By Roshi Joan Halifax
We are in a very different world than when I first looked at a computer printout in 1965. Today, data processing, information, disinformation, and Russian “infoshum” that maximizes clickability and minimizes actual information, happen in a mind-moment via our laptops.
We are in a global race around the development and deployment of AI technologies, driven to a great extent by capitalistic and power interests, as well as by a gamer mentality, the greatest benefits accruing to the individual, corporation or country which dominates the competition for political, military, economic, or ego power.
Some headlines are asking about another race as well: In a recent Harvard International review, the headline is: “A Race to Extinction: How Great Power Competition Is Making Artificial Intelligence Existentially Dangerous.”
In the midst of various races, one critic has written, “how we can fill up the depleted reserves of trust and reason in our world as we see the impact of the digital world on our individual and collective psyche.”
It is clear to many of us that we have a moral responsibility to understand and inform ourselves to the extent that we can about the benefits and burdens of AI. As many are pointing out, persuasive technology is quickly degrading our sovereignty, commodifying our identities, and is further handicapping the agency of the so-called “useless class.”
Basically, AI is a double-edged sword. For example, Marc Andreeson in his AI manifesto seems assured that AI is the panacea for everything from child care to warfare. On the other hand, various leaders in the AI field predicting the end of the human race.
Both might be right, with deepfakes, privacy violations, racial and sexist algorithmic biases, AI priming market volatility, autonomous weapons, AI-generated porn, fraud and disinformation, social surveillance and manipulation, identity commodification. Even Alexa had a MAGA-moment regarding who won the 2020 election. And AI hallucinations can lure one down the rabbit hole of a potentially dangerous and deluded unreality.
There are also extraordinary benefits to AI, including accurately diagnosing various diseases, protecting biodiversity, dealing with issues related to climate change, predicting the spread of infectious disease, detecting guns in schools, helping the speechless speak, slashing energy consumption, and more.
In sum, we are in a new information landscape primed in part by humanly flawed data, compounded by extractive economic interests, and furthered by adolescent drive, with not much thought to the social, environmental, moral and ethical harms that are current and sure to be even more problematic in the near and far future.
In the mid 1980’s, I watched a startling interview of one of our top generals in the US military. It was about the disposition of nuclear waste. He made it clear that there was not a plan made at the time of generating nuclear materials about how to get rid with radioactive waste. Today, most of us know that nuclear waste is piling up around the world with consequences that are truly scary to consider.
My sense is that we are not in a dissimilar but more dangerous situation with AI regarding how to deal with the exponential and pervasive accumulation of fractured-trust-waste that is contaminating our society and psyche. There seems not to be a clear plan forward regarding the disposition of the broken trust generated by AI, and much is at risk. And we can shift this before is too late.
In the midst of this tangle and threat, we ask: What has this got to do with Buddhism?
Curiously, the slipperiness of AI points to an interesting Buddhist perspective: the illusory nature of the phenomenal world. What can we really believe in, after all? What is really real?
From the Diamond Sutra: “Thus shall you think of all this fleeting world: A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream; a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.”
Yet most of us need to think that what we experience is not entirely a dream. This makes us feel secure, even though, from a Buddhist perspective, reality appears to be as slippery as AI is. In the midst of this slipperiness, however, rests issues related to serious harm and deep suffering, and yes, that are important benefits as well.
I have to ask myself: Can Buddhist teachings really serve in terms of mitigating the harms generated by AI? Can meditation help? Are we too far gone? Will this just be the landscape where we do charnel ground practice in the future, charnel grounds being a place where bodies are left above the ground to putrefy, and this is where we practice?
There have been some Buddhist suggestions that we mitigate the harm caused by AI through introducing into AI the ethos inspired by the Bodhisattva Vow to awaken and end suffering. This group has also proposed the slogan “intelligence as care” to try to revise the current definition of intelligence.
I ask myself: Yes, we have artificial intelligence but can there be such a thing as artificial wisdom or artificial compassion? Maybe yes, maybe no. If yes, then perhaps with a Buddhist ethic of virtue. But frankly, I think not. And reframing intelligence as care at this point seems a little late.
In the midst of this, another Buddhist perspective that comes to my mind is reflected in the term “appamada,” usually translated as vigilance or conscientiousness. Stephen Batchelor translates it as care. Appamada means to live by the vow not to harm, to be diligent about this commitment, and to be heedful of when we engage in harm, and choose to correct course.
Could appamada be trained into AI systems? Or is appamada up to us, and can we bring the spirit of appamada, vigilance, conscientiousness, and care into how we approach AI as developers and consumers?
And then one has to ask: How? I think this is what Tristan Harris and his team at the Center for Humane Technology are endeavoring to do… inform us so we can make informed and sane choices and be responsible providers and consumers of the technology and not at the effect of it.
From philosopher and neuroscientist Francisco Varela’s perspective on the enactive view, AI is already embedded in the context of our lived experience; it is coextensive with all aspects of our lives, whether we are accessing technology or not. In fact, it is not so much a matter of us accessing it. It has accessed us. It is now part of our psycho-social biome, whether we know it or not, or like it or not… To put this more nicely in Thich Nhat Hanh’s words from the point to view of co-dependent arising, we inter-are with AI; our views have colonized it, and it is colonizing us.
So what might Buddhism offer in the midst of the tsunami of AI development? What we have to offer is subtle but important. I appreciate what Roshi Norman Fischer has called the “bodhisattva attitude,” an unshakeable attitude of clarity that reflects our very character; this is our stance, our point of view, it is the internal atmosphere that colors our way of seeing the world, of seeing reality: it is an attitude saturated by appamada, by conscientiousness and compassion.
