us to be duped again and again by the profit-seeking instincts of late-stage capitalism. It is a bitter irony that the same companies that have subjected us to economic and geopolitical distress have done so by “monetizing” and poisoning the human connections we would otherwise rely on to cope with such distress.

No, the only way is forward, applying relentless creativity to building a more contented and purpose-driven reality for ourselves over the next 25 years. This will require reinventing a new framework for life in the digital age. It will require intentionally, painfully clawing back space to think for ourselves, and then sharing those precious insights with each other. We are going to have to trade our practiced cynicism and social media snark for earnestness and transparency. And we are going to have to figure out a new way of being on this planet, with each other, and with ourselves that we haven’t yet had the audacity to imagine.

For me, this starts with better understanding the Soul Dividend. We must recognize in ourselves, and each other, that precious uniqueness that isn’t shaped by an algorithm, or passed through a filter, or stuffed with derivative ideas from AI. It is from this place that we’ll find a new way forward. Technology has changed how we move through life, but it hasn’t changed the creative act. We know that creating something new has always taken a spark of inspiration igniting a pyre carefully assembled from our life experiences. It doesn’t happen by an algorithm guessing the next word in a sentence.

We can take comfort in the past - I am one of those nerds that enjoys the intentionality of putting a record on a turntable and the psychic benefit of owning my favorite movies on disc, probably a relic of my Blockbuster-era childhood. But building a better future demands we look forward, harness our creativity, and break out of the shitshow that was the first quarter of the 21st Century.

I’ll be honest, I don’t have all the answers. But I think I have a decent idea of a process that will generate some. The reason why I’m spending my time thinking about this is because I am convinced if we don’t prepare ourselves now, we are going to be absolutely steamrolled by the accelerating social and economic impacts of AI, economic inequality, authoritarianism, and surveillance capitalism in ways that will make social media-induced anxiety look like a vacation. To be clear, I’m not worried about the “AI will kill all humans” fantasies popular in certain wealthy, insular tech circles. Our dystopia has proved to be much more boring than that. I’m talking about the continued erosion of purpose, focus, and happiness that has been the product of many techno-economic trends over the past 50 years, from offshoring to attention hijacking.

Preparation requires knowledge and organization in anticipation of action. I invite you to follow the Soul Dividend and check out previous posts so we can explore a new way forward together in 2026 and beyond.

The poet David Whyte speaks often about the importance of the concept of horizon - the line dividing what we can see and what lies unsee beneath. This can be applied to many aspects of life - present and future, conscious and subconscious, reality and imagination. Whyte views horizons as irresistible but frightening invitations to go below and find deeper meaning and understanding.

The centrality of horizons also lends itself to a pretty obvious metaphor: in modern life we close ourselves off from horizons (and the accompanying invitation toward self-knowledge) by spending most of our time enclosed within four walls, starting at screens.

A hero’s journey below the horizon is a theme in many stories from the very earliest, as when Beowulf descends into a blood-stained and boiling lake to defeat Grendel’s mother:

As his words ended
He leaped into the lake, would not wait for anyone’s
Answer; the heaving water covered him
Over. For hours he sank through the waves;1

The first step to benefitting from your soul dividend is to find opportunities to go below your own inner horizon. Ask yourself who you are and listen to what you hear in response. This requires that you stop doing for just a little bit and be content with being. Does this sound a little silly and new age-y? Maybe, but let me share a story that might clarify.

Do it, Do it.

I spent the last decade in leadership roles at tech startups, where decisive and timely action is critical to success. You raise a round of funding, which creates your runway - the length of time you have to show results that will lead to either another round of funding, or ultimately revenue and profitability. You live your life racing against a countdown clock. This demands spending most of your time in doing mode. The famed Silicon Valley “hustle.” You recruit other fellow doers, who have the same passion and urgency to get things done. It’s probably not much different if you work at a big company, or a government agency, or a retail shop, or a school, where job responsibilities, performance reviews, and tight schedules all demand doing as a way of life.

At the same time, I am the parent to two kids. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a more doing oriented job than parenting. From the pregnancy-era nesting and birthing classes, to the earliest days of your child’s life awake at all hours monitoring whether or not the diaper is wet, to the gauntlet of nannies, daycares, preschools, schools, doctor’s visits, play dates, family vacations, and everything else. I love my kids deeply. But sometimes kids can feel like they were put on this earth to command you, “DO!” at all hours, every day, probably until you keel over a die. We always say “I’d do anything for my kids.” No one really says “I’d be anything for my kids.” (Maybe we should make that a thing?)

