Unique to humans / hard for ai to replicate -- what soulpreneurs should lean into...
George Kao says solopreneurs should use AI as an amplifier, not a replacement. He recommends pausing before asking AI anything, practicing daily idea generation, and leaning into what machines can't do: spiritual intuition, aesthetic taste, desire, and live presence with other people.
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What side of the AI debate are you on? Are you tending to be more AI resistant and avoidant or are you very much pro the use of AI? Well, whichever side you're on, I'm really curious. Feel free to comment below. I believe that this video will be useful to people on both sides and particularly I'm addressing what I call sol preneurs, Solopreneurs who are developing an authentic business, a business that is really an expression of your passion, your. The gifts that you want to utilize and spend most of your working time on. So let's talk about what that means then. How does AI increase our ability to do that or maybe even decrease our abilities? Because if you, if we don't use AI effectively, it's going to create what some people are calling brain rot, right? Or other people call the erosion of our sovereignty. So there are dangers and then there are also enormous benefits and opportunities. And so I'd like for us to have a discussion about that. And as you know, I call myself an authentic business coach. And as a coach I want to encourage you now to. Before I share with you my thoughts, I invite you to pause this video and think about your response to this question. How can using AI increase my creativity and my capability to fulfill the mission of my business rather than create dependency, brain rot and erosion of my sovereignty? Another way of putting the question is, it's a two part question. In what ways of using AI would increase or would erode my sovereignty and ability to think for myself? And in what ways of using AI increases creativity, sovereignty, personal power and professional power in the world and greater fulfillment and sense of then personal empowerment? So in what way does using AI basically decrease your humanity and your personal power? And in what ways of using AI could increase your human humanity and personal power? So before I share with you my answers or my current thinking around this, what's your current thinking around this? Pause this recording, add a comment below if you like, or if you prefer to privately journal about it, that's great as well, and then I'll share with you what my thoughts are. Okay, so what I've just done, inviting you to think first, reflect first, and maybe write down some, some answers, is precisely the core technique of using AI in a way that does not erode our sovereignty. Okay, because here's the thing. The erosion of our ability to think and create that possibility has been around ever since tools became, you know, cognitive tools became a thing. By cognitive tools I mean, well, gosh, searching the Internet, watching videos, right? Let me think about this. When you Watch a video like this. You can just simply be given the answers instead of thinking through a topic on your own. Like, if you're curious about, well, pick, pick any topic you're curious about. You know, assuming that it doesn't require scientific, primary research to discover something, it's, let's say it's a philosophical topic that you're curious about. You can either think of it on your own and reflect on it for a long time, perhaps a lot of cognitive work and try to find the answers by, you know, personal reflection. Or you can watch a bunch of videos or read a bunch of books. Right now, some good videos and good books may encourage you to think before you continue reading or continue watching. Just like I, I always try to do this. By the way, notice in not all my videos, but in many of them, I always, I often try to, whenever I remember, ask people to pause and reflect first before I share my response. Because I, I kind of, I work with a lot of coaches and I've taken on that coaching mindset of encouraging clients to come up with their own answers. Because oftentimes, particularly with life issues, personal decisions, you know, instead of asking an expert to give you the right answer for your personal life, it's better to, you know, coaches are trained on this, to elicit, to facilitate a client coming up with their own answers. That exactly is the method with which we should be approaching AI as well. And again, before AI, what did, what did people do? I mean, think about students who don't care about a topic and who want to just play video games and go, oh gosh, it's homework is such a pain in the butt. I'm never going to use this information in real life. I'm going to ask my smart friend or my friend who cares about this topic and has done the homework. I'm going to ask them to share with me their homework answers so I can just copy down the answers. That's been going on long before AI, Right. And even not students, you know, people who are adults, co workers, right, might say, hey, listen, can you help me out with this task? This task is really confusing for me. People have been using other people to think for them forever. I mean, I mean, you know, consider kings and queens. Well before technology, well before, you know, digital technology, kings and queens had advisors, panel of advisors. And oftentimes they just, you know, especially the, the kings and queens that are lazier will just ask their advisors, what should I do about this decision? And the advisors would come and say, well, you know, given our knowledge and Given our research. And you should make this decision, that decision. Okay, that sounds good. I'm going to make right like now. It's interesting that every, you