A case that as AI outpaces humanity in reasoning ability, certain cultivated forms of intuition will become humanity's edge in the future of work. A longer read for builders and leaders.
Thanks for this excellent article. This is exactly what we are doing at Sitting Lab. The only quibble I would have is the conclusion coming around to depending on AI for how to implement capacity that supports development of new platforms. Yes, current human capacity is rare, but this is precisely where large numbers of humans can fairly quickly become skilled enough to steward spaces and guide people along practice paths. I wouldn’t advocate for the scaling function to be outsourced to AI. This is the human ‘work’ of our times.
Thanks Robert. Important point that wasn't fully addressed. The way I think about it, tech is used to amplify what skilled human coaches and teachers can do at scale, because one-on-one support for these practices is labor-intensive enough that human-only scaling can't match the pace AI may reshape the landscape at. We also need many more humans trained to be part of that, it's not possible without them. Curious whether Sitting Lab specifically targets intuition cultivation as part of the practice work, or plans to do so in the future? Checked out your website
I have been observing this phenomenon through my own workflow with different language models, while I have also built an operational system I call Monika_OS, and what interests me is how instinct, intuition, logic, and synthesis move at different speeds and begin to cross into one another.
AI accelerates the logical stream. As it can brilliantly organize, recombine, compare, expand, and reflect with astonishing speed, that is mind-blowing!
Yet the human body, with a different speed, becomes the site of discernment: the place where one feels and senses what is alive, what is synthetic, what is useful, what can hold value, and what wants to subjectively emerge.
In my own work, a book I am writing now called The Art of Synthesis and the Architecture of My Value, I experience this crossover as an empirical practice, a personal methodology.
Instinct can accelerate the speed, acting previous to thought. Intuition senses what logic finds limiting. Logic tests patterns of coherence, while synthesis builds the framework that holds the different streams without breaking them into one another.
So I read this article, and I don’t see it as an abstract future thesis; it is a field I am already testing in practice: AI as an amplifier of logos, fast, precise, and at times too constrained by its own thinking, and the human being, with the body as the receptor, calibrates and synthesizes at a different level and speed what arrives through the body, through how it is sensed and perceived.
The time component is crucial, mixing both chronological timing and kairos timing through discernment.
The question that feels important to me is calibration: how do I distinguish a true intuitive signal from projection, anxiety, conditioning, or the echo of my own distorted narrative? The time of the body, fascia, qigong, breath-work, nature… the practice combines different aspects that find a unique creative outlet.
Thanks Monika. Thanks for your sharing on all that. Yes, agreed. There's tons of inaccurate and even dangerous "intuition" that people interpret as real, and that risk shouldn't be understated. Lots of work to be done on that.
Thanks Simon. Just skimmed that. Solid overlap with what this article points at, especially the elevation of sensing, intuiting and feeling as really important alongside rationality. Connecting on LinkedIn sounds good!
Implicit knowledge can optimize for e.g. four types of outcomes: living life to the fullest, competence and insight, social inclusion and empathy and finally ambition. What is considered embodied intuition might just translate to experiences filtered through our own personal preferences and temperament.
Thanks Mattias, fair pushback. Where I'd disagree is on the assumption that genius-level flashes of insight will only ever be available to "one in a million" genius-level people. The article is partly built on the bet that with the right cultivation practices, these flashes might be surprisingly accessible to average workers once we actually invest in training the underlying capacities. Whether that bet holds we'll see, but seems worth trying at least.
Yes, we must try, but maybe it isn’t the instrumental value of intuition that is worth striving for, but the experiental value of being alive and in connection with everyone and everything. I am optimistic that the AI can actually help free us from instrumental valuation in the end. Just being ALIVE together with each other and the living cosmos might be what we ought to be trying both by re-training ourselves in being fully human and trying to steer AI, robotics and all the other tools we invent towards more productivity.
Well researched . Curious what you think the push back will be from the "unconverted"? People already into wellness and mindfulness get this immediately. But to make this idea viable in the marketplace, language must be developed that makes immediate sense to people unfamiliar with any of it. This is our challenge anyways.
Interesting framing, thank you, Erik, for these reflections and for shining a light on the layers of intuitive intelligence and its applications.
Working at the intersection of AI, consciousness and human development, I increasingly feel that the real shift is not human vs. machine intelligence but a deeper understanding of the forms of intelligence (relational, embodied, ancestral, ecological) that we’ve undervalued for far too long.
Thanks for your reply Erik! Everything we do at Sitting Lab is by invitation, through feeling our way, and for staying present long enough to allow what needs to emerge within us to emerge and what needs to co-emerge between us to co-emerge. That’s the general orientation that creates conditions for the cultivation of intuition. More specifically, at the end of each 20-minute sit we spontaneously share (you could say intuitively as well) what we noticed as we sat just now. Surprising words and language come forth, the others just listen, and then when the person is done, the others echo a word or two that landed, we then take these words (from all the shares and echoes) and read them as a collective poem that expresses our shared practice. All of it ends up feeling very intimate, intuitive, creative, and relatable in a human way. I hope that answers your question. 🙏🏽
Thanks for this excellent article. This is exactly what we are doing at Sitting Lab. The only quibble I would have is the conclusion coming around to depending on AI for how to implement capacity that supports development of new platforms. Yes, current human capacity is rare, but this is precisely where large numbers of humans can fairly quickly become skilled enough to steward spaces and guide people along practice paths. I wouldn’t advocate for the scaling function to be outsourced to AI. This is the human ‘work’ of our times.