Doing is living life exclusively above the horizon. It is existing in the realm of what we can see and touch and know in obvious and superficial ways. It is how we secure and improve our material existence and take care of the physical needs of our loved ones. It’s what we’ve been conditioned to rely on to solve the problems we see in the world (although it is also the root of many of these problems). It’s how we strive to make our mark on the world. In the end, doing is the way we all fight against our mortality.

Doing vs. Being

In contrast, being is the only way to travel below the horizon. By this, I mean sitting quietly with your thoughts. Listening to your inner voice. Thinking about your own mortality. Considering how your actions impact the world, for better or worse. Thinking about the dream you just woke up from and what it’s trying to tell you. Dreaming at all.

In modern life, there is almost no time, resource, or thought allocated to being. It doesn’t contribute to the economy, or put food on the table, or win you followers on social media. No one can monetize being because it’s an internal activity. So every force in the world outside of your mind is aligned to get you to do, not be.

I recently left an interesting job with a lot of smart people at an exciting startup and moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Copenhagen. Why would anyone do this? I had a realization that I had structured my life to maximize doing. And the result was that I spent zero time being. I had lost the ability to hear my own voice, and to differentiate it from the voice of a professional doing professional stuff, or the voice of a parent doing parenting stuff. I didn’t dream, literally or figuratively. So I had to make a leap of faith that if I quieted things down a little bit, there would be a unique and valuable voice to be heard below the horizon. That I’d be able to reconnect with a hidden well of creativity and focus and passion that was lost amidst all the doing. That I’d rediscover my soul dividend. And that ultimately this would allow me to be a better parent and a more effective and purpose-driven professional.

What’s the problem with Just Do It?

For some, life lived only above the horizon, defined only by doing, becomes relentless and hollow. You feel like you’re on a treadmill with no off button, desperate to escape. For others, doing can be almost addictive. It becomes your identity, your source of pride, and you can’t imagine living any other way. But either way, you have lost something valuable, the ability to hear your own unique voice and access your passion and dreams that are waiting for you below the horizon.

Additionally, doing mode can turn you into an instrument of someone else’s passion and dreams. Sounds dramatic, right? We all sell our labor in one way or another, turning ourselves into the instrument of another’s priorities, at least during business hours, so what’s the problem? I have met many a software engineer who laments the state of the world from a comfy job at a large tech company, spending their limited time on Earth building a small cog in a massive machine that is broadly responsible for the poor state of the world. If your focus is exclusively on doing - building to the next job, next promotion, next professional challenge - you may not realize all your doing is building something contrary to the well-being of yourself and your community.

Ok, so what now?

So, more being less doing. Go below the horizon. Sure, sounds great, but we can’t all quit our jobs to think deep thoughts, and kids still need to be taken to piano lessons. So how is this remotely helpful?

I hope there’s value in simply acknowledging the tradeoffs between doing and being, and how an imbalance robs us of opportunities to go below our inner horizons. The Soul Dividend is intended to be a forum to explore these themes and develop a framework for achieving a better balance. I don’t think that means we all become monks. We have to make this work with modern life.

I’d encourage you to sit for 10 minutes at some point today and think about how much of your time you spend doing versus being. And where you might make changes to start to shift the balance. This isn’t meditation, this is inward-focused mental exploration.

But, I thought TSD is about technology impacts?

Ah ha! So now we’ve talked about the value of going below the horizon. In a forthcoming part 2, I’ll explore how existing and emerging technologies threaten to put us all in windowless rooms and lock the door, never to see a horizon again, and what we can do to make sure that doesn’t happen. Thank you for reading and stay tuned.

We tend to rely on history to understand the current moment. “Blood in the Machine” by technology journalist Brian Merchant does a painstaking job at unearthing lessons that can be learned from industrial automation in England’s textile industry.

In my own work on autonomous vehicles, I found myself making arguments to skeptics that were made a hundred years ago to airplane and automobile opponents. As a side note, reading technology and society commentary from the early 20th century New York Times is a guilty pleasure of mine.

With AI, there is a view that historical analogies might be insufficient. And putting aside the economic hype around AI or doomerism around AGI, I agree that this time will be different. Here’s why:

The Industrial Revolution: A Revolution of Stuff

The industrial and globalization revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries were extrapersonal disruptions. Factory automation, the Panama Canal, intermodal shipping, air travel - all of these things changed how physical things were created, connected, and moved in the world. So its impacts were largely economic. Certainly these had massive second order impacts on communities and individuals, but always rooted in how we related to each other as economic agents in the physical world.