Though we have to ask ourselves if most developers of the technology even care. The fiscal and psychic joyride is what might count in the experience of many. So, we as global citizens, as consumers and those developers who care, have an important task before us.
In the crush of persuasive distraction by our mobile devices and more, we are called to give attention to what we are doing and truly why we are doing it… and this in terms of the extractive, capitalistic self-interest that is driving the wholesale development of AI, too much of it devoid of care.
We also need to remember that evolution has endowed us with new brain competencies that can enhance our capacity for being intentional as we meet the complexities of our world. We can be deliberate about our actions; we can choose to act conscientiously, and we can strengthen those capacities within us that make it possible for us to engage our world with fundamental integrity.
And we can also intend the opposite….
It is important to remember why we are really here, which is not about “mindfulness washing” or “wisdom washing” in order to look like we are super aware and altruistic as opposed to being genuinely mindful and ethical. I believe that it is an imperative that we strengthen the conditions that make our actual motivations visible, and deliberately cultivate an intention that is free of self-interest and fundamentally non-transactional. This involves sensitivity to what is present, the capacity to perceive present circumstances clearly, and the will and wisdom to consider the deeper downstream effects or what we call in Buddhism cause and effect or karma.
On the other hand, what we so often see is that personal preferences, self-centeredness, greed, fear, and distractibility distort the perception of reality, and this influences our values, motivations, intentions, and behaviors.
From the Buddhist perspective, intention is a mental factor that is directional and deliberate. Our motivation, on the other hand, might not be fully conscious to us. To put it simply, our so-called good intentions can be driven by unconscious, ego-based, self-interested motivations, and lack fundamental integrity.
A related issue is understanding that our unconscious motivations can be the cause of preconscious moral suffering, including moral injury, or a sense of subtle but pernicious shame or deep regret. And, again, from a Buddhist point of view, maybe this is the brink where the small self gets deconstructed.
Or maybe not….
Please understand, I am just a Buddhist teacher, who right now is inundated with AI articles predicting doom or liberation. Perhaps none of us, including the developers of AI, can know fully what the downstream effects of AI will be. But we do know that the velocity of the development of AI is stupefying, and the opinions are numerous regarding this powerful tool that has our socially and culturally biased intelligence woven into it but not wisdom.
This is where wisdom comes in. It could well make a significant difference if both developers and consumers approach the development of AI with the attitude of the Bodhisattva, with vigilance and conscientiousness (appamada), being deliberately free of capitalistic self-interest and hedonic curiosity.
We also have to become more discerning and responsible about what and how information is delivered, and as consumers of information, have the awareness to recognize that there are attempts to spin us, manipulate us, undermine us, and hijack our fundamental faith and confidence.
Some might even think that their intentions are unselfish as AI developers and venture capitalists, but this group is also called to make their motivations transparent to themselves and to others.
As it stands now, the capacity to resist the harms of AI is mostly accessible to the more privileged among us. From the point of view of socially engaged Buddhism, privilege confers responsibility, responsibility to raise up the so-called less privileged, but more importantly to deconstruct the very systems that confer privilege.
In the end, whether AI is life-affirming or life-denying depends on all of us. To paraphrase Thich Nhat Hanh, we, as developers of AI and consumers of AI should engage the soft technologies of self-correcting practice and healthy, transparent communities as the sane instruments with which we experiment with truth. Both sides of this equation need to actualize appamada, that is vigilance, conscientiousness, and care in how we deploy and use these emergent technologies. If we are in an institution that is developing AI, we can bring “wise friction” to these institutions to decenter and decolonize AI’s embeddedness in the Eurocentric capitalistic worldview. We can also advocate, with indigenous consent, for diverse knowledge systems to be a fundamental part of the AI landscape, as per the work of Sabelo Mhlambi. We can legally call for the decommodification of our very identities. We can further commit to disrupting the systems that foster structural violence reflected in AI systems. In other words: We can make good trouble, and we should; we shouldn’t wait.
Ultimately, can we foster an AI landscape that is not only seemingly rational but genuinely relational and rehumanized, where dignity, human rights, and the rights of nature are valued; again thanks to Sabelo for articulating this.
And we have to be unflinchingly honest as we embark on this profound journey of developing new forms of intelligence. Instead of leaving the fractured-trust-waste for later, let’s deal with it now. Facebook acted like big tobacco in its formative years, knowingly sowing social distrust and psychological trauma in young people, while denying it all the while. We can’t allow ourselves or our friends to act in such bad faith this time around.
We should make sure that these big brained mammals who are driving the development of AI form a Cern-like relationship of cooperation and ethics to ensure that AI is a positive contributor to a sane and possible future.
And most importantly, all of us must endeavor to live by the values and vows that relate to ending harm through technology.
I want to thank Abeba Birhane, a friend and cognitive scientist, who did a brilliant presentation at Upaya’s Varela International Symposium that brought my attention to serious issues regarding racism and sexism in the scaling of datasets. I also want to thank Randy Fernando and Sensei Kozan Palevsky for helpful insights integrated into this article. I am grateful for my teachers Thich Nhat Hanh and Roshi Bernie Glassman for never turning away from addressing harms related to structural violence. A deep thanks to Soren Gordhamer for inviting me to explore AI.
This article first appeared in EBU Magazine #12 – Artificial Intelligence (Spring 2024). Download the full issue as PDF or browse all issues.