Ten years ago I had just gotten back from an 18-month proselytizing mission for my church. I hadn't touched an Xbox controller in almost two years, but it had been a favorite past-time before the mission.
Now that I was adjusting to "civilian" life, I wanted to try the new, enticing game: Assassin's Creed: Black Flag. This was going to be an amazing game, I just knew it. It was set in the Caribbean and I could even play it in Spanish—the assignment of my mission had been to serve that particular demographic.
I quickly realized this game was actually painful for me. There was an interaction where my character could pickpocket the AI characters on the islands I visited. I was so disgusted and sad. It was easy to project myself into that character I was controlling, and everyone else in the game may as well have been any one of the amazing people I met on my mission. I couldn't do that to them.
Putting Humanity Back In
In the years since, I've watched how I've reintegrated into the immersive digital worlds. My mission was a reset. I hadn't been allowed to use much technology—I was allowed to email my family once a week, and we had an LG Shadow for our phone, complete with a physical keyboard under the tiny screen.
While I'm generally a technology optimist, I've noticed some disturbing behaviors in myself. Like how my initial revulsion to the violence and anti-social behavior of the games I play has faded into desensitization. Or how I can have explosive reactions to minor issues at work (I've learned I can type pretty furiously, poor keyboard...).
Emotions and I have had a tenuous relationship for the majority of my life. As a queer kid, I had to hide a lot. I didn't like my emotions—they made me vulnerable, and vulnerability could mean a threat to physical safety, to belonging, to any number of bad outcomes. In middle school, I made it a secret goal to desensitize myself from gore, violence, anger, because I thought that would make me both stronger and more intimidating.
If I had no emotions to exploit, if I could be unshaken and unfazed by violence, then I could survive violence directed at me, or maybe even discourage violence. So, I turned to video games and horror movies to help me build my walls.
All of the repression turned into depression, and I had to feel things again.
Pain is a great teacher, but I still needed help to reconnect with my emotions. My attempts to desensitize myself from all emotion through my video games, my scary movies, my obsession with work, had failed to help me, and instead continued to hurt me.
My mission was a weird break in the middle of all of this. It was an experience that taught me that there are real people out there. They're not just non-player characters (NPCs) in one of my games that I can manipulate by saying the right things. It was a reality check that put humanity back into my life.
I've been chasing the balance of technology and humanity ever since.
Before we move on, note that I am not a psychologist and the is not professional advice. If you feel like this resonates and need more information, or if you are distressed or need support, I'd encourage you to find a professional therapist.
Emotional Intelligence
Working with a therapist for several years now, I'm finally starting to develop the emotional intelligence that I've been missing.
The hardest part for me is to stay with my feelings and actually feel them. I don't like them—especially the "primary emotions," so I still try to move past them. Anger is my favorite secondary emotion, because it makes me feel stronger; more intimidating to my problems. In reality, it just hurts me and everyone around me.
"Primary emotions are the first emotions that you feel for any given event. Secondary emotions are feelings you experience after primary emotion. Secondary emotions usually are more intense emotions that push people away or protect yourself in some way. While primary emotions and usually more uncomfortable by nature and require some vulnerability to experience." —Tyler Rich LMFT, Richer Life Counseling
If emotional intelligence is being able to notice, feel, and express our emotions (appropriately), then I'm still vastly under-developed. However, as I've looked over my choices from the past decades, I'm realizing that it is the most important skill I can work on.
A digital world presses on our emotions in ways that a physical world does not seem to do as aggressively. Anonymity has super-charged anger in online comments or conversations. Isolation and separation are common features of the virtual experience.
I don't think it has to be that way. I don't think it is inherently creating these negative experiences.
I do think that it is more of a revelation of our society's general lack of emotional intelligence, than a suppression of it.
Artificial Intelligence
By design, chatbots using generative AI present us with a difficult problem: remembering it's not a being. We interact with it like we might a colleague over Slack. We ask it questions, we make requests. To the unsuspecting human, it is more and more simple to draw the conclusion that AI is another human-like entity.
It's not, though. It's a prediction. It's a complex system of calculations and probabilities that seeks to provide the most likely expected response to a prompt.
If we don't have a base of emotional intelligence, we become vulnerable to exploitation and deception. AI doesn't get tired of us, it's always available and it always responds. Even if biases are controlled for and safety measures are taken in the development of the chatbot, we are still vulnerable if our emotional intelligence is low.
It has been too easy for me to forget humanity and treat people like objects when I was inundated with games in place of emotions.
General AI poses that same threat to us and younger generations of people if we don't make an effort to put in the emotional work.
If we are going to survive artificial intelligence, it will only happen with emotional intelligence at our side.