Mindfulness and AI: The Old + The New of Emotional Intelligence

Are you ready to learn, refresh, or expand your meditation practice?

I’ve been a long-time practitioner of meditation, which I see as a tool for self-awareness. Meditation retrains and strengthens your attention, which seems an ever-more valuable skill in this digital age of constant, pervasive distractions.?

So I’m pleased to invite readers of this newsletter to The Arts, Science and Practice of Meditation, a one-day experience on June 29th with me and my wife, Tara Bennett-Goleman.? In addition to meditation Tara has explored meditative arts like Ikebana, Japanese flower arranging.

In this one-day, in-person, workshop you will learn basic practices of meditation: one-pointedness, insight meditation, mindful walking, and compassion.

Any of these methods can be used daily by those who are beginning meditation, or as a refresher for more experienced meditators.??

This workshop on meditation can be taken as a stand-alone, or as the first in the Regenerative Connection series Tara and I are presenting this Fall. Tara and I started out years ago – and continue – giving workshops together, long before I wrote about emotional intelligence. One of our early workshops, in fact, was called “Emotional Wisdom.” This workshop on meditation is the first in a three-part series that carries on that integration of our work – two-thirds from Tara, one-third from me.

All sessions will combine lecture, discussion, and experiential exercises, and draw on current findings in neuroscience along with practices and principles from cognitive therapy and Eastern psychologies.

The workshops will be given at the Aligned Center in Irvington, NY. If you can’t join us in person, all of the sessions will be available later online so you can do them at your convenience.

To find out more, go here .

Onward...

Hope for AI and EI

In my last newsletter, many readers gave voice to skepticism about AI being able to have emotional intelligence. While AI can be programmed to seem to have emotional intelligence – at least to appear empathic and be an effective communicator and foster the illusion of self-awareness – the ethics of the programmers remains an issue.

If AI gets programmed to be ethical, people who use it might feel safer and more trusting. If not, then users might understandably be mistrustful.

But skepticism is not the whole story. Looking at responses from those who are optimistic, it’s clear that AI is already with us or imminent. The majority of applications are in fields where crunching data quickly is a great help – no problem there.?

The question remains, though, whether AI can actually be emotionally intelligent. For instance, one day (or perhaps already) an AI psychotherapist that can read emotions in facial expression, tone of voice and such will seem to empathize with the client. If the client feels he or she has a strong working alliance with that AI therapist, does it matter whether the machine truly feels emotions or simply imitates those feelings?

Does it matter if this is just a set of algorithms following a complex set of rules to display emotions, even though actually the AI has no feelings?

For me a critical question is what will render AI the helper of humans. For a more informed opinion I turned to Bill Duane , an AI expert at Google and consultant on AI at other such venues.? Bill is an optimist, part of a collective that seeks to get love and caring programmed into the very heart of AI. That group, the intriguingly titled Center for the Study of Apparent Selves , has just? begun its work, but I wholeheartedly support the effort!

Here's what Bill Duane has to say...

Next up...

Is Empathy in Decline?

Despite the drumbeat of meanness and destruction in our daily headlines or newsfeed, new data suggests that as a group we may be much kinder than the news suggests.? A survey of thousands of younger adults found that, while there had been a dip in empathy since the 1970s, people today are just as empathic as they were back then.

Both what I’d call ‘cognitive empathy’, or taking the other person’s perspective, as well as empathic concern, or caring about them, have been on the upswing of late, the study found.

The findings , published in the Journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science were reported by Sara Konrath and co-researchers at Notre Dame. Their findings contradict the cognitive bias that has us see the worst side of things – like assuming how rare empathy has become. News reporting is, sadly, lopsided: we hear lots about all the horror people create, but little about all the good done daily.

In short, the good news: empathy is on the rise.

To close...

Optimal Performance; EI vs. IQ; EI in Leadership and More

Interested? Listen in on a recent episode and Q&A on the Branches of Wisdom podcast with Banyen Books in Vancouver. We talk about key learnings from my new book Optimal, perfectionism and its toll on our emotional state and relationships, as well as EI for leadership and personal growth.