Posts Tagged ‘Human Development’

“If we want to use [AI] for nefarious means, it’ll be very effective, but if we want to use it for awakening, it can be a tool unlike anything humanity has ever had access to.”

Ep. 246 | Strategic advisor Robert MacNaughton is exactly whom we need to help us understand not only the current and emerging risks, challenges, and opportunities AI confronts us with, but also the deeper, bigger, sometimes frightening picture of what is truly at stake here, as we try to make sense of AI and how to chart our course forward through unknown, difficult-to-predict territory. Bright as anything, with a contemplative and integrally informed background, and long experience in leadership and human development, Robert is also an expert on AI. In this very illuminating conversation, Robert shares that his primary concern is not so much the first-order risks (impact on the economy, labor displacement, environmental risks, relational and attentional capture, and more) as the second-order risks: our social and psychological responses to the first-order risks. 

We’re starting to see what happens when people get afraid and lose certainty about the future, he relates, and there are people who know how to exploit that fear to gain power.  It is up to us to build bridges of knowledge and learn how to work together as never before, and AI can help us with this, Robert asserts. The most important conversation right now, he continues, is asking what capabilities we need to foster to become more epistemically mature and collaborative; what practices will help us with that? Robert suggests that since we need a destination and an orientation to guide our way, we should choose the transcendentals—goodness, truth, and beauty. “Because unless someone can come up with something better, it’s just Elon telling us we need to go to Mars,” he quips. An extraordinary, timely, enlightening, and eye-opening conversation. Recorded May 21, 2026.