Peter D. Hershock is director of the Asia Research and Development Program at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. Hershock has written or edited more than a dozen books on contemporary issues, including Buddhism, Asian Philosophy, The Attention Economy and the Personal and Social Impact of Artificial Intelligence in Buddhism, and Intelligent Technologies: Towards a More Humane Future. Ta.
The AI revolution requires thinking big. The first industrial revolution began with the use of energy from the combustion of fossil fuels. The potential for industrial-scale fossil fuel use to change the Earth’s climate was first recognized nearly a century later, at the end of the 19th century, and hard evidence of climate destruction has been mounting for more than 50 years. The solemn fact is that humanity has not been able to reliably prevent its disruptions from having devastating effects on the natural world and society.
Currently, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is well underway and accelerating. According to Silicon Valley’s techno-optimist prophets, this AI-fueled intelligence revolution is putting humanity on a glide path toward a utopian future of near-effortless satisfaction and frictionless choice. . You have to be careful.
Earth’s climate began to change due to human ignorance of the recursive feedback loop between human actions and Earth’s climate. And this change continues through willful ignorance of business-as-usual behavior at the increasing burden of future generations. The AI-driven Fourth Industrial Revolution is weaving a tighter and more complex web of recursive feedback loops, and the timeframe for the risks to materialize is likely within 1-20 decades rather than centuries. It’s a question of the year.
As a Buddhist philosopher, I recognize the positive transformative potential of AI. Machine learning systems are already accelerating advances in science and technology, and it is easy to see that they are driving similar advances toward achieving compassionate social goals such as eradicating hunger and ensuring universal access to health care. You can imagine it. But if the Fourth Industrial Revolution is to truly benefit humanity, it will simply solve the technical “coordination problem” of ensuring that AI systems deliver what designers and users want. That’s not enough. It involves resolving the “coordination predicament” of conflicting human values that are recursively amplified by algorithmic systems that are becoming increasingly adept at predicting and shaping the wants and needs of both individuals and society. It will be necessary. AI holds up a mirror to humanity that can make wishes come true. What we found in our investigation is not reassuring.
Buddhism 101
Religions vary widely. However, all religions offer a repertoire of practices for recognizing what is most important to living a fulfilling and worth living life. Buddhism is a family tree of such traditions that dates back more than 2,600 years to the teacher known as the Buddha or Awakened One. Although diverse, the repertoires of these traditions are all rooted in three common commitments. Viewing everything as occurring interdependently and having no fixed nature or identity. And we realize that it is not fate or chance that determines what we experience in life, but our karma – our values and intentions and the way we carry them out.
Importantly, the purpose of Buddhist practice is not predefined. Achieving Nirvana simply means “blowing away” the causes of suffering, conflict, and problems by cultivating ever-greater wisdom and compassion. It is a process dedicated to embodying the virtuosity of ever-more-freely being and responsiveness necessary to foster ever-more-free relational dynamics for all. .
That’s a noble goal. However, as the Dhammapada, an early compendium of Buddhism, provides the words of encouragement: “All things precede, are guided by, and are created by the mind.” As a cart follows the footsteps of an ox, our lives are a karmic function of what matters most to us: our values and intentions, our likes and dislikes, our habits of thought and feeling, and our patterns of speech. Expand. and the act of expressing it. This is encouraging because we can change our thoughts and what is most important to us. The process begins with the effort to cultivate freedom of attention. And that is why the current trajectory of AI development is so dangerous.
Existential risks of the digital attention economy
The commercial centerpiece of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is the digitally mediated attention economy. We usually think of attention as something like a general currency for “spending” on things, but digitally captured attention is a way of thinking about what’s important to us and how we It generates and transmits data about how it reacts and what changes over time. AI is now being referred to as a new general-purpose technology, but unlike all previous technologies, intelligent technology is not a passive transmitter of human wants and needs. It actively and innovatively amplifies human values and intentions, and the conflicts that exist between them.