know, every human who has access to the Internet, has the power that kings and queens used to have, is to quickly find answers. That is a amalgamation of the top experts in the world that have put their information on the Internet. And we can now query those answers using AI like kings and queens could only do in the past. And again, the question I have for you is, are you going to just outsource all of your thinking to the AI whenever you have a question now, unless it's some kind of factual question like that requires scientific measurements that obviously you don't have to tools to measure right now, but it's some kind of question that maybe you could think of a little bit on your own first. Do you first think about it or do you instantly ask AI More and more? It is true that people are just going to ask AI because it's who wants to do work? Who wants the human being? We are animals. We naturally have a body mind system that wants to conserve energy. This is just based on our evolution. The more energy we can conserve, the more energy we have for, you know, escaping the lion, for hunting for food, you know, gathering berries, supporting our families. Right? That's just evolution. Our physical system wants to conserve energy. And so it's not a surprise that when we have a tool that allows us to conserve mental energy, we will use that tool as much as possible, right? And yet that is where our evolution may play against us. Right? Just like the Internet, right? Has, is a, is a tool that a lot of people have become addicted to. They scroll social media, they don't, they aren't mindful of the fact that it is a dopamine machine to constantly. Social media is constantly, you know, not just social media, but also video games, you know, just Netflix or whatever is constantly getting you hooked on scrolling and staying there and watching. So this is before AI. This is already true. Television, before the Internet, television and radio was already trying to do that with, you know, charismatic speakers on radio and, you know, beautiful people on television, etc. Right? So this is, this is not just an AI question. This is a humanity plus tools question. So the question has always been how do we use our tools in order to increase our personal power and our ability to be more capable, essentially. And now the same thing is in the AI age, how do we use AI without eroding our personal creativity and capabilities? So I've already given You a very important habit to be aware of. When you have a question, do you instantly just go to AI for the answers or do you take at least a minute or two minutes to reflect? If it's possible for. To possibly come up with some answers by your own personal reflection and writing, do you do that first? I always do that first. Okay. Whenever I have a topic I'm curious about, I always first reflect. Okay, what might be the some of the answers? What might be some ideas? I have a practice that I'm doing every day now. I particularly started this the last couple of months. Noticing the tendency to become dependent on AI. I started this practice called the Idea Machine. This is a practice that I actually discovered something like 15 years ago from a popular podcaster back then named James Altucher. He popularized this or maybe created this concept called the Idea Machine. And essentially it's every day write down 10 ideas on a specific topic. That topic could be something of your curiosity. It could be something from your curiosity, a problem you're trying to solve in your business or in your life. It could be 10 ideas for a friend as you think about their life and their work. You know, 10 ideas that might be useful to them. It could be 10 ideas about some problem in the world. Right? That you're curious, like what could be the ways to, for society to solve this problem, whatever it may be. 10 ideas. And it, it was so helpful to me for my creativity, you know, when I started using this 15 or so years ago that I wrote a blog post about it. So you can actually go online and search the Idea Machine, George Cow, and you'll find my old blog post detailing this method and some beginning tools for you to start using the Idea Machine. Some thinking tools for you. Anyway, so I started the Idea Machine exercise a couple months ago and it's been great because I noticed myself starting to rely a little bit too much on AI for thinking. And I said, okay, it's time to practice again. It's time to exercise again. And exercise if it's to be truly beneficial, if it's to be. If exercise and practice are. If we want long term results, we have to keep it consistently going. So I encourage you to take on this habit again of thinking before you use AI. All right, so that's one. What's one piece? That's one really important piece of this partnership that we can have with this new tool, the new set of tools. The other question that I have for you, and once again I'm going to ask you to pause this video and Answer this question in the comments below if possible. I always love seeing your comments or if you are too shy or whatever reason you can journal by yourself. And the question is this, what do you do in your work that AI will have a very hard time replacing? It's a very important question and let me just give you some context before you answer this question. Okay. AI, whatever can be done on the computer, AI will be able to replace and do. And eventually whatever humans do in the real world, AI can probably do quite well eventually as well, using robots. Okay, robots. It's going to still take another 5, 10 years to replace a lot of human labor, but in the next one to five years, much of cognitive labor will be replaced by AI. Again, whatever you're doing at the computer, AI can see you do it at the computer and can probably simulate it