It is one year since my last post, in which I related how I made a comparison of human and machine intelligence on the basis of reflections on stillness. After pulling my paper from consideration for the JSRE special issue, I subsequently had a shorter article on this topic included in Issue 78 of De Numine, the magazine journal of the Alister Hardy Trust.
Since my last post my Academia profile has received dozens of invitations to submit a conference paper, all of them relating to AI. The headline themes include computer science, engineering, signal and image processing, wireless and mobile technologies, database management, big data, Internet of Things, and so on. Yet, at the same time, I’ve not received any invitations related to my most popular upload by far, which is on Buddhist ethics. This is an indication of the frenzied and scattered attention being given to AI, often at the expense of pretty much everything else.
Mainstream media is reporting increased existential fears, ranging from the immediate (job uncertainty) to long-term implications for humanity. This is concentrating attention on the distinct qualities of being human, but I find the response from academia tends to take a materialist perspective and gets bogged down in legalities. Much more on point is Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.
The Pope's letter dwells especially on the social aspects and the common good, naturally reflecting the concerns of an institution. Here I take a Buddhist perspective, focused more on the individual. Moving out of stillness, I wish again to highlight six characteristics of human agency:
• initiation
• exertion
• making effort
• steadfastness
• persistence
• endeavouring
This is sourced from the Attakārī Sutta: The Self-Doer, AN 6.38 (an English translation from the Pali on Access to Insight).
As an illustration, imagine entering the London Marathon. Fast forward to race day and the run itself.
• initiation: when the starter fires the gun, you respond and decide to start moving
• exertion: you drive forward and start moving your legs
• making effort: you accelerate up to your normal running speed and into your standard running posture
• steadfastness: you maintain a steady gait and pace, start to clock up the miles
• persistence: you tire and start to ache, but keep going
• endeavouring: you ‘hit the wall’, but take on energy fluids, rest a while and then keep going, determined to finish.
You complete the race and glow at the achievement; the sense of personal satisfaction is immense on top of the gladness in raising funds for your charity.
We can take each of these characteristics and simply ask of any proposed technology: Is this likely to enhance or undermine human agency? To sharpen the focus, ask these questions assuming that the technology is removed after a certain time. What are you left with?
I discuss this further in my short book, Buddhism and Computing: How to Flourish in the Age of Algorithms, and paper, Cultivating sīla Online: the use of Cognitive Interventions in Systems Design.