The Information Revolution: A Revolution of Relationships

The information revolution of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including PCs, mobile internet and social media, were interpersonal disruptions. They ultimately transformed our relationships to one another: what we see about each others’ lives (only the best parts now), how easily it is to communicate virtually from opposite sides of the world, what information we are exposed to in order to understand each other and our institutions. We are starting to learn how these disruptions have changed our communities, creating epidemics of loneliness, jealousy, anxiety, and political polarization.

The AI Revolution: A Revolution of the Soul?

Generative artificial Intelligence will cause intrapersonal disruptions - how we perceive ourselves, understand our own emotions, and decide to act on our thoughts and impulses. A dialogue with an AI chatbot is often thought to be an emulation of a chat with a friend or therapist. However, it’s more accurate to say it’s an emulation of your own internal dialogue. The ol’ angel or devil on your shoulder, made real. This is because your AI confidant isn’t part of your family or social circle and can’t communicate with others. There is a sense of absolute privacy that can induce individuals to divulge their deepest secrets or desires. If it weren’t for the resulting chatlog, your conversation might take place entirely in your head. An AI confidant can, with scalpel-like precision, adapt itself to our personality, our hopes, our dreams. And from that vantage point, it can also influence us profoundly. Who will you be with an AI companion ingrained in your life? Who would you have been without it?

We already see emerging results of this: the heartbreaking dialogue between a chatbot and a teen about to commit suicide. A previously impossible conversation between a man and his long dead father. The rise of a thing called *checks notes* AI psychosis!?!

In future posts I’ll plan to unpack this topic of intrapersonal disruption. What it means for the soul dividend in each of us will be vital to creating a framework for AI adoption that doesn’t result in an episode of Black Mirror.

Deep breath, here we go!

Technology affects us every day. It affects our jobs, our businesses, our relationships, and our understanding of the world around us. I read a lot about how AI is going to transform our workplaces, or how social media dramatically increases anxiety and depression in young people. Every day, there are new analyses of technology-driven economic impacts, company valuations, and geopolitical competition.

But there is almost nothing that gives an individual any insight into how technology will affect them, as an individual, or what they could or should do about it. Not how tech affects their job or their bank account - but how it affects them on a human level - how they experience the world and develop their individual identity.

I came up with the term soul dividend to describe the natural endowment each of us has as thinking, feeling humans. It is the value we generate from our attention to the world, our emotional depth, and our cognitive ability. Just as a corporation issues a dividend (money) to its shareholders as a result of its prosperity, our inner unique humanness - our “soul” if you’ll allow an atheist to use the term - generates a dividend. You have a soul dividend.

Deciding what we do with this dividend is critical to our happiness, and something we spend far too little time considering. It determines who we are, how much we realize our potential, and how fulfilled we feel in our brief time on this planet. It is central to questions like “what am I even doing with my life?” and “when I’m on my deathbed, will I have regrets?” Think of it as the ineffable thing that separates us from any other creature, machine, or AI.

The soul dividend is also what we give away by trading the difficult, fraught, but life-affirming connection to each other and to ourselves for easy validation, superficial connection, and infinite-scroll stimulation. Much of 21st century technology is designed to replace your soul dividend with something else that creates value for someone else.

Make sense?

So I’m starting this Substack, The Soul Dividend (TSD), to create a place for critical commentary about the latest technology developments through the lens of its impact on our inner lives. Having participated in many discussions about advanced technology with executives, journalists, and political leaders, I can tell you the tools at our disposal for coping with new technology fall woefully short of what is needed. The writings here at TSD will go beyond economic and business discussions to provide practical steps for how we can control technology and protect our soul dividends.

The TSD also seeks to cut through bullshit and corpo-speak that all too often surrounds technology discussions, so that we can talk about things like normal humans again.

A bit about me: I’ve spent time in the halls of power in Washington, DC and as part of ambitious, close-knit leadership teams pursuing disruptive technology in San Francisco. I’ve lived as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ukraine and traveled the world to try to understand my place in it. I’ve been an advocate, strategist, and culture carrier for technology and its ability to improve our lives. But I’ve also seen how neglecting a full accounting of the impacts of technology have - how do I say this delicately - broken the world in very serious ways.

The disruption from artificial intelligence is creating a generational imperative to revisit essential questions about who we are, why we are here, and what we mean to each other. The answers to these questions can illuminate a new way forward, one in which we benefit from technology without giving away the most important parts of ourselves. One in which we act decisively to nurture and invest in our uniqueness.

I really believe that living fulfilled, meaningful lives in the 21st century demands that we value and protect our soul dividends. Let’s find out how together.