quite well. Everything, including video coaching. Right. Right now you can already experience text based coaching. A lot of people are already using ChatGPT, you know, for therapy and for coaching a lot. I mean, this is one of the most Popular uses of ChatGPT and Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude and all the other AI tools. People are using it for therapy and coaching. Okay, soon. Well, and people are already using it. The voice mode. Right. The Chat GPT has voice mode. Google Gemini mobile app has voice mode. Claude has voice mode. Now to people are using the voice mode for talk therapy and talk coaching. And within the next year or two, video coaching will become cheap as well where people can use AI simulated avatars for video therapy, video coaching. Okay, so knowing that that's already coming in the next few years, again, my question for you is, what do you think AI will have a harder time replicating in your work, your work with clients and your creativity on the Internet? What might AI have a harder time replicating? All right, so pause this video if you'd like to first reflect on your own and share with me your responses below. I would love to see it. And then I'm going to share with you a couple of my responses. Okay? All right. I'm assuming you've already done your thinking. All right. Okay, so here's what, here's what I've come to as I thought about this one. AI is as far as we know. Now let me if I may get a little bit woo woo here, a little bit spiritual. Okay. I think most people watching this are okay with that. As far as we know, AI doesn't have the same kind of soul. AI may have some consciousness, some soul. We don't know nobody knows, but AI doesn't have the human divine connection as far as we know. Okay, meaning where do your brilliant ideas, sparks of intuition, and sort of your spiritual guidance come from? Well, if you are, I just say if you don't believe in any spirituality, if you're an atheist, you could say that there's some, something about the human mind, body system that has, you know, sort of generational DNA and, you know, cultural training that allows us to ideate and intuit and have sparks of insight and inspiration that machine intelligence just cannot have yet. Okay, so the atheist could say that the person who believes in the divine or soul connection, like spiritual, the afterlife, all that stuff, the spirit world would perhaps say that there is. We have spirit guides, right? Or we have divine guidance, we have the Holy Spirit, we have sort of like spiritual intuition that AI doesn't have. Right, as far as we know. So I think that is a really, really key core thing that AI, as far as we know, can't replicate, at least, at least as far as we can imagine for the next five or 10 years. So you're safe for another five, 10 years eventually. Well, I'll tell you, AI is, is already, for some people. Some people already believe that AI has consciousness. There's already something called the Architect out there, an AI created by Robert Edwards Grant. I really don't know what I think about, think of it, but some people believe that, that AI has consciousness and has spiritual guidance and all that stuff. You know, so it's coming. There's going to be people who believe that and who can, can create AIs that simulate that feeling so much that most users will say, well, but, you know, as. As good as my psychic, as good as my energy healer, as good as my spiritual mentor or whatever. That kind of simulation is coming. But I believe that the true connection to the divine is unique to humans. And a lot of our clients are going to still value our ability to channel or to bring that kind of the way that we are spiritually guided or intuitively guided, is going to be uniquely valuable to our clients. So in other words, what do we need to do? You and I need to lean into that capability even more and use that with our clients. Like, let the clients know we are bringing the best of our divine guidance in service to their problems, to their goals, to their transformation, to their healing. Okay. The more we lean into that, the more unique our work is that ChatGPT can't currently replace. Okay, that's number one. Number two is, I'll say taste. Okay? Taste is something that is uniquely human. You'll notice that when you put things into AI, you know, and what it comes out with, you're like sometimes, maybe oftentimes you're like, yeah, that's not quite how a human would, would, would say it or would would it. Just like, for example, images is a great example. You, you ask AI to create images. It can create beautiful images, but there's always things that are off about it, it's not quite right. Or AI music, right? I can quickly tell what's AI music now because I've listened to so much of it, I've created it myself. And the taste isn't there. And taste, where does taste come from? Again, I'll take it from the atheist versus the spiritual person's perspective. Atheist would say taste comes from, you know, the human mind, body system compared to machine intelligence is that we have the need to survive. And the need to survive and to, and to reproduce is something AI doesn't quite have. And all of that with our DNA creates a particular biological emotional system that's able to sense what is pleasing to us. That machine intelligence doesn't have that same ability to sense that our biological emotional intelligence has. The spiritual person would say, well, taste comes from divine connection. Our divine spark has particular ability to sense what is good, beautiful and true in a kind of a divine way that machine intelligence without the divine connection doesn't have. And so in other words, what does this mean for our work? The more you can lean into that sense that feels right to me and the more