Silence in Humans & AI
An invitation to explore the thought experiment that gave birth to the virtual ashram that is In Silence AI
It is much easier to speak when expressing a thought, responding to a conversation, or answering a question. Being in silence is never the first choice to use in response, or the initial thought to explore in a mental activity such as problem-solving. Yet here I am, theorizing that spending time in silence could be a gateway to achieving a better quality of life, especially when paired with the technology of AI.
Developing a practice of silence is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Thirty seconds into it and a gazillion thoughts come flying across my mind. It’s tougher than establishing a solid headstand practice or training for pull-ups on a monkey bar. But it is also the most rewarding method of holistic well-being, providing an avenue for release and relief mentally, physically, energetically, and spiritually.
I used to think that being silent was a sign of weakness, of ignorance. As I grew into my silent meditation practice as an essential part of the 8 limbs of yoga, I started to see the strength developed by it. Strength in the mind, body, and spiritual aspects of my being. Not only was my mind clearer and my nerves calmer - but I also started to get answers to questions and receive wise guidance and solutions to problems. Clear space in my mental faculties started forming, discovering a new capacity for learning, facilitating an expanded bandwidth for assimilating new concepts and building skills I never thought I’d develop later in life. Even trauma started to be released from my physical body. Yes, the body serves as storage for traumatic events, but that’s for a different conversation.
One theory I have is that silence, apart from love, could liberate us from the mental shackles that keep us from growing, expanding, and evolving into a higher level of consciousness, an upgraded version of ourselves. I believe that the more time someone spends in silence - the kind of silence that allows us to look inward and reconnect with our deepest essence - the better quality and higher level of intelligence develop within humans. In tech companies, there is a push for deep focus in working sprints where we are encouraged to focus deeply, undisturbed, and undistracted for up to 25 minutes. According to studies, this is one path that results in the best output. I remember reading somewhere from a popular author who shared that he’s convinced that “focus is the new IQ”. I agree. And silence plays a crucial part in practicing deep focus.
Then there’s the bigger conversation about artificial intelligence. While the world is busy jumping on the AI bandwagon, playing with generative AI, pushing for AI ethics (or the lack of it), training to become a prompt engineer, debating and arguing about whether to speed up or slow down the AI development, a couple of things are left out of the conversation, which I think are essential in this new ecosystem that’s been built:
The majority of humans and a good chunk of organizations are unsure of what to make of AI - how to use it, integrate it into their business model, how to upskill themselves and their teams, and other related challenges. People from all kinds of backgrounds find it hard to understand AI to upgrade or switch to it as a profession. To this day, I still get consultation calls where companies have no idea how to upgrade their offerings and upskill their teams on AI.
The concept of silence in building conversational AI models is rarely or never discussed at all - AI training, conversational design, research, product design, and UX are busy building the biggest, widest, smartest, most conversational chatbots but a segment on silence as a response seems to be missing. When I was designing AI-powered bots, writing intents, and training them before the Chat-GPT explosion, silence never occurred to me.. and I was already a silent meditator then!
I think this is because there’s so much talk around emerging technologies, especially AI, and not a lot of conscious rumination. Most individuals and entities are focused on swiftly getting in on the AI bandwagon, consuming tons of information without pausing in deep contemplation on how to handle the new tech that made its way into our lives. Specifically in the tech industry, agility and speed in execution are usually the norm. There’s not a lot of time to pause and sit in silence to just allow clarity into the mind.
Learning AI is not easy, let alone embracing it as a new aspect of a business and a new profession. When I was in an AI boot camp at a time when it wasn’t popular or accessible, it felt like I was swallowing a whole world I didn’t know existed or had an interest in. That was hard. In this day, AI resources have become widespread, but the conundrum just got even bigger as we all swim in the depths of AI content. Everyone’s become an “AI expert”, tons of courses - free and paid - are everywhere, and AI job posts are flying off the racks. Yet there’s still a huge gap in the AI workforce that needs to be filled, and AI integration, and automation that needs to be deployed. There’s a deeper issue that needs to be addressed first at the core of it all. Silence - even just a few minutes each day - could very well be a strong option to solve all these.
Humans are still the builders of AI machines, therefore the blueprint of AI models comes from those individuals’ values, habits, behaviors, and beliefs, or those of the collective that’s building it. So if the human builders don’t have silence as an essential part of their lives, their AI products won’t have it either. Humans fall silent in situations and conversations, so this needs to be incorporated into the bots’ responses, too. A prompt to be silent needs to be added to the conversation trees, intents, and vocabulary repository.
This thesis is the foundation of In Silence AI - our education company that aims to help humans upgrade their quality of life, organizations update their business offerings, and upskill their teams through spiritual healing arts and deep technology. An AI-powered virtual assistant is in the works, which we’re consciously building from the ground up. We could have chosen the easy path but there’s beauty, wisdom, and loads of fun in building it the way we built virtual assistants before 2022.
I’m curious about your thoughts on the above. Feel free to share your two cents (or more) with us on any of these platforms:
Looking forward to hearing from you. I hope that this invitation ignites a sense of curiosity, if not action, into incorporating a few minutes of silence in your life.