This article was first published in Cocooners N° 17.
If you would like to receive updates on this and other topics around the changing landscape of the world of work, subscribe to our newsletter here: https://cocoon-pro.com/#subscribe
History seems to confront us, time and again, with familiar patterns Until we eventually recognise our “mistakes” and choose to change course. In some of today’s most pressing events, it appears we have yet to overcome certain deep-rooted, ancestral dynamics. Unfortunately.
With the arrival of AI in our lives, we now have the opportunity to avoid stumbling over the same stone. Most arguments in favour of it revolve around the idea of a “tool” that will significantly assist us as humans, giving us more time to produce more, and better. Of course, this is already quite evident. But once again, improvement and progress appear to serve—just as they did in the 20th century—to make us work more, produce more, and most likely, increase our levels of stress and push ourselves even harder. Even in leisure, there is pressure to do many things in little time, to seek overstimulation, to make the most of every moment.
Despite the growing “Slow” movement, born in the 1980s as a reaction to “fast food” and later expanded to other fields, we still fail to grasp that exploitation—now often self-exploitation—of our time remains one of the dominant patterns of this era. The compulsion to fill every moment, to “think fast” as Kahneman described, and the lack of space for depth, for more thoughtful and authentic relationships, for pauses that allow regeneration, for connection with our world, for creativity … once again throws our nature off balance and distances us further from a kind of well-being that is as natural as it is, in many cases, unattainable.
Let us give space to pause, to “doing nothing”; the brain needs rest in order to regenerate and become more creative and agile. Let us spend our time “thinking slowly”. Let us not repeat the pattern. We are at a crucial moment in history, one that will shape the future. Perhaps thinking in terms of “Slow AI” could be a good first step.
What do you think?
This article was first published in Cocooners N° 17.
If you would like to receive updates on this and other topics around the changing landscape of the world of work, subscribe to our newsletter here: https://cocoon-pro.com/#subscribe