Thanks Robert. Important point that wasn't fully addressed. The way I think about it, tech is used to amplify what skilled human coaches and teachers can do at scale, because one-on-one support for these practices is labor-intensive enough that human-only scaling can't match the pace AI may reshape the landscape at. We also need many more humans trained to be part of that, it's not possible without them. Curious whether Sitting Lab specifically targets intuition cultivation as part of the practice work, or plans to do so in the future? Checked out your website
I have been observing this phenomenon through my own workflow with different language models, while I have also built an operational system I call Monika_OS, and what interests me is how instinct, intuition, logic, and synthesis move at different speeds and begin to cross into one another.
AI accelerates the logical stream. As it can brilliantly organize, recombine, compare, expand, and reflect with astonishing speed, that is mind-blowing!
Yet the human body, with a different speed, becomes the site of discernment: the place where one feels and senses what is alive, what is synthetic, what is useful, what can hold value, and what wants to subjectively emerge.
In my own work, a book I am writing now called The Art of Synthesis and the Architecture of My Value, I experience this crossover as an empirical practice, a personal methodology.
Instinct can accelerate the speed, acting previous to thought. Intuition senses what logic finds limiting. Logic tests patterns of coherence, while synthesis builds the framework that holds the different streams without breaking them into one another.
So I read this article, and I don’t see it as an abstract future thesis; it is a field I am already testing in practice: AI as an amplifier of logos, fast, precise, and at times too constrained by its own thinking, and the human being, with the body as the receptor, calibrates and synthesizes at a different level and speed what arrives through the body, through how it is sensed and perceived.
The time component is crucial, mixing both chronological timing and kairos timing through discernment.
The question that feels important to me is calibration: how do I distinguish a true intuitive signal from projection, anxiety, conditioning, or the echo of my own distorted narrative? The time of the body, fascia, qigong, breath-work, nature… the practice combines different aspects that find a unique creative outlet.
AI is a tool, techné, that requires skills.
Great article btw
Thanks Monika. Thanks for your sharing on all that. Yes, agreed. There's tons of inaccurate and even dangerous "intuition" that people interpret as real, and that risk shouldn't be understated. Lots of work to be done on that.
Thanks heaps Eddy and Eric… reaching out in LinkedIn
I love these questions:
“the human capacities technology can’t replicate? “training at the pace that the up-leveling will be required? “conditions to build and iterate on …?
And pieces like our “Mindsets of Transformation” action research issue, if you’ve yet to see, will be useful, deepening intuitive frames and more.
Thanks Simon. Just skimmed that. Solid overlap with what this article points at, especially the elevation of sensing, intuiting and feeling as really important alongside rationality. Connecting on LinkedIn sounds good!
Grand! Just messaged you back there before reading this now :)
Computer says no, unfortunately, except for ”flashes of insight” that maybe a genius like Tesla had, but hardly the average worker, or you and me.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a0367ca-a120-83eb-960e-fd72535d7ddd
Implicit knowledge can optimize for e.g. four types of outcomes: living life to the fullest, competence and insight, social inclusion and empathy and finally ambition. What is considered embodied intuition might just translate to experiences filtered through our own personal preferences and temperament.
Thanks Mattias, fair pushback. Where I'd disagree is on the assumption that genius-level flashes of insight will only ever be available to "one in a million" genius-level people. The article is partly built on the bet that with the right cultivation practices, these flashes might be surprisingly accessible to average workers once we actually invest in training the underlying capacities. Whether that bet holds we'll see, but seems worth trying at least.
Yes, we must try, but maybe it isn’t the instrumental value of intuition that is worth striving for, but the experiental value of being alive and in connection with everyone and everything. I am optimistic that the AI can actually help free us from instrumental valuation in the end. Just being ALIVE together with each other and the living cosmos might be what we ought to be trying both by re-training ourselves in being fully human and trying to steer AI, robotics and all the other tools we invent towards more productivity.
Well researched . Curious what you think the push back will be from the "unconverted"? People already into wellness and mindfulness get this immediately. But to make this idea viable in the marketplace, language must be developed that makes immediate sense to people unfamiliar with any of it. This is our challenge anyways.
Interesting framing, thank you, Erik, for these reflections and for shining a light on the layers of intuitive intelligence and its applications.
Working at the intersection of AI, consciousness and human development, I increasingly feel that the real shift is not human vs. machine intelligence but a deeper understanding of the forms of intelligence (relational, embodied, ancestral, ecological) that we’ve undervalued for far too long.
Thanks for your reply Erik! Everything we do at Sitting Lab is by invitation, through feeling our way, and for staying present long enough to allow what needs to emerge within us to emerge and what needs to co-emerge between us to co-emerge. That’s the general orientation that creates conditions for the cultivation of intuition. More specifically, at the end of each 20-minute sit we spontaneously share (you could say intuitively as well) what we noticed as we sat just now. Surprising words and language come forth, the others just listen, and then when the person is done, the others echo a word or two that landed, we then take these words (from all the shares and echoes) and read them as a collective poem that expresses our shared practice. All of it ends up feeling very intimate, intuitive, creative, and relatable in a human way. I hope that answers your question. 🙏🏽