By Mo Edjlali, Founder of Mindful Leader; Author, Open MBSR
In February 2023, a few months after ChatGPT launched, I wrote my first article about AI and mindfulness.
I couldn't help myself. I have a degree in computer engineering and spent two decades working in bleeding-edge tech. I was playing with GPT-2 back when it mostly produced confident nonsense, long before AI was dinner conversation.
Recently, I went back and read what I'd written. Some of it held up surprisingly well. Some of it didn't. But what struck me most was how often I was watching for the spectacular while something much more ordinary was happening right in front of me.
1. AI Got Personal Fast
In April 2023, I wrote Digital Deepak: A Byte of Enlightenment? I imagined an AI Deepak Chopra: an endlessly patient spiritual confidant that knew your history, remembered every conversation, and was available 24/7.
The guru part hasn't really happened. The relationship part has. Last winter, my daughter heard me getting frustrated with ChatGPT and called me out: "Daddy, you were mean to the AI."
I laughed. She knew it wasn't a person, and I knew it wasn't a person, yet the way I treated it mattered to her. The boundary between tool and relationship got blurry fast.
2. What Happens When We Outsource Our Thinking?
I catch myself doing this all the time. I'll have a problem to work through, and before I've really wrestled with it, I'll open ChatGPT. Sometimes it's research. Sometimes it's writing. Sometimes I want it to challenge an argument. And sometimes I just want help thinking through what I should do.
Why struggle with something for twenty minutes when I can get a pretty good answer in twenty seconds?
Back in 2023, I wondered whether having an intelligence like this constantly available might change our willingness or ability to think for ourselves. Now researchers are beginning to ask similar questions.
A widely discussed MIT Media Lab study, Your Brain on ChatGPT, compared people writing essays using an LLM, search engines, or no outside tools. The researchers found differences in measures of brain connectivity, recall, and ownership of the writing, with the LLM group showing the weakest results on several measures. It's a small, early study. It doesn't prove AI is making us stupid. But the question no longer feels theoretical to me.
3. The AI Guru Didn't Take Over
Here's one I got wrong. I thought AI teachers would emerge quickly. Not just meditation apps with AI features. I imagined people developing ongoing relationships with AI teachers that would begin competing with meditation teachers, coaches, therapists, and spiritual guides.
The technology can do much of this already. But human teachers are still here. Maybe people don't want an artificial guru. Maybe trust and authority work differently than convenience. Maybe this is still coming.
But three and a half years in, the shift I imagined hasn't happened. And mind reading? I got way too excited about mind reading. In December 2023, I wrote about researchers using brain scans and AI to reconstruct aspects of what people were seeing or thinking. I imagined real-time systems sensing what was happening in your mind and adapting your meditation accordingly. Cool idea, but still mostly science fiction. Maybe I'll get to claim victory in 2030. For now, I'll take the loss.
4. How Boring the Revolution Would Look
This is the part I really didn't see. I was watching for AI gurus, mind reading, job displacement, and enormous institutional disruption. Meanwhile, I started using AI. A lot. I use it to edit emails and articles. I use it for research. I ask it to poke holes in my arguments. And increasingly, I use it to help me make decisions. That's the part that gives me pause.
I can lay out a problem, explain the people involved, describe what I'm worried about, and ask: “What am I missing? What would you do?”
The answer is often useful. The strange part is how quickly that became normal. It didn't need to read my mind. I was voluntarily telling it what I was thinking. AI didn't arrive in my life as some all-knowing oracle. It arrived as a really useful tool. Then it became a thinking partner. I'm not sure I noticed when the line moved.
5. And What About the "New Human Age"?
In 2025, I published an article with the modest title AI: Not Another Tool, But a New Human Age. I argued that AI would change not only how we work, but our relationship with creativity, intelligence, identity, connection, and meaning. I still think that may be right. But I was too fast.
Jobs haven't disappeared on the scale I expected. Institutions have been remarkably stubborn. Most people still go to work, complain about their bosses, sit in traffic, take their kids to soccer, and live recognizably human lives.
AI is moving incredibly fast. Humans and institutions aren't. I underestimated that gap.
6. Why I Think Mindfulness Matters More Now
For all the things I got wrong about timing, there is one prediction I believe more strongly today than when I first made it:
Mindfulness is going to matter more in the age of AI, not less.
I believe we may be at the beginning of the greatest period of innovation and human advancement in history. AI could accelerate breakthroughs in medicine, science, education, energy, productivity, and problems we have struggled with for generations.
I also believe we may be at the beginning of the greatest mental health crisis in human history. Those two things can be true at the same time. Technology has already given us extraordinary capabilities while making it easier to spend our lives distracted, sedentary, isolated, staring at screens, and consuming experiences designed by algorithms to keep us consuming. AI could accelerate both sides of that equation.
It may give us extraordinary new capabilities while also accelerating the isolation, distraction, and disconnection technology has already brought into our lives. That's why I believe mindfulness will become more important, not less. We will need to protect our attention, stay connected to our bodies and each other, and remember that not everything worth doing should be made effortless.
AI may become extraordinarily good at being intelligent. Our job is to remember what it means to be human.
Want to Go Down the AI Rabbit Hole?
- February 2023 — 4 Ways ChatGPT Might Help With Mindfulness Facilitation
- April 2023 — Digital Deepak: A Byte of Enlightenment?
- December 2023 — 3 Ways Artificial Intelligence Will Help Shape the Mindfulness Field
- February 2025 — AI: Not Another Tool, But a New Human Age (And Our Minds Aren't Ready)
- January 2026 — Daddy, You Were Mean to the AI
- April 2026 — The Cost of AI: Signs of Brain Fry & Cognitive Debt
- May 2026 — 4 Ways AI Makes Mindfulness Matter More
This is part of our Wackfulness Series: a thoughtful critique of the mindfulness field.
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