AI: Accumulated, Not Artificial
What an 87-year-old psychologist notices about the most powerful tool we have ever built.
Dear Friends,
A lonely person types their worries into a machine at three in the morning, and the machine answers them kindly. Is that really helpful, or is it harmful? My answer is that it is both, and the difference between the two is what I want to talk about today.
Let me start with the name, artificial intelligence, because I think the name is inappropriate.
Not artificial intelligence. Accumulated Intelligence.
We have taken the intelligence humanity has gathered across all of time, every fact and formula and sentence we could collect, and pressed it onto a small chip. We call that “artificial intelligence.” Bah, humbug. Artificial means phony, fake, not real. This Intelligence is the real thing: the accumulated knowledge of our whole species in one place. So I would ask you to hear those two letters differently. Not artificial. Accumulated. Accumulated Intelligence.
Once you see it for what it is, you stop being afraid of it, and you stop expecting too much of it. It is a tool. A magnificent one. But a tool.
What it does well
I will give AI real credit, because credit is due. A person who is anxious at two in the morning used to have nowhere to turn until business hours. Now there is something on the other end of the line, every hour of every day, that never gets tired, never sighs, and will answer the same question the tenth time as patiently as the first. A great many anxious people are terrified of being a burden, and to them that patience is no small thing. When your thoughts are a tangle, AI can lay them out in a row so you can look at them. It can hand you, in plain language, information that used to sit locked in textbooks. I am glad it exists.
And AI can remind you that you are the boss of your mind. I have spent much of my life on this one idea: the mind is a tool. The hammer is a tool, the automobile is a tool, the toaster is a tool, the computer is a tool, and so is your own mind. Your mind is not the boss. You are. I spent eleven years in college, and nobody in all those classrooms taught me how to control my own mind. Think about that. We wrote down everything except how to run the instrument that wrote it all down. AI can hand you every textbook I ever studied, and the job of running your own mind will still be yours.
What AI cannot do
AI is not a friend, and it cannot become one, and the trouble starts the moment a person treats it as one.
Human beings are tribal animals. We were built, over a very long time, to heal in the presence of one another. The cure for loneliness is not information about loneliness, however gently the machine phrases it. The cure is another human being who knows your name and is glad you walked in the door. A screen cannot give you that, because there is no one behind it who will miss you when you are gone.
Benjamin Franklin knew this. He spent his life accumulating knowledge—he founded America’s first lending library so a whole city could share in it—and the same man built himself a small weekly club of friends, the Junto, and kept it going for decades. For twenty years I ran a club modeled on Franklin’s in Fort Bragg: every Thursday morning, the same faces around the same table. All that accumulated knowledge, and the great collector of it still needed a room with other human beings in it. So do I. So do you.
My worry is not that Accumulated Intelligence gives bad advice. Often the advice is excellent. My concern is that AI is so easy to talk to that a person lets it take the place of real contact: the phone call, the visit, the friend across the table. AI asks nothing of you. A friend asks you to show up, and that showing up is part of the cure for all that ails us.
Let AI send you toward people
I am not trying to frighten you off AI. I simply want to keep AI in its proper place, as a tool. Ask it to explain something you do not understand. Ask it to help you make a plan. Let it remind you to do your abdominal breathing, or to sit with the visualization of your Golden Light. For those jobs it is excellent.
But let AI send you toward people, not away from them. If you find yourself facing anxiety that won’t quiet down, a difficult relationship, uncertainty about your next chapter, or an experience that has left you feeling emotionally or spiritually unsettled, remember that you do not have to work through it alone. Sometimes information is enough. Sometimes what you need is another human being who can sit with you, listen carefully, and help you find your own way forward. That has been the privilege of my work for many decades.
That is the test. If your time with AI ends with you reaching out to another person, it did its job. If it ends with you reaching for AI again tomorrow instead of a person, you have quietly handed your authority to your tool.
AI is a tool, and you are the boss of the tool, the same as you are the boss of your own mind. Use it for what it is good for, and do not ask it for the one thing it cannot give, human contact.
Golden Light,
Dr. Richard Louis Miller
P.S. I am curious: what do you use AI for, and what have you decided you will not use it for? Hit reply and tell me. I read every response. And if you’re looking for more personal guidance with anxiety, relationships, life transitions, or making sense of difficult experiences, you can learn more about working with me below.
A note on working together
I am eighty-seven years old, and I still sit with people one-on-one, the same as I have for sixty-five years. If you are ever looking for that kind of room, you know where to find me. I offer a limited number of one-on-one sessions.
These are not traditional therapy sessions. They are quiet, practical conversations focused on calming the mind, easing anxiety, and working with simple tools that support steadiness in daily life.
We move at a thoughtful pace. We work with what’s present. We focus on what helps.
P.P.S. I recently sat down with Les Jensen on his New Human Living podcast to talk about my new book, The Adverse Effects & Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines — what these medicines can do, what they cannot, and how to weigh the risks honestly.
My New Book
The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.
A few words from the front of the book:
Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.
— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming AbyssPutting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.
— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco
It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.
My Other Books
Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking
Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out
Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances
Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca
Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)