Hurt people, hurt people

This week I’ve been watching Furious on Disney+, Last Seen on Apple TV, and listening to Sly Stallone’s interview with Jay Shetty. All amazing. None of them exactly light relief.

Apparently my idea of winding down now involves serial killers, child kidnappings and Rocky’s boyhood trauma. I should probably take up knitting. But something in all of them stood out: Hurt people, hurt people.

In Sly’s interview, he talks about the way his parents treated him. And when he speaks about his mother, he recognises something: she’d been treated horribly herself. She was passing on pain like a family heirloom.

In Furious, a woman murders her abusers one by one. Last Seen sees a family kidnap another child after the death of their own. Extreme, fictional versions of the same cycle. Hurt becoming more hurt.

And we see quieter versions of it all around us, every day. The parent repeating the words they swore they’d never say. The boss humiliating someone because that’s how they were 'toughened up' by their dad. The person carrying old wounds into every new relationship.

But people do break that cycle, too. Somewhere, someone recognises what they’re carrying and decides to get help, do things differently, get off the merry-go-round, and give their children something better. Which is where the hope for humanity (AI included) resides.

Remember, AI is a mirror to humanity, and we ought to pay attention to what we’re putting in front of it. We’re building this technology around human choices. What we value. What we reward. What we’re prepared to overlook, if there’s enough money involved... Don!

And as the technology becomes more powerful, the consequences of those choices get even bigger. An old human grievance can now travel further, faster, and do more damage than ever before.

The past cannot be changed. Being hurt was never your fault. Yet there is something useful in remembering that our feelings shift. Like the in-laws at Christmas... they only stick around if you feed them!

We don’t have to turn every painful feeling into something somebody else has to recover from. This becomes our 'response-ability'.

So this week, before the sharp reply, the impatient dismissal or the moment when someone else gets the full force of a day they didn’t cause... just pause.

For how we raise our children. How we lead our businesses. How we build AI. How we treat the troubled person standing right in front of us... we only need to remember two simple words...

'Be kind'.