Thus, ubiquitous digital connectivity and a global attention economy have created unprecedented cognitive power to predict human behavior, beliefs, and desires, but also patterns of thought, language, emotion, and behavior. It also generates unprecedented ontic forces that strengthen values and intentions. I’m letting them know. These are forces that shape who consumers and citizens become, not through coercive acts, but through algorithmically reinforced desires and curation of environments of choice and decision-making. It is the power to transform your experience from the inside out.
Additionally, machine learning and generative AI systems will become increasingly adept at predicting, interpreting, and enforcing human intentions, becoming karmic intermediaries on digital platforms that emphasize competition, convenience, choice, and control. and has a reward structure. Promotes addictive engagement, strengthens habits of thought and feeling, and accelerates the rotation of desires.
Ethics of the world relationship between humans and technology
Intelligent technology clearly has huge positive potential. But the digital attention economy jeopardizes our ability to cultivate true attentional freedom based on the design goal of algorithmically engineered attention-grabbing. Without freedom of attention, there can be no true freedom of intention. And without freedom of intention, the line between choice and compulsion dissolves.
From a Buddhist perspective, the path to a truly free life begins with the effortful cultivation of freedom of attention. If intelligent technology is to foster a more just and humane future, we need the mastery of attentiveness and moral clarity needed to rebuild the karmic engine and computational factory of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. , we must cultivate wisdom. It’s possible. However, this is not something that can be taken for granted, and it is a job that cannot be done alone. As the Japanese Zen master Dogen described the demanding but joyful task of carving out a path to liberation, it is a task that can only be carried out effectively by standing shoulder to shoulder.
Solving the AI coordination predicament requires a global effort to shed more light than ever on how humanity arrived at this crossroads and create a truly liberating relationship between humans, technology, and the world. It is necessary to share deeply. The ethics of AI are ultimately the ethics of humanity’s future. However, all ethical systems have blind spots. With that in mind, our goal is not to create a single global ethical system, but rather that the differences between sacred and secular ethical systems contribute mutually to the flourishing of humanity and the planet. The aim should be to foster the emergence of a global ethical ecosystem that provides resources for If the climate and environmental crises of the last century have taught us anything, it’s the value of diversity.
This is a statement that might have little meaning if diversity were simply another word meaning plurality or diversity. Buddhist teachings on interdependence and karma open up the possibility of thinking about diversity in other ways. Diversity is a numerical measure of diversity that is both immediately visible and mandatory. Diversity, by contrast, is a relational indicator of the degree to which differences are the basis for mutual contributions to sustained shared prosperity. This relational property is evident, for example, in the coordination between species in healthy ecosystems, but it is absent in zoos. There, there is nothing more than species diversity. Diversity includes not only our differences from each other, but also our differences from each other in the way we are valued in a sense of appreciation.
If technology is a relational system that scales the realization of human values and intentions, then the potential for AI to benefit humanity as a whole is that it embodies diverse intelligences, including ethical intelligences. It depends on whether or not. This requires resisting the monopolistic tendencies of platform capitalism and the karmic impasses that result when network growth is a function of attention-grabbing and desire-spinning rather than feats of responsiveness. From a Buddhist perspective, an ethically sound reorganization of the karmic engine of the Fourth Industrial Revolution begins with developing the relationship between humans, technology, and the world based on:
Support intelligent human practice, rather than first supplementing it with smart services and eventually replacing it Facilitating concentration rather than distraction Both freedom of attention and freedom of intention Ensuring an environment conducive to the pursuit of self-awareness and the effortful cultivation of the art of gratitude and contribution.
Importantly, just as virtuoso musical performance establishes new standards of musicality, so too does recognition of virtuosity of appreciation and contribution require ever-higher standards of ethical excellence. , which requires concrete efforts to set new standards of both responsibility and responsiveness. You shouldn’t settle for less.