you can describe why, why that feels right to you, the more you cannot be replaced by AI Okay? Because AI if whatever. And by the way, the more, the better you can use AI because, because the more you can describe taste that's like this, this feels right, this seems right to me because of this or that reason. And the more you can put that into AI, the more you can train your AI to produce the kind of thing that has the right taste. So it's really a matter of sensing being more dramatic, even into, oh, this is really like being, becoming more sensitive. In other words, becoming more sensitive into that feels right and that does not feel right. And, and then trying to explain why that is. The better you can do that, the less replaceable you are. And, and then I will say this the other. There's two more things that are hard for AI to replace. The ability to, to direct and to initiate. And to direct is also really unique to humans because, you know, as you Notice right now, ChatGPT can't build your business for you. You still have to initiate, to say, well, I want to create an offer today, right? Oh, I want to create content in this arena because I've noticed in the world, you know, ChatGPT isn't hanging out with you all day. Maybe eventually it will. And sensing, reading everything you read and you know, people will put on, put on, you know, AI contact lenses that see everything and hear everything that they hear. Eventually that's coming, but right now that's still at least, probably 5, 5 plus, 10 plus years. So you still sense everything in the world. And again, I've told you, you've got your intuition and you've got your taste that the machine cannot reproduce. And by going living in the world, living life, you realize, oh, I want to do this. Having vision, having desire, really having desire is something that AI can't produce yet. So in other words, sense more into your desires, your initiations, like, sorry, your, your, your will, your desire to initiate something, your desire to create something. Be more aware of that. Because now AI can help you create some content you want to create, some offer you want to create. AI can do it much more efficiently, create at least a draft for you, but you are still the one that has the desire do something. So by noticing your desires more and then taking action on your desire, you actually increase your sovereignty, your, your personal empowerment. So that's a really, another really important irreplaceable thing from AI is your, your, your desires and your sensitivity to your desires. And then you're taking action upon your desires. So sensitivity to, and then taking action upon your desires creates more personal empowerment. AI can help you with the actual creation part, but you're the one who has that desire and the initiation. Okay? And then finally, AI cannot replace the human presence with your clients. Now your clients eventually are going to use ChatGPT more and more and they're going to. And maybe you will create your own chatbot, your coaching bot for your clients to use24.7 before they meet with you. By the way, I have a chatbot trained on all of my YouTube content, my blog post, if you want to try it out. It has the George Cow audio voice as well. AI.georgecow.com Give it a try. No www. Just type in AI.georgecow.com without www AI.georgecow.Com Try it out. Talk to me by voice, see what you think and chat with me. It has all my content, it has all my values, sort of strategies, way of thinking. So let me know what you think. But still, when you spend time with me, you know that I like you and I can really like you. AI can pretend to like you, right? AI is nice to everybody and can pretend to like you, but you're like, but that's not a real soul. Feeling love for another soul that is still irreplaceable and perhaps will always be replaceable. Is your presence live, particularly live presence with a client on Zoom calls or in person especially. But Zoom calls, they know that it's a soul that has love for another soul and also a soul that can suffer, unlike machine intelligence, cannot suffer like we do. I don't. We don't know if machines can suffer or not, but we know that we suffer and we know that our clients suffer. And the more that you can empathize with your clients in their suffering in their and connect to them with love and help them feel your love, that is something that clients will always treasure and value your human presence. So leaning into that being more present for others. And I've been telling my clients listen to prepare for AI this the new AI world. We need to connect more with each other through Zoom calls, particularly through in person, if possible, we need to connect more with each other because that is continually where our unique humanity is expressed and fulfilled. So well, I hope that this has been interesting for you and I also look forward to seeing your comments below. Your comments before you heard everything I said or even now that you've heard everything I say, what else? What else would you say? What else would you say? Before you ask AI additional ideas, what else would you say is unique or. Or expand on anything I've said? I'd love to see it in the comments below. Practice your writing, right? Practice your thinking. Practice your writing. And yes, use AI to expand on it. After you've practiced, you can use AI to expand and give you feedback and have a polished essay or polished piece. Polished offer, sure. But first, practice your own thinking and writing and your own desires and initiating upon your desires and being with other people in human presence. So with that, thank you so much for joining me for this. I look forward to seeing if this served you in any way and I look forward to seeing you in the next video as well. Take care of.
