So I've been building AI solutions for a while now, and I keep running into this same conversation over and over again. Just last week I was at a networking event, and this guy basically told me I was helping to destroy humanity. Which, you know, wasn't exactly what I expected to hear while grabbing coffee.

But honestly? I get where he's coming from. I'm kind of on both sides of this myself because, let's face it, every tool can be used for good or bad.

Here's how I see it though. We've got three choices: use these tools to make us more human, let them take away from our humanity, or just sit back and do nothing while other people make that call for us. And option three really bothers me.

Most of the time when we talk about AI, it's all efficiency and automation and data crunching and making things faster. But what if it could actually help us be better at the human stuff? Like, the stuff we're honestly pretty terrible at sometimes.

We miss cues all the time. We react emotionally when we should probably take a breath. We completely misunderstand what people are trying to tell us. I do this constantly, by the way.

But imagine if AI could help you catch emotional stuff you might miss in an email. Or give you a second to rewrite that text message before you hit send and regret it later. Or just remind you to pause and actually think before you respond to something.

I'm not talking about automating empathy here; that's not the point at all. It's more about helping us be more aware of what's actually happening in our conversations. Making us better listeners instead of just faster talkers.

What if instead of just making us more efficient, AI helped us slow down and actually pay attention to each other?

So here's what I'm curious about. Do you think AI could help us connect better with each other? Or is that asking way too much from a machine? Because honestly I'm not sure myself, but I think it's worth figuring out.

What do you think?