Human Transmission vs AI

tldr: What is “human transmission.” Why AI can’t do it. And how to cultivate it.

Last week I wrote a note inviting you to join me on November 6. So that we can be together no matter what happens on election day.

It was an invitation for us to consider what is essential. What is most important. About how to be human, together, upon this sacred earth.

I wrote that it is important to consider the most essential so that we know how to live it and -

How to transmit it to our descendants.

Implied in that invitation is the assumption that we are beings who transmit. So today, I’m writing about transmission.

You see, I just read another terrifying piece about AI:

I Created an A.I. Voice Clone to Prank Telemarketers. But the Joke’s on Us. (It’s the New York Times, sorry about the paywall!)

Evan Ratliff writes about his in depth experiment creating an “AI Voice Agent.” About how easy it is to clone our voices. And how easy it is for us to get tricked by these voices. It’s not just that AI Agents can sound exactly like you. It's that they can imitate the voice and style of the people that you love.

They can also imitate the voice of people you have loved and lost. And the voice of the most caring teacher or therapist you can imagine.

But the interaction will still leave you feeling lonely. Something is missing from the imitation. Even when the voice is perfectly cloned. It lacks the potency of human transmission.

Human transmission is the power, the energy, the very vibration of our aliveness.

Ratliff writes:

Along the way, I discovered [the AI Agent’s] singular talent: a knack for endless untruthful riffing that no human can match… I’m talking about a bottomless capacity for mundane small talk, combined with the imperative to make things up just to keep the conversation going…

Companies are poised to unleash these A.I. voice agents into our world. We humans need to decide how we will adjust to a world flooded with near-human voices. We could, as I have done, fight impostors with impostors, while we go about our lives ignoring the cacophony. Or we could try and reject this technology, carving out no-clone spaces and refusing to patronize the companies that offer a pseudo-human experience instead of a real one.

If there’s one thing we don’t need, it’s more loneliness, which seems to be the one thing these A.I. voices reliably supply. Their arrival offers a chance to rethink how we use our own voices and to seek out more of the human interactions that they can never replace.

What is this thing that cannot be replaced?

Last time I wrote about AI I focused on how important it is for us to keep coming together IRL (In Real Life), in the flesh.

But even if we are not together face to face, it is good for us to become aware that each one of us has the power of transmission. That the life force that moves through each of us is a force that touches the people around us. We transmit it.

This is true for poems, novels, songs and all sorts of works of art. As it is true for phone calls and zoom meetings. For emails and newsletters. Like the one you are reading right now.

Can you feel me?

You always know when the happiest person walks into the room. And you get a sense for who is the saddest. They are transmitting their state. You get a feel for who is anxious, who is at peace, who is confident and who is holding power. You even know who is holding structural power. Who is formally in charge. And you get to know who is holding authentic power. The one standing with enough integrity that it commands your respect.

If we can be aware of the fact that we transmit. Then we can cultivate our transmission. We can be more responsible for it. We get better at seeing who is posing. Who is holding empty charisma. Who is humble in the best of ways. And who is doing their best to live in truth.

Twenty years ago last month, I was blessed by an ancient, esoteric initiation into a path I knew nothing about. I received a life changing transmission from a master who is the embodiment of her teaching. And to this day, I have never been in her physical presence.

I hope I’m not losing you with this talk of the esoteric. Because it is not the point I’m trying to make. You don’t have to buy it to get what I’m talking about.

I bring it up because it was easy for me to compare myself to her. To want to be like her.

And in that way to miss the point.

To miss the point that I do not have to be her in order to transmit goodness. I do not have to wait for some unforeseeable future. I do not have to wait many lifetimes until someday I become this radiant realized being. That rare embodied being that can transmit with such Grace that it sets your soul ablaze.

I can start practicing today. With my fallibilities, anxieties, desires and shortcomings. I am alive. I have transmission today.

Her gaze upon my heart taught me about radical love. It taught me about oneness. About surrender and letting go. About forgiving others, and learning to forgive myself. It showed me how powerful a human being’s transmission can be.

And it taught me that I transmit.

It taught me that you transmit.

And it is reminding me that today, as far as we can still tell, AI can talk, write, code, and draw. It can imitate so many things that only humans could previously do.

But what AI cannot do is transmit.

How then do we become sensitive to the power of each other’s transmission? How do we cultivate the very essence of our own?

We come to sense and understand that transmission is aliveness itself. That everything that lives transmits.

We cultivate our attunement to the essence of life itself.

We practice ways to remember that we are animal beings who are made of living earth. 

We touch the ground, stay on the ground, and feel our mammalian self.

We remember we have senses, and we sense.

We allow ourselves to grow and unfold in the way all of life does.

We let ourselves “get grown.”

We continue to grow into beings who are capable of staying awake. Awake to the full breadth of the human experience.

We touch joy when there is joy and joy is what we transmit.

We touch grief when there is grief and grief is what we transmit. Because wisdom is what’s waiting on the other side of grief. 

We root ourselves into the fullness of our aliveness. We trust it. Nurture it. Hold it. Transmit it.

And we learn how to receive it. To receive from earth itself.

And to receive from each other. From those who love us, and those we love.

Then we are less likely to get tricked or fooled. By AI, a targeted ad, or even a living, breathing charlatan.

Because we are in tune with what is us.

We are in tune with what’s true.

We are in tune with what's alive.

And what is alive is us.